大象传媒

Carla Bruni has packed a lot into her life. She’s been a supermodel, First Lady of France and a successful recording artist. As she releases her new self-titled album, for Radio 3's Music Planet, Carla talks to Lopa Kothari about lockdown, late starts and the loneliness of modelling. Here are eight things we learned.

Photography © Yann Orhan

1. She recorded her new album in just six days

Carla usually takes her time when recording her albums. For her latest, titled Carla Bruni, the pandemic meant she had to record much faster, to minimise contact with other people and comply with French lockdown. “We started recording on the 9th of June and we did it in six days,” she says. “It usually takes months to record an album!”

I was always concentrating on not committing any faux pas...

2. Lockdown suited her temperament

Nobody found the coronavirus lockdown stress-free, but Carla says the solitary life suited her better than most. “I wouldn’t say I embraced it, but I could really cope with it,” she says. “My work, the writing part, it’s something that you do at home…It’s hard to write in the middle of reality and people. Loneliness is part of my job, and it’s one of my favourite parts.” Like everyone else, she still found this version of isolation stressful. “It's not like being pleasantly confined to write in a romantic way,” she says. “The world is sort of falling down and people are getting ill and people are dying. So it was was not pleasant, but the situation of being confined and stuck somewhere with my guitar, that is a situation that I like.”

3. She started writing songs when she was a child

Carla says she was always musical and as a child she’d make her family listen to all her compositions. “I was doing it from childhood, writing small songs. All my family had to hear them over and over. Testing songs on people around me, I still do that.”

4. She didn’t consider releasing music until she was in her thirties

Despite writing songs from a young age, Carla didn’t think she was “allowed” to take music seriously as a career. For most of her twenties Carla was an incredibly successful model. In 1997, she left the fashion world behind and decided to focus on music. “I don’t know what happened that made me feel allowed,” she says. “My father died. He was a great composer, so maybe I was happy to be free from his judgement, but that’s too simple. That’s a very Freudian thing…I believe I’m just slow and around 30 years old I thought, maybe I can just do what I want.”

5. She found modelling very lonely

Although she didn’t perform publicly until her thirties, Carla says she always played music for herself while she was modelling, to keep herself entertained. “It’s going to sound sort of tragic, but modelling is a lonely job,” she says. “You’re travelling all the time alone – which sounds like paradise today – but it’s so much travelling and quite a lot of loneliness. I was bringing the guitar everywhere and I played music all the time.”

6. She missed touring when she was First Lady

In 2008, Carla married the French President Nicolas Sarkozy. She didn’t entirely put her music on hold, releasing the album Comme si de rien n'était while Sarkozy was in office – “It was so audacious. I can’t believe I did that…They all went nuts.” – but she did have to stop touring, which she missed. “I couldn’t tour,” she says. “But I’m not Lady Gaga anyway…It’s only me and my guitar. That was a little small sacrifice. But, you know, when you're madly in love with someone and he puts you in that sort of situation you don't feel like you're sacrificing anything.”

Being the First Lady of France really puts you in the spotlight, but especially so when you’re a former supermodel. Carla felt all the world’s eyes on her.

“I’m glad it’s over, because it was a lot of pressure,” she says. “I was always afraid I’d do something wrong. Usually when you do a mistake it’s embarrassing, but when you do a mistake in that position, it’s hell…I was always concentrating on not committing any faux pas.”

8. She never thought she’d like being married

Carla says she loves to write about, “broken love…because that gives you a lot of colouring. With a happy heart you have one colour, which is basically happiness and satisfaction. With a broken heart you have some darker colours.”

Broken love is, happily, not part of her life at the moment. “I love to be in love and…I love being married. I never thought I was going to say something like that when I was young.”

Hear Carla Bruni talking to Lopa Kothari and playing her music on Radio 3's Music Planet.