Laure Briard Shares New Single "The Smell Of Your Hair"

After her three first singles, Laure Briard continues to reveal the luminosity and optimism of her new album Ne pas trop rester bleue, to be released on February 10th. A pop-soul procession bursting with radiant strings and gleaming brass, “The Smell Of Your Hair” was written during Laure’s 2019 trip to the Joshua Tree desert, a two-hour drive from Los Angeles. The song recounts a heartbreaking encounter with a lonesome cowboy, where fleeting passion under the Californian sun is lulled by the sound of the wind and the song of birds.

Rather than lamenting the inevitable separation and giving into the blues or to melodrama, Laure converts heartbreak into a happy, sunny and sensual memory, in a song full of energy, vivacity, and color. The groove of Carole King, the orchestral art of Harry Nilsson, and the country elegance of Bobbie Gentry all infuse this composition by Vincent Guyot, where sumptuous strings and brass climax in graceful choruses of pop ‘70s.

These “wonderful memories shipshaped in a box of souvenirs” are ingeniously illustrated in the song’s music video by a movie studio’s “white box,” where Laure’s band plays in ’70s costumes before a timeless, large white cyclo. Shot from four different camera perspectives, the clip utilizes diverse image styles and distortion effects (wide angle, fisheye, 360 tracking…), evoking “a psychedelic LSD trip in Woodstock, but also a mixing of eras, with visual references that could belong at once to the 70’s and to contemporary times,” explains the director Benjamin Marius Petit. “The goal was not to make a strictly ‘retro’ clip but, to best reflect the atmosphere of Laure’s music, to keep one foot in the past and the other in the present.”

This juxtaposition of both the old and the new is enhanced by the on-screen presence of everything that is typically concealed: backgrounds, cables, cameras, monitors, lighting, in a mise en abyme recalling certain clips of Spike Jonze or Roman Coppola, or the transparency of the filming process of Get Back, Peter Jackson’s documentary on the Beatles.

The smell of hair, zenithal light, and the feeling of warm wind blowing on the skin permeate this vivid remembrance of a suspended time, “exactement sous le soleil.” Through music and image, “The Smell of Your Hair” magically transforms pain into joy, and memory into becoming.