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Met took Camille 15 years to create her new album. The Sound of Milk is a three-part album, each recording a different part of the French singer’s experience raising two children with singer Clément Ducol: Naissance is from 2015, Enfance 2020 and Adolescence 2025. He could have released each one when it was finished, he says, but he realized he wasn’t ready. Her son and daughter, who are now teenagers, “were very young, and I would have felt too exposed not to talk about it because it is about beauty, joy, and depth,” says Camille, chatting from their home in the French countryside. “I had to step back and look at this journey. I had to be stable in order to get out of a world that does not respect children and women.”
On the surface, most of Camille’s sixth album might sound pretty sweet. Naissance has no real instruments – it’s just baby boomers, all drums and vocals. Known for his vocal experiments – beatboxing, raspberries – Camille saw it as a liberating song from the mainstream of pop. He said: “As a woman, music is a way of life. “It’s about breathing, being with my children, singing along with what’s happening around me in the open world.” He calls Enfance “pocket music”: like the sky, it’s full of the kinds of parents who make when teaching children about stairs and washing machines – raising the voice of mothers every day as an art, I ask. He said: “I like what you say. “All families are works of art. We create what we stand for, our world, a way of communicating with each other.”
It’s a full-fledged Youth that matches Camille’s catalog since 2002, a song that combines drone, cabaret, body sounds and church music, as well as music from the movies Ratatouille and Le Petit Prince, songs about the sounds of masculinity. Jacques Audiard’s 2024 film Emilia Pérez.
Now 48 years old, Camille is in conversation with artists such as Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson and David Byrne, mainly because of their music and their ideas as well as the humor they bring to them. Youth is the most politically charged part of The Sound of Milk, with songs about the fall of nature, disrespect for future generations and the myopia connected to the screen, but there is a mockery of all history: happiness in the face of darkness, leading what happened to the mother – and the history of her family – in a world that can change.
Camille scolds, emphasizing the topic. He had to fight to make such an album. “You know,” he says, “it took a lot of time to confirm my brand” – Because, also at the home of Charlotte Gainsbourg – “that this could be a record, because these songs are considered. things for women: ‘This should be in your house. Do proper music, radio music, in the studio.’ But this is music. This is my life, and this” – giving birth – “makes the world go round, boys, because this is where we all come from, and if no one calls us when we’re young, if no one creates us, then we die.”
I admit that the first time I listened, the songs about family life made me feel sad, then I checked myself: even as a person who loves children and my female friends, I clearly have an internal misogyny in how women can express themselves and be taken seriously. “It’s provocative,” he admits. “I understand exactly what you’re saying and I appreciate you telling me that because I think a lot of people will feel the same way.”
At first, he did the same. An inner voice told him not to turn his family’s music into music: “This is my private life, this is not for sale, this is not art; it’s very interesting.” I heard “chicken“- sappy. “Then I realized: no, this is a hatred of men and women, and it is a great disgust because you believe that you should not exist.” Her limited album of 2011 Ilo Veyou played a part with her first pregnancy, so she decided that she should not make another one in that way: “‘I will not continue about motherhood.’ Then I thought, ‘But I’ll always be like that. I’ll always be a mum – I could make 10 posts about motherhood.’
People continue to compare The Sound of Milk to Richard Linklater’s childhood film Boyhood but Camille never saw it; they write to remember. Milk Noise has its own version of time travel. Several songs appear in various recordings; Monsieur Garçon, from Adolescence, contrasts the vision of his teenage son with his younger son. Camille said, “How can you say parenting is amazing? The song, she says, is about the “dizzy, amazing miracle of life”.
He has a small crush on those who despise him. They bring President François Macron calling in 2024 “demographic rearmament“- to rehabilitate the population in order to overcome the decline in the number of people born.” “You can feel like you’re making soldiers of the world, and if they’re not soldiers, they can be bombed, because children and women and families can be bombed out of the world,” he says, reminding me of Käthe Kollwitz’s pacifist works.
This is not related to the causes of the problem: “Mothers give birth and are asked to help the next day, month or three months. Milk’s words represent “a time of joy in what happens when you are with your children.” She deliberately left out the difficult aspects of parenting. “Today, happiness has been difficult, frustrating, we don’t want to hear about it, it’s like it’s on the way. It’s like nature – oh, this is great. Come on guys, let’s re-energize people and talk about war and real issues.”
Camille has always been an interesting artist. His 2005 album Le Fil is laced together with a steady drone; when he played on Jools Holland, he drew the line on his face and body. Music Hole, which is mainly performed by his body, named “lip fart synth” and “Donald Duck”. He does not believe that artists need to be unhappy in order to create. In fact, his optimism helps him challenge his true nature as a “completely black man”, he says, laughing. “I have the pain of the world. To overcome depression you need happiness. It sounds silly, but that’s why I chose to sing.”
That “great sensitivity”, he says, often comes when children grow up in families that are “very dark”. Camille’s father came from a poor family and was abandoned when he was a child, then he was raised by other parents. His mother was from a wealthy family where children were raised and fed by daughters. Camille said: “She had three children and her problem was great because she went back to work when my brother was three months old. She saw breastfeeding as a way to “make up for a little bit of lack of any kind on all sides”.
His children love the new history. He said: “I am proud. “At his year-end show, my son invited me to sing this song with his friends. And she’s young – she’s going to be 16 – so I think it’s really sweet.” She cries a few tears of joy. Ironically, this will be the first time Camille’s family won’t be joining her. “So that’s how I make a family with my team and all people – what is a human family?”
Her children’s teenage years have created a new kind of youth for Camille. He said: “When you are young, you feel that you can live without your parents, but you still need them. “And as a parent, you feel that, oh, I love being with my children and they depend on me, but one day they will be living their own lives. You are between two worlds and you need to prepare. It feels so good to take care of the people you love, it takes you out of your selfish world, but then you think, who am I? happy?
That’s why he made this record again, he says. “This is magic, and I’m celebrating its magic. I’m thankful for my children so I can move on and be someone else – and start over and over again.”
