Johnny Jane's story is one of inner movement. Most of his songs are the result of long, solitary, aimless strolls through the streets of Paris, with headphones screwed to his ears. “I have to discover”.
 

Carried by these words, whispered to himself in an internal dialogue, this 25-year-old composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist has travelled musical paths in reverse. Gifted with a keen ear, Johnny Jane has systematically sought out the musical DNA of the musical styles and artists that have caught his attention, to build a family tree traversed by correspondences between musical eras and obvious causal relationships - such as the link between the Velvet Underground, the Strokes and their heirs.
 

Nothing is left to chance in his free verse lyrics, or in his melodies, harmonies and arrangements, which oscillate with precision, at the crossroads. Sophisticated pop with Fender Rhodes organs, French chanson tinged with vocoder effects, atmospheric French Touch electro and 90's drums from Anglo-Saxon rock and post-punk... The whole identity of her first album stems from the journey and journey of her multiple influences. Starting with her artist name, a nod to the Ballade de Johnny Jane composed by Serge Gainsbourg for the film Je t'aime moi non plus, in tribute to Jane Birkin.
 

Like Gainsbourg, Johnny Jane says he “doesn't work much”, dismissing with a smug grin the ten years he spent studying piano, solfège, percussion and guitar at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Musique in his native Orléans. Yet Émile - his real first name - admits to “observing” “all around” “all the time”, those crucial details that often escape the eye. This excessively ritualized time of contemplation, in which time becomes extensible, is necessary to his creative process. His songs are born like glimmers of light that take no account of the seconds, minutes and hours imprinted by clocks. They take shape randomly, with a sudden click. Sometimes when he's walking down the street, more often when he's sitting at the piano, microphone open.
 

Images, sounds and emotions are then imprinted in his music, like tangible witnesses to the apparent futility of existence, which is transformed into the glory of little things. Like the “blue” evaporating “from the sky” on Bye Bye and the unmistakable “red” on Justine's shirt, two of the key tracks on Attitude(s). A searcher of the soul, Johnny Jane seeks out the fragility of the moment in everything he does. Just as he did when he was a photographer, wandering day and night with his Canon 50mm camera “to capture in a series of snapshots wonderful accidents and chance encounters with passers-by”. This was during his studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, which he entered after a literary baccalaureate. From the age of 16, Johnny Jane had understood that he was outside the norm, outside the law, and probably a little lost, preferring to drown himself in the text of En Attendant Godot - “What do we do now? We wait. But while we wait?” - to the stubborn methodology of secondary education.
 

Still at the Conservatoire d'Orléans, he had decided to take acting classes and, by playing the character of Vladimir in Beckett's play, he had reflected himself in the merciless lucidity of his vision of the world: “of such simplicity, irony and elegance”, comments Johnny Jane. As a teenager, he also discovered Rimbaud's Illuminations, wandered around in a long, retro-looking trench coat, and wrote poems - “a series of elucidations and adolescent clichés”, he recalls. But they led to the sharpening of his pen, to his first compositions, and to a momentous encounter on the high-school benches with Carl and Renaud, a tandem of producers - still his best friends today - who helped him compose and produce some of his songs.
 

Kleenex - all rhymed in “Ex” - was revealed to his pen as he listened to Françoise Hardy's syncopated, hyphenated delivery of “Comment te dire Adieu” (written by Serge Gainsbourg). At once the story of a prelude to and the mourning of a love affair, the album Attitude(s) moves forward with Johnny Jane's trademark pacing, between depth, dandyism, humor and insolence. It's about a “Master” whose ship seems to be wrecked, but is bobbing on the waves. Les Lois de l'Univers seems dictated by the drunken state of a rave, and combines a melodic line reminiscent of “Que je t'aime” (by Johnny Hallyday) and a church organ evolving like a Bach Toccata and Fugue. Ultra-pop, “Plus rien à perdre” follows an up-tempo rhythm, in counterpoint to a text painting a portrait of a disillusioned generation “that creates more from nothing than from hope”, explains Johnny Jane. “With a willingness to let go,” he continues, “as if the only thing left was the pleasure of the moment.” The musical influences of bands evoking idyllic pasts and the dreamy colors of the Velvet Underground resurface as a possible refuge.
 

Profiled like airplane wings, Bye Bye and Justine vigorously assert themselves in Johnny Jane's skyline, between synth effects and airy refrains, cross-rhyming and wordplay that interweave poetry and gentle irony. It's as if Justine takes shape in the text, like a fascinating character from a Warholian pop silkscreen that haunts her dreams.
 

Fascinatingly, Johnny Jane's chiaroscuro lighting resembles the twinkling headlights of the cars that light up the roads at the end of the night, as seen in À l'Américaine: “Take the keys to the car, come on, let's get out of here / We're going to love each other American-style, on Route 66”, he sings to a hazy melody and a heart of soaring synths. It's a song that evokes the thousands of miles Johnny Jane has traveled on the road in his azure-blue Citroën, sometimes just to watch a sunset alone on the pink granite coastline north of Brittany.
 

For Johnny Jane, observing is a mental attitude, a way of being, a way of life. It's also a game, which has often led this pop chameleon to slip into the skin of different characters and borrow several appearances, haircuts and clothing styles - bohemian-chic, modern, vintage, dandy-trendy or heavenly tramp... The mask he wears on the cover of Attitude(s) is a symbol of the complexity that constitutes each being, multiple by definition. It's a treasure hunt, an ironic gesture akin to Marcel Duchamp's moustache on the Mona Lisa, designed to question where the real lies and to protect himself from the chilling seriousness of society.