Christine and the Queens on Expanding His Voice and Making Art Accessible to Everyone
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The Future of Music Interview is a Q&A in which our favorite artists and producers share their vision of what’s next, weighing in on everything from AI to emerging scenes to the artists inspiring them the most.
When Christine and the Queens, the progressive French pop artist who also goes by “Chris,” decided he wanted Madonna to voice the narrator on his ambitious, new three-act pop opera, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love, he had to think fast.
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His collaborator, Mike Dean, had worked with Madonna before and quickly got her on a FaceTime, so Chris had to deliver a fevered elevator pitch. “I said to myself, ‘Now is the time to prove that you can explain the plot of a record you don’t yet understand in 20 seconds,” he says, laughing, on a Zoom from Paris. “I told her, ‘Listen, I’m making this rock opera about angels. Your character could be my mom … or it could be a big robot … and I’m really not sure yet.'” He pulls an anxious look like when he was expecting her answer. “She was like, ‘You’re crazy. I’ll do it.'”
Chris has always trusted his intuition when exploring new terrain in pop music. When Chris released his first album in 2014, his mastery of sharp pop hooks was already evident. Since then, he has expanded his musical vocabulary to include experimental detours and fine-tuned his lyrics into blunt emotional confessionals about his journey of transitioning gender and making sense of his own life. As he’s delved deeper personally, his music has become more dramatic and exciting, placing him at the vanguard of pop’s next great wave. For Paranoïa, Angels, True Love, he spent a month and a half writing music and recording his vocals as single-take improvisations, often surprising himself with his performances — and then fighting the urge to recut them, trusting his initial inspiration instead.
That sense of daring helped keep the emotion raw and the music fresh. At the time, he was grieving the loss of his mother, and, inspired by Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, was obsessed with the nature of celestial bodies. Ultimately, he composed 90 minutes of music that ranges from traditional pop songs (“Flowery Days” and “True Love,” which is a playful duet with 070 Shake) to R&B love songs (“We Have to Be Friends”) to psychedelic jams (“Track 10,” “Let Me Touch You Once”). It’s sprawling but never boring.
Last year, he released a prologue album, Redcar Les Adorables Étoiles, a work that he wrote after finishing Paranoïa that explores his gender transition and the nature of love. Since he focused himself on Redcar, he deferred making sense of everything he put into Paranoïa until now. Now with the magnum opus finally coming out — the end of his “quest” (a word he uses frequently) — Chris tells Rolling Stone he’s just now learning what Paranoïa, Angels, True Love means to him. He also explains how presenting a large-scale dramatic work has informed his vision of the future.
How did you challenge yourself to create something new with Paranoïa, Angels, True Love?
I almost put myself in self-hypnosis. I was interested in moments of surrender, where the work seemed to be done through the artist. I feel like the quest for this album was to get inside of the music.
You structured the album into a three-act opera. What attracted you to the form?
When you say “opera,” there is a need for structure: narration, point A, point B, some characters, and a clear arc. My operatic form is fragmented: It’s like a succession of visions. I was interested in this hallucinatory dimension. Like in Angels in America, [the character] Prior is dying and he’s seeing the angels. It’s like the fabric of space and time opens. I was questing for those sensations.
I was thinking heavily about figures who, to me, were brave in terms of stage presence — like Nick Cave and Led Zeppelin. I was thinking of the cathartic detonation of a song by Led Zeppelin that feels like a whole journey in itself. And I feel like I was subconsciously nudging myself in the direction that I felt could satisfy me as a performer, as well. I was hungry for sensations — for a sensation to solidify, to be fully there. I wanted to be able to just exalt, getting to a state of transcendence.
You recorded your vocals, improvising the lyrics, early in the morning. Was it hard to trust that process?
That practice has been part of my work since the beginning. I think the big difference that makes this one stand out is that I forbid myself to do more than one take. And I was just calling for that cohesiveness, and “This is going to happen now, and I don’t retouch that,” which I never did so drastically before. Every morning was a new song.
You asked Madonna to be the album’s narrator, the character Big Eye, which she performs spoken word — not singing. Why did you approach her for that?
