Alice on the roof
One evening, alone, in the shut-in months of 2020, a Belgian woman at a piano wrote a song about how much she had loved someone ... That is where the record says it began, and nothing that happened to it afterward — the co-writer, the producer, the release five years later — took the evening atmosphere and feeling out of it ...
Alice Dutoit sings as Alice on the roof ... For two records she sang in a mix of English and French, the way Belgian pop often does to reach past the border ... Then seven years of quiet, and a third album, Alice, out in November 2025, in French from the first word to the last — a choice she made, she said, to be as sincere as possible ... This song was the first thing she let out of it, that September ...
Comme je t'ai aimé ... As I loved you, or the way I loved you, or how much — French folds all three into one phrase and lets the singer choose with her breath ... It is a breakup song without a villain ... the other person has a new life now, and the song looks at that life without wanting it back, and still says the love was real ...
The song went through gentle hands, the press notes say — Adrien Gallo, who wrote with her ... Albin de la Simone, who shaped it ... Paco Del Rosso, who added the electronics ... Which is the measure of it ... her piano, the most old-fashioned instrument in pop, sitting inside a bed of programmed sound, so that the ballad is both the room she wrote it in and the year she wrote it in ...