In the two decades since French singer-songwriter Carla Bruni launched her musical career, the former fashion model – and French First Lady after she marred past President Nicolas Sarközy – sold more than 3 million albums worldwide.
Most of those, of course, were sold in France or other parts of the world such as Quebec, where French, the primary language in which Bruni writes her lyrics, is widely spoken, which makes her new album, “French Touch,” something special: An English-language record, but also her first collection of covers of songs originally recorded in English, which for the Italian-French Bruni is her third language.
The idea for “French Touch” surfaced after Bruni and superstar producer David Foster, who was also the president of Verve, her label, talked in 2014 after her last Los Angeles concert.
“He said he would love to produce something because he liked my voice, but he didn’t understand my lyrics because, you know, I’m writing songs but basically only in French,” says Bruni, calling from Boston, where she’d just arrived on a short U.S. tour that brings her back to Los Angeles for a concert on Wednesday, Feb. 21.
“So he said, ‘Why don’t you write some English songs?'” Bruni says. “And said, ‘Well, I tried, but I don’t have enough vocabulary.’ Maybe I haven’t read enough in English. So he said, ‘Let’s make some covers.'”
Bruni says she never imagined she’d do a covers album, “because my purist job really writing songs … but it was such a good fun to do. We had such a good time.”
“French Touch” refers to a laid-back style of electronic music popular in that country starting around the current millennium, but also to an elegance and easy, sensuality and sexiness native to the French way of life. As a collection, it’s a wildly eclectic selection of songs – Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence” and the Clash’s “Jimmy Jazz” alongside AC/DC’s “Highway To Hell” and a duet with Willie Nelson on “Crazy” – that somehow comes together through Foster’s arrangements and Bruni’s languid, dreamy vocals.
“It really has no logic, you know, apart from the logic of they’re all songs I really love,” Bruni says. “I think I spent a day with David at my house in Paris in my studio and we spent that day playing music, him on the piano, and me on the guitar. That’s how we choose the songs.
“We were choosing songs that would change the most,” she says. “I wouldn’t say we were transformed the songs, but we sort of make it as if they were my own songs, you know what I mean?
“You just pretend you wrote them,” Bruni says, laughing. “And you try to make them sound like your own. It was such a good fun. It was like you take a song and you put it in your pocket, or you take some clothing and you make it exactly fit your body.”
Recording and performing in English is a breeze compared to songwriting in that language, she says.
“Singing in English is like a dream for a singer because you have so much swing, and so much rhythm,” Bruni says. “Which French doesn’t have.”
Her set at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles will include a mix of the new covers and her own French and occasionally Italian songs, performed with a group that in addition to the usual guitar, bass, piano and drums includes cello and trumpet depending on the number, she said.
Bruni says she feels that in the 20 years since her debut album her process of songwriting has stayed mostly the same.
“A song is like a little miracle to me, to get a song out of nothing, out of inspiration, out of memory, out of emotion,” she says. “I don’t know if you can really learn how to write.
“But as a singer I’ve been working a lot, because I was so fragile and shy, really. I feel much safer now when I’m on stage, and it makes me happier because I have a little more confidence.”
With age, too, her confidence has grown, as has the life experiences from which to write new songs, the 50-year-old Bruni says.
Her life, which might seem like a fairy tale to some – high fashion model turned musician turned wife of the French president – is something much simpler in her eyes.
“Basically I have a lot of luck,” Bruni says. “That’s how I would describe my life. It’s full of chances and opportunities. So I must have been someone like Mother Teresa in a previous life. I’ve been having a very lucky life.
“And it also kept changing,” she says of the life she’s lived, describing how her family moved from Italy to France when she was 7, how she left modeling for music, how she had to learn the role of the wife of a head of state, and so on.
“I’m sort of running after my life because it’s always changing, you know what I mean?” Bruni says. “I enjoy it very much. I do catch every single drop of luck I see.
“So that’s how I’d describe my life.”
Carla Bruni
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 21
Where: Orpheum Theatre, 842 S. Broadway, Los Angeles
Tickets: $45-$65
Information: laorpheum.com