I was working with Mike, and we found a poem voiced by a computer voice. I was like, “Well, interestingly, they fashioned the computer voice close to Madonna’s,” and I was like, “Well, that’s probably because she’s in everybody’s subconscious so hard. It’s kind of a reassuring but also terrifying choice.” I remember just saying, “Well, actually, I think she would make a killer Broadway character that could be this very ambivalent creature, called Big Eye.”
Mike acted on it fast and set up a FaceTime. When she agreed, she recorded it very swiftly. Mike panicked a bit because I sent her lots of lines to say. He was like, “What did you do?” And I was like, “Well, she’s a character.” She did all the lines. That was quite an iconic moment.
Which other musicians do you look up to most?
I think a lot about Prince, and how he never stopped. I understand that. I respect that. I think it’s the least we can do if we’re given the privilege of being questers of music; I want to be of service.
Who is an artist you expect will have a role in shaping the future of music?
This artist will be born next year. They will have a crazy mind, very symphonic, and they will create the symphony of the future. They will be able to properly collaborate well with computers, which is probably not the way it is now.
What gives you the most hope about the future of music?
Music itself. Sometimes I feel exhausted in this industry because we are being very boring with content, fucking algorithms, “likes,” comments, and … blech.
Does anything worry you about the future of music?
Yes, capitalism as this force that nobody questions, and fame culture. The extreme validation culture and the demand of immediate embrace bore me. The question of immediate success, and immediate resonance doesn’t make sense to me. Some art can take time, and music cannot be digested in 10 seconds. Some performances are ugly, and you have to go through it. [It feels like] we don’t want anything imperfect anymore. Because we are working with a lot of people who think a lot about money; they don’t really think about emotion.
There’s also so much music to pick from now. It makes art feel like product.
Exactly. I’ve been thinking, as an artist, we have such an obligation of [producing] content. And as a responsible artist, I’d rather focus more on just the performances. I feel like we are suffocated by [the availability of too much music at once], which makes it hard to receive new things as well. That’s why I got obsessed with just performing, because I’m like, “At least it’s like a date. You meet somewhere, and you know what you’re going to share, and you share it.” And it’s amazing. And sometimes it’s a bit less amazing. It’s actually being together.
What needs to change about the way artists tour that can make it a more sustainable and livable experience, not to mention more affordable, for fans?
I grew up with seeing great pieces of theater when I was young, and it changed me. But I remember the tickets were already quite expensive. I actually stopped doing theater when I was younger, because I thought it was too elitist, and too expensive, and not everybody could come to the theater. Sometimes in gigs it’s the same problem now [laughs].
I feel like you can put your intention in your work, though. If you want to plan a tour that feels more affordable, you have to think of a creation that thinks about cost, expense, and what you want to tell.
It’s a tough question since you also need to make money as an artist to keep going.
Around Redcar, I was like, “I should do gigs in the streets.” Think of Prince: He was doing a main gig, and then he was not stopping. He was doing another one in a smaller venue. I personally would love to multiply my ways of performing in many, many ways, rather than falling into the content, selfie trap, and never seeing actual people again. So maybe we should make more free performances.
Also, I feel like we are very isolated as artists. So maybe the answer should be from a collective of artists, intellectually talking about how to make it healthier, because I don’t think I could have the solutions alone.
Redcar dealt with your journey with gender. How has your journey with gender opened up your creativity?
I just sing more fully now, because I’m in my shoes. That’s the only true thing. I birthed my truth very early in my work. The second song I wrote was “iT” [on which he sings, “She’s a man now/And there’s nothing we can do/To make her change her mind.”] I feel like I’m going to be less meta about my gender, and just own it. I want actually to become a great producer, great poet, insane performer, without breaking too much of my body — because I already broke my leg, and it hurt.
Has opening up about your gender identity changed how you sing?
My range has drastically expanded. It’s more open. When I was young, I was very meticulous about my singing, very terrified of pushing my voice. I was unhappy, and it was just an expression of my tension. Now I’m just going high, low, and strong, and it’s a galloping horse. It feels good. It feels good to sing, being yourself. Think about Freddie Mercury, that guy was singing with everything open. We miss that guy. The future of music is Freddie Mercury coming back to Earth [laughs].
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