Il s’appelle elie zoé
On connaissait Emilie Zoé et ses chansons en chair de poule. L’artiste annonce aujourd’hui qu’il a changé de nom, de pronoms, mais pas de poétique. Il nous raconte son long voyage
Arnaud Robert, Le Temps
Their name is elie zoé
We knew Emilie Zoé and their heart-stirring songs. Today, the artist announces that they have changed their name, their pronouns, but not their poetic approach. They tell us about their long journey
Arnaud Robert, Le Temps
“Something is screaming in me which I need to talk about.” It’s a simple message abandoned on an answering machine one rainy afternoon. Emilie Zoé announces that from now on their name is elie zoé, no caps, and that their pronouns are they/them. For months they have been living a discreet transition in full view of everyone. During their “Hello Future Me” tour, which ended at Christmas, their voice slowly dropped under the effect of hormones. “People sometimes asked me if I had a cold or if I was tired. My close friends and family were informed of my new identity but I was confronted non-stop with the public persona, with Emilie Zoé, and this struggle is no longer comfortable.”
So, we get together on a rainless day, they arrive with a bright smile, blue eyes, very blonde hair, a guitar on their back: nothing has changed, everything has changed. “I’ve just lived the two most beautiful years of my life.” We have been following the artist since 2018 and their album “The Very Start”, deep rock music with lyrics that often speak of another on the run. Emilie Zoé’s charisma, this way of demanding that a song be sewn together with goosebumps, impress; within a few years, their project with drummer Nicolas Pittet took off, receiving a Swiss Music Award, and then a Swiss Music Prize, and a series of international concerts. And even in their premonitory last tour when Emilie Zoé was addressing their future twin, nothing really transpired of the metamorphosis underway.
Because, for a long time, elie managed to bury the evidence, that of not being a girl. “In 2021, musician Laure Betris invites six women and me to collaborate on a project that will be named Berceuses. At the beginning of the first rehearsal, she proposes to share a sort of inner weather where we speak in turn of our feelings in the moment, which often have to do with the body. The discussion makes me uncomfortable.” On the train going home, they stumble by chance on a podcast where a non-binary person talks about their experience. “This was the first time I heard this word. In my head, there were fireworks, and a huge door opened with lots of colours inside.”
Silencing a “mi”
They explore their own biography: as a child, elie’s family lets them dress up as they please – with clothes comfy enough to climb trees, and join a boys football team. Everything would be fine with this indecision if it wasn’t for the dressing rooms from which the girls banish them because they look like a guy. “I said to myself then: let your hair grow, wear tight clothes. Nature gave you this body, accept it.” They create a woman with long hair tied in a bun that they hardly ever style, and wear underwear that binds their breast because they can’t stand the sight of them. At that time, they are adjusting the loud rough sound of an electric guitar while constantly having to answer the same question: “How does it feel to be a woman performing in a men’s scene?”
Contrary to what we sometimes hear, a gender transition, even in 2024 in Switzerland with its rather favourable laws, is rarely a light affair. It means coming out multiple times a day, wilfully or not, the fear of the parents’ gaze and of certain relatives and friends, the feeling that one must fight against not being legitimate in this endeavour, and mixed administrative and sanitary constraints: “The psychiatrist that was following me at the time thought it was a whim. I would leave each session feeling even more hopeless.” An association eventually gives them the keys to understand that what is at stake is not destined to end tragically.
And so, they must choose a name. Their bedroom walls have always been covered in lists of words, drawings, as if this body had to be regularly emptied of the profusion of ideas that overcrowd it. This new list resembles one that parents draw for an incoming child. “I wanted a name that was neither masculine nor feminine. elie kept buzzing in my head. It was quite musical to silence the ‘mi’ in Emilie.” In their synesthetic head, the name elie reads in blue, yellow, green, “three colours I love”. elie zoé presents themself to their circle, they decide not to say anything publicly before the release of Live at Montreux from 2022, blessed concert opening for Nick Cave which will consequently serve as a goodbye to Emilie Zoé. In an extreme close up fixing their closed eyes, the song “Roses on Fire” resounds inside the Auditorium Stravinski like a call to this oncoming new inner world: “There’s this alley near the backdoor/In the corner of your head/Have you ever walked the corridor/With the knowledge of what’s left/On the other side of town”.
« This isn’t just a matter of changing names.
This process has led me to question
how I look at the links between beings. »
Finding one’s voice
This was a bit more than two years ago. Since then, like Alice, elie has stepped through the looking glass. They have gone through surgery to make their chest disappear. They also noticed, as their voice kept dropping, that Emilie Zoé’s songs became inaccessible to them. “At the start of the tour, I would force myself to sing in the original keys, at the risk of losing my voice. I would impose myself this suffering so as not to reveal my transition. Then, with drummer Fred Bürki who took part in the last tour, we adapted the songs several times, sometimes two tones below. It even happened that Fred sang the higher harmony.” elie zoé hated their girl’s vocal range to the point that they sometimes recorded at accelerated speed to artificially reproduce the lower vocal tone hidden in them. “Today, I am happy with this voice. It’s an enormous joy to become oneself. I feel like I am breathing for the first time in 30 years.”
With musician Louis Jucker, their more-than-a-brother, they have renovated the studios of their label Humus. It’s a warehouse in La Chaux-de-Fonds with lots of second-hand sofas and lamps, a mixing console that needs to be warmed up in the morning before it can consider responding; everything here has found its place after a long journey. elie and Louis are crafting together elie zoé’s first album like that of a long-repressed alter ego. “I bought a huge notebook and a set of Neocolors. I fill in the pages with a few lines of lyrics that I read again much later and I connect them at random.” There won’t necessarily be any songs that literally evoke this duality. elie has always read anthropologists, biologists, who write about how life organises itself and how species coexist. “I really enjoy A l’Est des Rêves (In the Dreaming East) by Nastassja Martin. She talks about ways to be in the world from a family living in the woods, post-soviet era. One sentence really touched me: the light went out and the spirits came back. I used this idea in a song.” It’s called “Contact Zone”, it’s about our relationship with otherness in the style of poetic ecology.
An act of communion
In this story, everything is beautiful, nothing is simple. elie zoé would have liked that the world understood their rediscovered identity at once. Without having to explain it, not to the train controllers who find the photo on the train pass does not resemble the boy they see in front of them, nor to social media platforms ready to question everything about transidentity. “I don’t wish to be a flag bearer, nor a political activist. On the last tour, because of my short hair, some spectators came up to me to say that I sang well but that I was a dirty dike. I’m quite worried when I think of the violence I could suffer.”
But elie wouldn’t want us to end by evoking adversity. For them, this whole experience is first a communion. A few years ago, they had gathered their family, their friends, all of those who share their life, to sing the harmonies in a song entitled “Tiger Song”. Recently, they repeated the idea for their birthday. An entire tribe came to lend their voice. The song is called “Change My Name”. It evokes this very particular moment when a being discovers how confined or freed we are by the way we name things.
elie zoé just wrote their name on their mailbox. Each time it’s printed on an envelope, it’s an immense joy.
English adaptation by Jeremie Magnin
Photo by Lea Kunz