Lulu Van Trapp
Lulu van Trapp is the woman of our dreams and the secret superhero to save the world, with the taste of peaches and love. It’s also a four musicians live act from Paris and New Caledonia that serves a lo-fi milkshake of 60’s rock’n’roll, smooth jazz tunes, pure pop melodies and R&B love songs presented with touches of surrealism and the honesty of todays millennials.
Who is Lulu van Trapp?
Lulu is the woman of our dreams, and our secret superhero identity to save the world.
What have you been up to all summer?
We’ve been travelling a lot, apart from one another after being glued together all year. We also had new experiences: Rebecca directed a videoclip in the desert near Joshua Tree when she was in LA. It will be released this winter, the song’s called « Valley of Love ». The video is inspired by a chapter from « Desert Solitaire » by Edward Abbey. It takes place during the Gold Rush, she plays a little boy who gets lost in the desert and loses his mind. We can’t wait to release it! We also made tons of new songs for the year to come, and right now we’re in studio recording a new single.
Where are you from and how did you meet?
We’re all from Paris, except Manu who’s from New Caledonia. Maxime and Rebecca met almost a decade from ago in a former band. That’s when they became really close and started writing and singing together. They realized they had the same desire of playing a new kind of music and created Lulu Van Trapp, first recording homemade tapes in their bedroom and doing everything together. Manu and Nico joined later on the bass and drums/machines, first as stage musicians when Lulu started playing live, and then became a part of the whole creative process.
What are your main impulses to write music about?
We’re looking for honesty in everything we write about. We write about the confusion of our generation, how we feel old before we actually are, bending under the burden of social expectations. Boys who dream of being girls and girls of being boys, who don’t want to feel assigned to any kind of role or stereotype. We write about our dreams and loves, with a touch of surrealism and naivety.
Dormir plus pour rever plus ("sleep more to dream more") was just released in September. The music video, directed by Juliet Casella, shows a boy caught into an imaginary world traveling to deep jungles and amongst skyscrapers. Can you tell us how the song first was thought of and created?
It all came from this lovely sentence Maxime once said, which became the title of the song. We picture it as a hedonist anthem. We feel that people of our age tend to look for a refuge in dreams and an escape from reality to live in an easier, softer world, often thanks to drugs or passivity. We want to say that we should overcome this and stand up to live our dreams awaken and build the world of today for ourselves to feel good in it.
It was also about going back to childhood, where everything seems possible and colorful, we wanted this song to be an ode to that time of life that’s so important to us.
In the music video to The Echo you’re eating/smashing/feeding each other a Lulu Van Trapp cake, which flavour is the taste of Lulu?
Love and peaches.
What do you want Lulu Van trapp to contribute with to the world? What do you want to express with your music?
As we said earlier, wether we want it or not, being on stage having people listening to you makes you one of the voices of your generation: it is a big responsibility to stand in front of these people and have them listening to you. Through lyrics, music, attitude, clothing, speech, you can convey so many ideas and feelings. Basically we don’t want anything else than being able to travel all around the world with our music and spread this one hour of joy that a concert can give, to anybody.
What kind of music did you grow up listening to? Who and what inspires you today?
Each one of us listened to very different kinds of music, but it is true that we never payed a lot of attention to the music of our time growing up. It was more Motown and Stax records, sixties rock’n’roll, french « variété », classical music, jazz… Today we are stoked with the new musical scene, that’s so varied and beautiful. We also have a huge interest for what is stupidly called « world music »: from the 60’s to nowadays, turkish, arabic, saharan, caribbean, indonesian, latin music is insanely rich and inspiring! That’s what we mostly listen to.
Dream venue for a gig?
In Hell with Barry White!
courtesy LULU VAN TRAPP
interview REBECCA LOVGRENS
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