Maison Bélier is the duo of Elsa Formisano, also known as Lil Mama, and bassist and producer Juanlu Leprevost, one of the founders of Ojos de Brujo and Calima. Las cosas del querer (2022, Ventilator Music) is the first album they have released together, an organic mix of different musical styles (flamenco, songwriter, soul, bossa or reggae) that deals with love from different perspectives. It is a fresh project, cooked over low heat and above all created with great care and honesty. La Vanguardia has been able to speak with the authors, Elsa and Juanlu, about their composition process.
The French translation of Maison Bélier means house and goat. Why this name?
Elsa: Although Juanlu is the epitome of a musical globetrotter, deep down, it's a very big house where we find many musicians. I am a bit of a goat and Juanlu picked me up at his musical house. In French, because we both have this origin.
What made you come together for the project?
Elsa: Juanlu found me when he had the group Calima set up, I was dying to play with them. Then we got involved with this album because we had the need to make music together.
Juanlu: During the confinement period, the Calima project remained on standby and we did a musical match with Elsa, we have very close backgrounds. We have made the songs together, lyrics and music.
Elsa: We got a little crazy, do you remember when we made the noises with the marble and the screws? We've gone a bit crazy using home-recorded organic sounds.
How would you label them?
Juanlu: Elsa wrote something for the biography on Spotify that is very well expressed.
Elsa (reading on her phone): We are a Spanish musical group that fuses pop-folk, songwriters and indie mixes with pampered lyrics and fresh melodies. Sometimes I rack my brain and then I forget things.
What feedback do you have from people?
Juanlu: They tell us that it is a very fresh record. We wanted to do it well naked and for the lyrics to be understood very well. The general feedback, despite the fact that it has been a somewhat blurred time, has been from the natural.
Elsa: This record touches little hearts. Also, people who might not listen to our music find it and fall in love with it.
How did you work the songs?
Elsa: I don't know if from the beginning we were clear that we would make a record, we wanted to play around all the facets of love.
Juanlu: In some song I have come up with the main idea of the lyrics and she has taken it and corrected it. There are songs that are the opposite. There are also curious things, as in Follow me; Elsa had a slump and I told her to do a song dedicated to how music heals, I sent her the chorus and she wrote the verse.
Elsa: We've also spent a lot of time thinking about how to say things between the lines.
How long were you working on the record?
Juanlu: I always compare it with pregnancies, because the nine-month thing adds up a lot. I think that in nine months we made the entire album and the four videos. It was intensive.
It's beautiful how you close it.
Elsa: The voices are from my daughter and 20 other children.
Juanlu: In fact, the album begins with my grandmother and ends with the children. Is very pretty.
Yes, it is a special introduction.
Juanlu: In the background there is a song called Las cosas del querer, by Lola Flores. We left it that way because when I told my grandmother how we would title the record, she told me that there is a song with the same name. She also says that love is a mess, that it gives you many things, but then the water comes and takes them all away.
And what makes your album different from all the others that also talk about love?
Elsa: Who doesn't have masks. If you pick up and listen, you suddenly feel that they are talking about you.
Aren't you afraid of the mix of styles and languages?
Juanlu: We have tried to do an exercise in musical honesty, to convey this acoustic encounter between her and me. With the languages, we have used the ones she has at home, Catalan, Spanish, French and we have made a little fooling around with Portuguese.
Elsa: We wanted to play with everything we have on the bench. If we know how to do all that, why aren't we going to use it? There are people who value it and that gives it "life", surely because of the soul it has. This record is like an extension of us.
Like your name, there are also songs in French.
Elsa: One of the things that worried me is that my father always says that I have an incredible Spanish accent, but I've lived in France for many years and no one notices it. They don't place me in a region because my accent is nulle part.
What music influenced you?
Elsa: I consider myself a crazy music lover because I listen to a lot of things. Some people know him through his Spotify, you will never know me like that because I drink from Morena and Clara to Erykah Badu or Aretha Franklin. I love black, which we say in the south, and Juanlu has involved me with the flamenco vein in recent years. And the reggae of a lifetime, which is fresh and always comes to pick you up.
Juanlu: As a bass player I am interested in all kinds of music, from Sid Vicious to Jaco Pastorius and all rock, reggae or electronic music. We didn't want this album to be mixed, but we did want it to have something of it.
Any reading to inspire you?
Elsa: I would recommend How to Start a Fire and Why, I also really like to read about psychology.
Juanlu: When I started with music I stopped reading, although I like everything that is essay. For novels I start to make musical novels.
Do you have an audience of all ages?
Juanlu: Yes, and we didn't do anything to place ourselves in any space. What we do is liked by those who have listened to more elaborate music of forty tacos and also by those of twenty. It is a beautiful time because there is a very fat mix and all the styles have returned.
How is the direct?
Juanlu: I wanted there to be a difference between the album and the live one. In a song that talks about building love we recorded things of work and made a base with them. We recorded a marble and we can't take it live, so the drums play it and it's also very cool. There is also something desktop, although it is very powerful.
