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It's not easy being AIR. In true Gallic style, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel are showing their roots and making existential love sickness look sophisticated and intoxicating. In 1998, Moon Safari may have made them famous and spread their dreamy, interstellar sound around the world, but what use, the duo asks, are all the critical success, credibility, fame, riches and synth-groupies in the world, if there is no love? "Ever since the success of our first album, we had everything given to us, everything available," Godin explains on the phone from his Paris apartment. "But the thing we missed most of all was love and tenderness. It's easy to have sex with everybody when you have some pop success, but you never know why someone is loving you."
Enter, Talkie Walkie, AIR's fourth album and their most intimate, honest effort to date. "It's very personal," offers Godin whistfully. "We have grown up. we have changed as men and for the first time we have focused on our emotion. THis album is a call for love." Of course, it may have been easier to continue making love to throngs of ladies with dubious motives, but in the end, AIR's dark night of the soul birthed a deep, shadowy soundtrack to late-night contemplation with left-handed cigarettes. "We needed to do it, to reach for what we needed, not what we wanted," says Godin of the duo's decision to fasten their hearts boldly to their sleeves. "It took us four or five years, but we did it." (Not a bad time-line, considering pop stars see no shame in riding the groupie gravy train well into their geriatric years.) They even forewent the seductive guest female vocalist routine, opting for all vocals to be delivered by Dunckel.
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Ohayo!!!
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