The Wall Street Journal-20080125-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Entertainment - Culture -- Hollywood Report- The French President-s Girlfriend-s Album- Carla Bruni looks for a wider U-S- audience for her latest CD
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Entertainment & Culture -- Hollywood Report: The French President's Girlfriend's Album; Carla Bruni looks for a wider U.S. audience for her latest CD
One French pop star is about to find out what a budding relationship with a world leader does to her album sales.
Carla Bruni, an Italian-born supermodel turned singer, has been making headlines around the world for her relationship with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, which started late last year. Though her 2002 album of folky pop songs made her a music star in France, Ms. Bruni is better-known in U.S. music circles for her back-to-back relationships with Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger in the 1990s. Now the question is whether Ms. Bruni's gossip-column fame can help the U.S. release of her second album, an English-language collection called "No Promises."
On Ms. Bruni's new CD she sings poems by the likes of William Butler Yeats and Emily Dickinson to her own original, blues-inflected melodies and instrumentation.
For a music industry beset by plummeting CD sales, ever-tighter radio playlists and other ills, artists who come with a pre-existing public profile can be valuable. Jennifer Lopez was a successful actress before she became a pop star. But this is far from a sure-fire formula. Aspiring rapper Kevin Federline's marriage to Britney Spears got him a record contract, but he couldn't follow through with a hit. Models including Milla Jovovich, Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks have tried -- generally with far less success than Ms. Bruni -- to launch singing careers. And despite endless tabloid exposure, Paris Hilton could garner almost no commercial traction when she released her "Paris" album in 2006.
Raised by a billionaire industrialist father and a concert-pianist mother, the 40-year-old Ms. Bruni started modeling at age 19. Over the next 12 years she parlayed early gigs for Guess jeans and various high-fashion houses into an estimated 250 magazine covers.
Shortly after retiring from fashion in 1997 at age 30, Ms. Bruni began writing song lyrics for French singers Julien Clerc and Louis Bertignac, and was soon writing complete songs of her own.
Ms. Bruni launched her singing career with the 2002 album of her own French-language compositions, "Quelqu'un m'a Dit" ("Someone Told Me") which sold 1.2 million copies in France. Although some edgier magazines have dismissed her music as too mainstream, her album was generally well received by French critics, and garnered an award in 2004 in the female-artist category in the Victoires de la Musique, the French equivalent of the Grammy Awards.
Her success made Ms. Bruni France's answer to jazzy pop singer Norah Jones; one music magazine there recently said, half-seriously, that seemingly everyone "aged seven to 77 was seduced" by the album's breathy chansons.
In the U.S., it was another story. "Quelqu'un" was released here in 2004 by the independent label V2 Records, and has sold 44,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Before the album was released widely to retailers, Barnes & Noble Inc. sold about 15,000 copies that weren't counted by SoundScan, according to Andy Gershon, who was V2's president at the time.
V2 has since shut down, but Mr. Gershon says the release was "very profitable," because the company spent next to nothing on marketing or promotion. "It's a microcosm of what word of mouth can do," Mr. Gershon says.
Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Bruni met at a party in late November 2007, according to European media reports, and were photographed together a few weeks later at Disneyland Paris. At the time, Mr. Sarkozy was recently divorced. The coupling drew an instant firestorm of publicity in France and around the world. The pair has since been photographed vacationing in Egypt and Jordan, and widely circulated (though officially unconfirmed) reports of a February wedding have further stoked world-wide interest.
Ms. Bruni has declined interview requests since news broke of her relationship with Mr. Sarkozy.
In a short online video promoting the new album, Ms. Bruni says she chose to sing poems that were recommended to her by singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull, a friend of hers who is also one of Mr. Jagger's exes. A press release about "No Promises" calls the album a "true celebration of the English language" and "a tribute to the literary greats of our time."
"No Promises" can make challenging listening for pop fans. The poems Ms. Bruni chose don't always rhyme, and they occasionally stretch listeners' comfort zones in other ways, too. Dorothy Parker's "Ballade at Thirty Five," for instance, declares itself "a solo of sapience" and "a chantey of sophistry."
Mr. Gershon argues that Ms. Bruni might face an even greater challenge in the U.S. than she did before. Hearing her sing in English "takes away a bit of the mystique for me," he says.
As for her link to Mr. Sarkozy, Mr. Gershon adds: "I don't think that helps you sell any more records. In fact it might hurt you a little bit." Anything that makes her less mysterious, he argues, makes her more like any run-of-the-mill celebrity, and therefore less intriguing.
Ms. Bruni is now signed in this country to Downtown Records, the label behind the alternative hip-hop duo Gnarls Barkley. As with "Quelqu'un," her label struck a deal with Barnes & Noble for the bookseller to carry the new disc exclusively for several months before its wider commercial release in February.
The book chain doesn't release sales figures, but Chuck Gorman, Barnes & Noble's vice president for music and video, says his company is "very satisfied" with the sales of Ms. Bruni's album, which since last August has been sold in about 500 of the chain's 801 U.S. locations. Given what Mr. Gorman calls the album's "literary bent," he says, "For us this seemed like a natural fit."
Downtown Records has bigger ambitions for "No Promises" than just reaching the lit-and-latte set. "It's certainly our intention to reach a wider audience than the first album did," says Josh Deutsch, the label's chairman. He cites a couple of popular American singer- songwriters as an example of artists whose fans might gravitate to Ms. Bruni: "I'm not saying it's the most overtly mainstream record, but for fans of Jack Johnson and Ben Harper, it has a similarly carefree sound."
To reach that audience, Downtown is spending a bit more than V2 did, promoting the album to influential radio stations in the so-called Triple-A, or Adult Album Alternative, genre. Nonetheless Mr. Deutsch says the label is being conservative with its marketing budget. "If you have expectations that are reasonable and you spend accordingly, it can be a profitable business."
Anne Litt, a DJ on KCRW, the influential public radio station in Santa Monica, Calif., has occasionally played Ms. Bruni's music since the release of "Quelqu'un."
Ms. Litt says she thinks "No Promises" has a literary integrity to it, and the station has played the track "Lady Weeping at the Crossroads" (lyrics by the poet W.H. Auden) a couple of times in the past week. Ms. Litt has found that listeners are intrigued by the singer's sexy, slightly husky delivery. "Men in particular seem to like her voice," Ms. Litt says.
