David Eugene Edwards, a pious and mystical young man, remembers that he was 14 when this album appeared to him as a "revelation". It was in 1983. On the cover, a little girl in a wretched house seemed to be peering at the grown-up world through closed shutters. On the record, there was a collection of songs that have meanwhile become classics and laid the foundation of 'folk-punk', a mix between scraping square dance and teenage anger. We can say with (very) little doubt that without the Violent Femmes, a Milwaukee trio led by Gordon Gano, and their debut album, 16HP, DEE's band, and Louise Attaque (most famous French rock band, sounding a bit like the Violent Femmes) wouldn't exist today. "In almost 20 years, our 1st album eventually sold 2 million copies", Gano points out ironically.

The punk revolution wasn't hurling abuse towards anything traditional anymore. The Violent Femmes, who started in 1981, appeared when the rebellion was burning away. They made their debut on stage opening for Richard Hell and the Voivoids, who were patrons in the CBGB, the temple of N.Y.C punk scene. Rather than harping on their initial successful method, the Violent Femmes have collected musical adventures ever since. "Our music comes from a melting-pot including country, hillbilly, folk, which is American popular music, and rock, which has its roots there but at the same time started as a reaction against it. But we soon added brass, free jazz and experimental music."

The Violent Femmes have lately worked with composer Pierre Henry (a French composer from the 70's, deemed as one of the pioneers of electronic sounds), whom bass and keyboards player Brian Ritchie introduced to the other 2 members. "Pierre Henry manipulated sounds we had sent him for his album Intrieur/Extrieur", Gano explains. "We went to his little house in Paris, where he has a studio. In exchange, he played on the track 'A story' on our new album, 'Freak Magnet'. It's far from the folk-punk image we had when we started."

10 years later, 16HP followed the track that The Violent Femmes opened with their debut album. This Franco-American quartet based in Denver (Colorado) was revealed in 1996 with the album Sackcloth 'N' Ashes, on which Gordon Gano played the fiddle. "It was more than a matter of mere friendship, DEE explains. It was natural and logical for us to meet a musician who influenced us so much." Both bands are fond of jarring electric and acoustic guitars, and dynamic rhythm sections. Yet, while the Violent Femmes use 'classical' rock instruments, 16HP collect second-hand battered banjos, concertinas, rustic guitars from the 30's and hurdy-gurdies. "The American musicians I admired were especially Dylan and Cohen, Jean Yves Tola says, but David introduced me to the source of genuine traditional music, recorded by the Library of Congress." Along with the emblematic figures of country (Hank Williams, Carter family, Johnny Cash) and bluegrass, DEE refers to Hungarian, Mongolian, Gypsy, Yiddish music and polka. He's interested in France because of 'musette' (music based on accordions, that can be viewed as 'the' traditional French music) and because French emigrants fashioned the Cajun sound in Louisiana.

Respectively the son of a Baptist minister and the grandson of a preacher, Gano and Edwards share concerns in the Bible. Hassled right from the start by religion, rock first provided puritan America with great examples of possessed characters (Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Elvis Presley) -all of whom owe a lot to the church and its musical expressions-, then created its own liturgy.

Edwards is an exemplary husband, father and parishioner, and his singing reminds us of incantation, of a minister admonishing his flock. Gano's way of declaiming results probably more from a dramatization of his characters than from a profession of faith. "I don't think the band conveys anything mystical. My faith is part of my private life, not of my artistic life. I've sung things that even atheists would've been reluctant to write." However, Edwards hopes that his psalms will alter the audience's mind, even when he's far from his country: "God transcends any barrier of language." Along with this Christian corpus, which cements American identity, both singers are enthralled by the Deep South. "A geographical area but also a word fraught with a spiritual meaning that goes beyond geography", according to DEE. 16HP's forthcoming album is entitled Secret South. "Gordon and I come from Milwaukee and Denver, cities where that spiritual meaning doesn't have any influence. In the South, certain values, like the worship of progress and success, don't matter as much as everywhere else." DEE is aware that part of 16HP's attractiveness stems from a sort of southern exoticism, the same exoticism that made the success of this fantasyland's main writers in Europe.

If Edwards readily mentions Cormac MacCarthy, he also points out that "in the US, no one reads Faulkner's books" and adds: "European writers, like Dostojevski, had a greater influence on me. For a very long time, Americans didn't want writers to throw the past in their faces, like the Civil War, the Indians and the slaves. But things are changing."

Gano, in turn, qualifies that relationship: "There's a recurring fantasy about us: our songs are said to convey the atmospheres of Faulkner, Caldwell, Carson MacCullers or Flannery O'Connor, who I'm quite fond of by the way. Which grants us the status of a kind of a, let's say, intellectual group, even if most of my fellow citizens probably don't know that word. At the same time, we're linked with a somehow forgotten literature, whose writers aren't superstars." On the Violent Femmes' new album, indeed, Gano wanted to pay a tribute to William Carlos Williams, and put the words of his poem 'Forbidden' into music.

Translation by Magali.