A year ago, on her 30th birthday, Melody Prochet announced her second album as Melody’s Echo Chamber, titled Bon Voyage. At the time, a new song was released, and a tour was planned. It seemed like Prochet was finally ready to follow up her breakthrough 2012 self-titled debut. But soon after, everything was put on hold: Her family released a statement announcing that she would be hospitalized for months due to a “serious accident.” An ensuing report stated that she had fallen, broken vertebrae in her neck and spine, and suffered a brain aneurysm.
Though Prochet is not yet ready to talk about the specifics surrounding last year’s events, it’s clear is that she’s doing better. “Today I feel blessed, as I’m healed,” she writes Pitchfork via email. “It’s been traumatic but it has beautifully put some perspective into my eyes and broke a life pattern that didn’t work for me. I’m lucky it revealed more light.”
And now, Bon Voyage is once again set to surface, on June 15. The folk-prog odyssey teems with ideas and sounds—flute solo breakdowns, half-whispered singing, multiple languages, and psychedelic guitar freakouts. Before her accident, the French artist decamped to Sweden to work on the album with psychedelic brethren Fredrik Swahn of the Amazing and Dungen’s Reine Fiske. In part, the music is a testament to the trio’s mutual love of deep-cut oddities. (Prochet cites Turkish composer Özdemir Erdoğan, Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento, and soulful crate-digger favorite Shuggie Otis as influences.) The resulting record is one that she describes as “a little winter’s tale.”
It seems appropriate that this music should arrive following a period of trauma and subsequent recovery; the album’s lyrics frequently reference tumult, as on “Desert Horse,” where she sings, “So much blood on my hands/And not much left to destroy.” But Bon Voyage’s creation offered Prochet an emotional reprieve after some heavy years. “I felt like my life lacked lightness, fun, and fantasy,” she writes. “Moving to Sweden was like breathing again—very refreshing and pure.”
Prochet answered our questions about creating new music in an “enchanted” forest, her scrapped recording sessions with ex-boyfriend Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, and her dreams for the future.
Life.
I think you can hear and sense the core of my soul the most in “Desert Horse.” This track was a monster for me; it’s the most sculptural and mad, with no real common format. It embodies my difficult life journey these last few years, through my own personal desert of heartaches, thirst, mirages, moving sands, disillusionment, and of becoming an adult woman in a mad world. This record was a kind of well I could scream, confide, and whisper into without prudishness, which I find very hard to do with human beings, who can be so helpless, overwhelmed, and judgmental.
The title is an homage to this Wendy and Bonnie song called “I Realized You.” It’s the adventures of a mermaid, a vampire, a werewolf, a sailor, and them sucking all the feelings and love out of her neck.
I had troubles breathing.
For a few years I was on a sort of pilgrimage trying to find an environment of gracefulness, gentleness, and enchantment to release my creativity. Stockholm and its forests happened to be that special place for me. I like to remember some of it as in Elsa Beskow’s Children of the Forest. The cold and snow were enchanting, and the summer heavenly.
I think it might be a more personal, self-confidence issue I have had since I was a child, but sometimes, that feeling of undervaluation has been triggered by some people’s mischievous words, patronizing behaviors in the industry, very intrusive press comments and comparisons, violations of my privacy, and a lot of credit for my work being stolen from me. Personally, it has been tough to be a woman musician, but a big part of the “harm” came from my own hypersensitivity, which is just incompatible with that general artistic lifestyle and the reality that comes with it.
We always had a lot of fun and an easy time creating together. The painful part for me was that I had been working on my record for more than a year and I just could not finish it and release it. It’s been a million hours of work, thoughts, tears, a bunch of money invested in the process and lost. I also tried working on it with new people that I have let down because it never felt right. I realized I wasn’t going to be emotionally ready to play these songs either, so it was a bit doomed. My only regret is that it has taken me so long to let it go!
No, I needed a break from that sort of passion pattern and obsessing over music. Open up to other horizons! Traveling the world and doing serious hikes is a new dream of mine. There is always music inside of me. Maybe I’ll let it [stay] in there for a while.
