Cyrille Aimée to Release New Album “à Fleur de Peau”

ACCLAIMED SINGER/SONGWRITER/MUSICIAN CYRILLE AIMÉE
ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM “à Fleur de Peau”

Out March 8th via Whirlwind Recordings

Listen to the New Single “AGAIN AGAIN”

January 19, 2024: Today, Costa Rica/New Orleans-based musician Cyrille Aimée releases her charming tropical tinged ballad “Again Again” via Whirlwind Recordings. The Dominican/French singer’s track comes from her upcoming album, à Fleur de Peau to be released on March 8th with an extensive tour to follow.

Pre-Save the album here.

Of the track Cyrille shares, “I think ‘Again Again’ is the saddest song I’ve ever written. My journey of falling back in love with being in nature started with feeling so so sad after a very difficult heartbreak, and realizing there was only one thing that could help – taking time off and going to the jungle. I say ‘back’ because I grew up in the beautiful forest of Fontainebleau, France, but when I moved to NYC I started to forget the importance of my relationship with nature as if it was an old friend who I didn’t really keep in touch with.” She continues,”‘Again Again’ for me is a cry to let everything go, become egoless and go back to the simple. Being humble, flawed and perfectly human again, the way nature makes us feel.”

Listeners may think that they know Cyrille Aimée: the matchless interpreter of song, steeped in the jazz tradition she learnt from the gypsy masters in her native France. It’s a story that has been told many times across Cyrille’s career taking her on a magic carpet ride from France to New York and then to New Orleans, pursuing her musical vision through the works of some of the world’s great composers of popular song.

À Fleur de Peau presents Cyrille in her own words, with her own original compositions and arrangements, developed in close collaboration with co-producer, multi-instrumentalist/producer Jake Sherman. Drawing on her Dominican heritage, with its combination of African dance rhythms and Spanish folk songs, the new album embraces the directness of contemporary pop structure, with lyrics that are inspired by her lived experiences. This is Cyrille as she has never been heard before.

The album’s genesis originates far from New York or Cyrille’s adopted New Orleans home, deep within the forests of Costa Rica: an astonishing tale of a creative rebirth. Cyrille shares her process, “I’ve been writing forever, but this album is my real birth as a songwriter. Six years ago, I found out I was pregnant as I traveled to Costa Rica. I spent a week there, surrounded by the teeming life of the jungle, knowing I had to have an abortion when I returned home. I wrote the song ‘Inside and Out’ about this powerful, scary and difficult experience… but I didn’t trust myself as a songwriter back then and so the song lay dormant for years.” Cyrille continues, “Then when the pandemic hit, I moved to some land I had bought in Costa Rica and – to my own amazement – I designed and built a house in the jungle all by myself. It was my creative outlet, and my inspiration. The house was my baby and I found myself writing again, gaining confidence as I built and wrote. Back in New York I took my new songs to Jake and said ‘Let’s finish what we started!’.” Cyrille’s ‘jungle house’ in Costa Rica has been lauded and featured on several travel channels impressed by its simplicity, sustainability and of course beauty.

Cyrille and Sherman quickly found a working method to bring the songs to life. At the heart of each recording is a live performance by Cyrille, accompanying herself with voice and guitar or baritone ukulele: then together they would add layers of arrangement, using Cyrille’s trademark scat vocal improvisations to suggest horn lines, percussion parts and counter melodies which Sherman would re-create on his array of vintage instruments. The results are appealing in their direct honesty but diverse in their sound. The album contains an array of stylings held together by Cyrilles enchanting voice – ‘Beautiful Way’ is a breezy bilingual paean to New Orleans with creative percussion sounds provided by Cyrille biting down on a cracker, ‘Back to You’ captures the nostalgia of a lovers separation with a Nu-Soul inflection, a cover of the Isley Brothers ‘For the Love of You’ is an unabashed, gloriously uplifting slice of sophisticated Yacht-Pop. A children’s choir adds to the pure grooving positivity of ‘Here,’ fragile waltz-ballad ‘Feel What I Feel’, and the hushed, sun-drenched Spanish-language ‘Historia De Amor’ that closes the album with a simple, two-chord love song dedicated to Mother Nature.

Cyrille says “I want to inspire women to create: with their hands, their wombs, their voices, whatever inspires them.” With à Fleur de Peau she’s created an album that is deeply intimate and personal yet completely open, marking a new chapter in her journey as an artist.

Photo Credit: Noé Cugny

à Fleur de Peau – Tracklisting

1 Beautiful Way
2 Again Again
3 For the Love of You
4 Inside and Out
5 Yo soy Diosa
6 Back to You
7 Feel What I Feel
8 Here
9 Ma Préférence
10 Historia de Amor

North American Tour Dates

Mar 13: Amaturo Theater – Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Mar 15: Dalton Center Recital Hall – Kalamazoo, MI
Mar 16: Blue LLama – Ann Arbor, MI
Mar 17: SPACE – Evanston, IL
Mar 18: Jazz Coterie – Appleton, WI
Mar 19: Dakota – Minneapolis, MN
Mar 28: Jefferson Center – Roanoke, VA

Apr 8: MIM – Phoenix, AZ*
Apr 9: The Old Church: Portland, OR*
Apr 10: The Shedd – Eugene, OR*
Apr 11: Ellen Theatre – Bozeman, MT*
Apr 12: The Triple Door – Seattle, WA*
Apr 18: Ellen Theater – Mamaroneck, NY*
Apr 21: Jimmy’s – Portsmouth, NH*

Missing Piece Group