Pierre de Maere on Ave de Maere: “My exes are very spoiled”

On his new album Ave de Maere, Belgian pop artist Pierre de Maere leaves fantasy behind for songs rooted in his own experiences. He talks about coming out, missing out on a conventional adolescence, first relationships and sexual experiences, working with his brother Xavier, and why former lovers keep finding their way into his music.

The lyrics on your first album Regarde-moi seem to be based more in fantasy, whereas those on Ave de Maere feel more factual. Why the change? “Because I finally lived. I had the time and opportunity to discover things I didn’t know about. Ave de Maere is an album about first times. It is really about me knowing nothing and touching everything.

From the age of thirteen to eighteen, I went to a very strict Catholic school. It was absolutely impossible to accept being gay there, let alone live openly as a gay person. It was unthinkable. When I turned eighteen, I finally found the courage. It was my last year and I thought: okay, I am going to leave anyway. So I finally came out and started living.

When I wrote my first album, I was nineteen and had not experienced very much. The album was about my dreams, fantasies and things I wanted to live. A lot of the songs are: one day I will do that. I will marry an angel. I will be a superstar. I will buy all this crazy stuff.

I have not married an angel yet and I am not a superstar, but a lot has happened since then. I finally started dating and having my first intimate experiences. I was nineteen the first time I got drunk. This new album is about true stories. I am not afraid to talk about dirty things, or things I'm not proud of. There is no taboo. I see it as a private diary I'm sharing with the world, and perhaps it will make people feel a little less weird themselves.”

You produced the album with your brother Xavier. Does old brotherly dynamic emerge when you work together? “It does. It is great to work together, but it is also hard. For the past few years, everybody has treated me very nicely and politely. My brother does not give a shit about that. It means we don't waste time being polite. When we have something to say to each other, we say it, then move on quickly and that works very well. Sometimes I wish he treated me a little more like a princess. It is my face on the album cover, after all, so he has to respect that.

We are very complementary. I used to play the drums, I sing and I co-produced the whole album. I am good at producing the drums, bass and the groove, while he is much better at finding the sound of the synthesisers. It feels very natural. I've been tempted to work with other producers and have tried it with several people, but it never sounded as unique as it does when my brother and I make something together, or when I work alone.

I produced some of the songs by myself, including ‘La grande vie’, whose production I love. But usually it's the two of us. Xavier also does the sound for my live shows, so we more or less live our lives together. I see him more often than I would see a boyfriend or my mother.”

You made around one hundred demos and kept twelve songs. How did you decide what belonged on the album? “When I was twelve, Lady Gaga released Artpop. She said in interviews: ‘We made 140 songs and kept fourteen.’ I never believed her. I thought she was faking it for the promotion, that it was just one of her tricks to have something to say. Now I believe her, because it happened to me.

None of the songs I left off the album are interesting. I didn't keep them for a reason: either they didn't sound like me or they were simply not catchy enough. I won't use them later. I have no problem with drafts or with letting something go. My work isn't sacred. It used to be, when I started a song, I wanted to finish it and it had to be on the album. For the first album I wrote fifteen songs and we kept twelve, so there wasn't much room for error.

This time I realised there is nothing holy about writing a song. It's fine to throw away a lot of material. That changed my perspective on work and music, and helped me write much better songs. When something is sacred, it becomes too important and you no longer dare to take risks.

There are around one hundred Logic Pro projects in the ‘album two’ folder on my MacBook. In the end, I simply kept the songs that mattered most to me. I wasn't thinking about cohesion or storytelling, but they happened to be twelve songs about first times. Because I produced all of them, their colours work together.”

Queer people often feel that their adolescence only begins after coming out, and that they then have to catch up. It seems like that was your experience as well? “I do feel as though I missed my youth. I have a big problem with youth. Most of the people who listen to me are forty, forty-five or fifty. I don't have that many listeners between sixteen and thirty, and that annoys me for no good reason. I love the people who listen to my music, but I wish I were cool to the people I used to want to impress.

I was never a cool kid, so I still want to please the cool kids. As I get older, I will probably let that go and realise it is not very interesting. Cool kids are not necessarily the most interesting kids.

