may 26, 2014 - THE INDEPENDENT
Johnny Depp & me
Vanessa Paradis
INTERVIEW
Description:
EXTRACT FROM THE INDEPENDENT INTERVIEW - FULL VERSION ON THE LINK BELOW:
Johnny Depp and me: Vanessa Paradis on acting, gigging and life after a break up
Since breaking up with Johnny Depp, the Gallic chanteuse has never been busier
Vanessa Paradis is juggling. There are the two home lives, one in Paris and one in Los Angeles. There's the shared childcare – she and Johnny Depp, from whom she split in 2012 after 14 years together, divide custody of their children, Lily-Rose, 15 this month, and Jack, 12, and her life is a constant blur of transatlantic shuttling. There are the cigarette papers and pouch of tobacco she's currently balancing in her lap as she attempts to build a cigarette.
And then there are the three careers.
Her own daughter is now at the age she was when she started out, and it seems she might be following her mother's lead: Lily-Rose has a songwriting credit on Love Songs, alongside her father.
"This song, 'New Year', is actually really old – it was composed when Lily-Rose was six! I couldn't find a melody that I liked but at one point she started to sing this thing over the chords! She sang not only the first phrase with the melody but even the words.
"And I was just like, 'Oh my God, what's that?' It was like a melody that can lighten you up in church. It was so beautiful. And I never forgot that melody. Then I finished the song – but the song would never have been that if she hadn't found that first, perfect phrase."
Depp, meanwhile, had come up with those chords, making it a proper, three-way, familial collaboration. "Yes," she beams. "But it took a long time. Johnny's chords were really so pretty. And I knew I wanted to make a song of it, but it took all those years. I even tried it on my last album," she says of 2007's Divinidylle, "but I couldn't find it. I needed Lily-Rose's melody."
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