Cyrille Aimée: À Fleur de Peau

Like other parts of Cyrille Aimée's musical journey (her time spent learning "gypsy jazz" with Manouche Romani people in Samois-sur-Seine, for example), À Fleur de Peau (Hypersensitive) has an engaging tale attached. In 2018, on a visit to the Costa Rican jungle at a pivotal moment in her personal life, Aimée was inspired to write "Inside and Out" (track four on the album). Upon her return to the US, she played the composition for producer and multi-instrumentalist Jake Sherman. They recorded it in his Brooklyn apartment and "put it on pause," as she describes it.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, she returned to the Costa Rican jungle and bought a plot of land in an eco-community inhabited mainly by expatriates. She spent time there during the lockdown, camping out at first, eventually designing and building her own off-the-grid homestead. After the fact, she describes the songs she wrote in Costa Rica as a kind of "journal" of the process. She declares in her lyric to "Inside and Out," the seed for the album, that "I will build a house so steady for you to come back to." At the time she wrote it, she had no real plans to build. In retrospect, she sees the house in the lyric as the real jungle dwelling she was to construct and the "you" as the music she was to create in it. The official video of the piece was shot on her Costa Rican property and in her home, a fantastic idiosyncratic colorful abode with charmingly primitive plumbing. It shows her singing and dancing on her porch and frolicking in the village swimming hole (YouTube, bottom of this page).

When she had written enough material for an album, she reconnected with Sherman, saying, "Hey, I have some fun, trendy songs. Let's finish what we started." The two of them realized the project together. The tunes on À Fleur de Peau are as described: they have a breezy pop flavor, gentle grooves, lovely melodies and lyrics that are sweet and personal. Aimée, accompanying herself simply on guitar or ukulele, is at the core of the production, with the other lines and instruments superimposed.

After more than a dozen well-received recordings of standards as a leader, including a Grammy nomination for her arrangement of Stephen Sondheim's "Marry Me a Little" (Move On: A Sondheim Adventure, Mack Avenue, 2019), this is Aimée's first album to feature original material. She intended for it to be "accessible" and it is. Situated among her pop confections are versions of "Ma Préférence" by French singer-songwriter Julien Clerc (Pathé, 1978) and The Isley Brothers' "For the Love of You" (The Heat is On, Epic, 1975), which is described in the album notes as "an unabashed, gloriously uplifting slice of sophisticated Yacht-Pop."