I think this is common among gay people who came out at eighteen, nineteen, twenty or twenty-five. They feel like they missed their youth. I always want to go where the young people are. When I play festivals, the crowd is very young and I feel more stressed because I feel like I have to please them. It's funny and a little sad at the same time. I suppose you accept these things as time passes. The way I live my youth now is by watching college television shows on Netflix. Not exactly the same, but it works.

Sometimes I really wish I had had a love affair when I was sixteen. But all the trouble I have experienced brought me to where I am. Sometimes I think: yes, my teenage years were shit, but without it I would be a very boring boy with no depth and no humour, and that would be a shame. So I am glad I suffered a little bit.”

Five years ago, you said you preferred the word ‘flamboyant’ to ‘queer’. This is a very openly queer album. Has your relationship with that label changed? “It has. Five years ago I was only nineteen. Two years before that, I was still at that Catholic school, where queer was not even a word that existed in my mind. Then I started releasing music and suddenly all the journalists called me queer because I was gay and they knew it. I thought: shit, can we talk about my music first?

I was annoyed by it. People always want to put you in a box because it's easy and probably attractive to the reader. Nowadays I don't have a problem with it at all. I know people listen to my music. I still have monthly listeners on Spotify and my concert tickets are selling. They aren't selling because I'm gay, but because people like my music. So you can call me a queer singer. I'm completely fine with that.”

On ‘J’aurais fini par te plaire’, you sing about touching yourself while looking at pictures of an ex. Has the person you sing about heard it? “I love that question. I have a thing with my exes: I never forget them. I really never forget them. Actually, any of them could get in touch, say they want to get back together, and I would go for it. That's a problem I should probably discuss with a therapist.

The song has a funny story. I started writing it two years ago when I was deeply obsessed with an ex. I'm always very slow with lyrics, it takes me about a year to finish a song. I wrote the first verse, including the line about touching myself while looking at old photographs, about him. By the time I finished writing the song, it was for another guy. The same song was written for two different men, which is funny. It's very targeted and very specific. They each have several songs about them on the album, so they're very spoiled.

I'm no longer in touch with either of them. I hope they hear the songs and tell me: ‘It's great, your album is great, I'm so sorry for what I did.’ That would be fucking amazing. That actually happened to me once and it felt so good, but it does not happen very often. I can only dream about it.”

‘I Don’t Wanna Sleep Tonight’ is about your first sexual experience. What did you want to express beyond the fact that it was your first time? “I want people to know that it's okay to be extremely shy in bed and only make love in the dark. I sing: Je suis timide, ferme les stores, ‘I am shy, close the curtains.’ I love another line: Tu écris dans mon livre d’or, et tu ris car il est encore vide. A livre d’or is a guest book. You're laughing because it is still empty. Apprends-moi tout: teach me everything.

I want people to feel no shame about sex, because they should never be ashamed of it. Of course, we're all a little afraid at first because it's very intimate and unfamiliar. I think we all started having sex in the dark, or at least I did, and many of my friends did.

I recently broke up, but it took me a year with my boyfriend before I could light a candle, then leave the curtains open. I want people to know that's normal. Not specifically that it happened to me, but that it is a normal experience. If a singer who appears confident onstage and in interviews feels this way, maybe other people will too. Of course, it's not true for everybody. I know plenty of people who don't worry about it at all.

I like that the song is very danceable and groovy while also having this shy, vulnerable side. I'm never shy about talking, only when it comes to actions. I'm very open about my private life. When something bad or traumatic happens to me, the first thing I do is tell fifteen people. I would have no problem telling 5,000 people onstage how my previous night went. In bed, I will always be shy. That's about intimacy. I don't know, it's me and my body.”

In ‘Quasiment parfait’, you redesign yourself to become more attractive to somebody. Do you do the same when presenting ‘Pierre de Maere, the artist’, to an audience? “No, I'm very much myself with the audience. Of course, I act more dramatically onstage. I don't speak onstage the way I'm speaking to you now, but it's still me. I never transform myself for the crowd or for my friends. It's only for boys. I have a problem with boys, you know. I love them, but they make me do silly things.

I was eighteen when I kissed a boy for the first time. He was very conventional. I already had a bowl cut and wore some strange outfits from Zara. For him, I went from Zara to Massimo Dutti. They make some beautiful things, but it is all very classic, institutional and conventional. I got rid of the bowl cut, chose a very traditional hairstyle and started running. I did all these things that weren't natural to me.

