Hélène Sio
A piano and a voice ... Almost nothing else on the record — no band, no strings, no bed of electronics under it ... Whatever the song is going to do, it does with ten fingers, a throat, and the piano's own loud and soft as the weather ...
Hélène Sio is from Narbonne, in the south of France, near the sea, and she was in her early twenties when this came out, November 2024, the first song from a short record ... Before it she had put out two others, and then this, which is a return to the plainest possible arrangement, as if to find out how little a song needs ...
The title means I want to know everything ... She has said that the songs on this record are as much about herself as about anyone she wrote them to — that there is something in writing that is a way of growing up ... So everything the song wants to know is not only about the other person ... Some of it is about the one asking ...
The measure is the piano itself ... Mastered so its dynamics survive — the quiet parts left quiet, the loud parts allowed to strongly voice — which is rarer than it sounds in a year when most records are pressed flat so they carry on a phone ... This one keeps its distance between a whisper and a shout, and the song lives in that distance ...