It was very wrong and it didn't work, because it never works when you transform yourself for somebody. You have to be yourself, that's what makes you sexy. I've done so many stupid things for boys, and that is what the song is about.

I like that Clara, who duets with me, responds to me. She has one line that sums everything up: C’est quand tu transpires que je te trouve digne d’être aimé. ‘It's when you sweat that I find you worthy of love.’ She speaks to me almost as though I'm her child: calm down, stop changing who you are. If you keep polishing yourself, I will no longer be able to see through you.

The song ends badly, and I love that. There's no happy ending because I'm not doing the right thing. There is no moral. It's simply: be yourself.”

‘La grande vie’, your duet with Eva, explores the glamorous life you always imagined. What happens when that fantasy becomes reality? “I think you get used to things very easily. Unfortunately, I get used to them extremely quickly. What I will never tire of is people’s company, my sister’s company and my best friend’s company. In the end, that's all that matters.

I've always dreamt very big. My verse on the song is quite empty because it's simply: I'm here for the high life. I want to go there. I'm thinking about the Ritz in Paris and all those things. Eva adds depth to the song. In her verse, she says: I've been there, now I'm scared and I want to leave because the people are frightening. I think she's had more traumatic experiences than I have with la grande vie, and with Parisian nights where people go absolutely insane and almost vampirise you. I simply always wanted to go to the Ritz with my sister, and I will never tire of that.

The song is about always wanting more. You become accustomed to something, then want more and more, and you're never completely satisfied. That's still happening to me, but it also makes me happy because I prefer anticipation to realisation. I love waiting for a gift, but when you finally receive it, it's over. Wanting more fits me very well. For Eva, I think la grande vie made her rather unhappy, so we have different perspectives. Her verse is much darker than mine, which makes it interesting. Her R&B voice is absolutely beautiful and works very well on the song. I love its musicality. To be really honest, I don't think it has the album’s most interesting lyrics, but I love the production.”

What do people outside the music industry misunderstand about the glamorous life of an artist? “People imagine huge budgets, incredible hotels, ceremonies and award shows. You picture an artist stepping out of a Mercedes and onto the red carpet. The reality is that there is not much money left in the music industry, though I love pretending there is. I invite my collaborators to great hotels and waste money making everything look fabulous, so I maintain the illusion. But I thought we would be able to make videos with enormous budgets. Nope. That's behind us. An artist in the 1990s probably had a very different experience.

When I discovered Lady Gaga in 2008 or 2009, social media was not such a big thing. You could be a little mysterious. You only had to do a few interviews and television shows. Now you have to produce so much social media content that it's very difficult to become a myth, remain mysterious or keep people excited. They see you all the time. They see you in your kitchen, making a selfie video for Spotify to announce that your new release is out. That's all very useful, but it's not exciting.

I'm a little disappointed in my job because of that and because of my expectations. On the other hand, I always dreamt of having a creative team around me. At school there was no creativity. There was maths, science and French literature. I was the only person writing songs or taking photographs, and that was what got me through. Being openly gay at that school would have meant social death. Being an artist saved me. People could say: ‘It's fine, he's weird, but he's an artist.’ I could play the artist card.

I dreamt of being surrounded by people who were brilliant at sewing, fashion and imagery, and I found them. My ex-boyfriend worked on the album and directed all the videos. He is still working with me and has directed the video for ‘Opinel’. My best friend Eddie has also directed many of my videos, and I have friends at Dior who make costumes for me. That used to be a dream of mine, and it came true. The most beautiful gift is to be surrounded by creative, talented people.”

This album combines more live instrumentation with your electronic production. Where do you want to go musically from here? “This album has more real instruments and feels more organic. I'll probably return to more synthetic production in a few years, for sure, but I really enjoyed playing with musicians and hearing the very alive sound of a real drum, a guitar and a bass. I think the best results are in a hybrid of the two.

‘I Don’t Wanna Sleep Tonight’ is closer to my first album because it uses more synthetic drum hits. I would also like to use more English lyrics. It's a lot of fun to write lyrics in English because it's such a musical language, more musical than French. French can be very harsh, with all those Rs, Ps, Qs and Xs. In the future, maybe I'll mix French and English a little more.”

Ave de Maere is out now!