Lara Fabian

Lara Fabian
A Wonderful Life

Having sold more than 10 million records across five continents, the Belgian-born multi-lingual singer/songwriter/performer Lara Fabian is truly an international superstar. Her new album, A Wonderful Life, is the artist's second full-length English-language collection, the long-awaited successor to the self-titled, multi-million-selling Lara Fabian, released worldwide in May 2000.

On A Wonderful Life, Lara Fabian explores, through her music, the nuanced complexities and paradoxes of life and love, expressing the universal truths and emotions that course through humanity. "I go through many emotions myself," she admits, "and I think we are all very complex individuals. We all run after the same thing and we all seek the same thing. We're really composed of the same essence and the quest for A Wonderful Life is really the same for everyone, only the ingredients we choose to make it so are different from one individual to another."

A Wonderful Life is a collection of 12 songs, each of them creating its own unique mood and sense of time and space, all of them working together to sustain an organic consistency. "We aimed at consistency," she says, citing a wide and diverse range of records that have continually inspired her: The Wall, Thriller, Breakfast In America, and "Strawberry Fields." "Some of these records truly changed the course of music. In all humility, I think they changed the course of time. This is what music is supposed to do." She goes on to name some of the artists in her pantheon: Miles Davis, Sting, Pat Metheny, the Eagles, Freddie Mercury, Frédérick Chopin ("The master of all masters, Chopin talks to my soul"), Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Maria Callas ("Singing-wise, it's definitely Maria Callas and nobody else"). "Even if they come from different sources, with different artistic individualities," she observes, "they do contain the same consistency, they are built with the same foundation which is: truth, integrity, and absolutely no will to compromise on anything."

It is this uncompromising approach to music that informs A Wonderful Life. Working with a select group of top flight musicians and producers--including Gary Barlow, Eliot Kennedy, guitarist Jean-Félix Lalanne, Desmond Child, and Anders "BAG" Bagge--Lara Fabian inhabits each of the album's songs, communicating the essence of each piece with extraordinary power and subtle passion. "I could have never gathered all I did without my collaborators," Lara says. "Truly, they defended my integrity and point-of-view."

"The three songs that truly define me the most," she offers, "are: 'Intoxicated,' it's more like a movie than a song to me, you'll be sitting in the moment with her where she's having that heartache, melodically, it's very close to my culture, which is Italian; 'Review My Kisses,' because that's the mellow, silent me, the person who sits in the room and is really me; and 'I Guess I Loved You,' which is the after-side, you've loved, but not the wide, total spectrum, maybe just part of it."

On "No Big Deal," she confesses to "Feelings I've been hiding down in the darker side," admitting that "Now all I need is freedom, not this ego-land" while on "Wonderful Life," she expresses an inexhaustible yearning for a purity of experience, beyond pain or pleasure, where there is "No need to laugh and cryéyou know it feels unfair, There's magic everywhere." "It is A Wonderful Life," Lara believes, "we just don't have the right eyes to see it sometimes."

For Lara Fabian, music is a means to fully express and fully possess the totality of life contained in its individual moments. "Music puts you into that moment," she says. "You're not thinking about the past, you're not worrying about the future. As you're writing, as you're singing, as you're playing, as you're into the inspiration, believe me, you're not thinking about paying your bills or why your neighbor was so mean to you. All of a sudden that song you hear, whether you're the composer or not, will sweep that away. Music has that amazing power. It puts you in a place where nothing that currently matters, matters."

The idea of suspending time through immersion in the moment, pulses through "The Last Goodbye," where the singer expresses the desire to merge with her beloved for eternity. "Let's just live here in the moment, sharing something realébecause anything else is wasted timeéJust let me grow old, here by your side, until the end of time, til the last goodbye."

"Instinct, music, inspiration, food, when you taste something and it's beyond words, love, a kiss, making love, suspending moments make life worthy of living," these are the elements of Lara Fabian's aesthetic and philosophy. "Basically, it makes it worth the fall, the fall from I don't know where. We all have the feeling we don't belong. We all have the feeling, 'What is this? What are we going through? Do we live? And in which world?' What kind of relationships do we really have?' We all question ourselves in this way. So these suspensions--the moments where we truly grasp the essence and we taste life and we enjoy it in the deepest way--make it worth being where we are."

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Lara Fabian began her formal music training at the age of 8 when she enrolled in the Conservatory of Brussels. Moving to Montréal, she released her French-language debut album, Lara Fabian, in 1991 in Canada. A sublime and passionate performer, she toured consistently throughout the 1990s, capturing the hearts of audiences around the world with her electrifying live shows. Her eloquent writing and soulful vocals drew her fans to her 1994 album, Carpe Diem, her 1997 breakthrough, Pure, which sold more than 2 million copies in France alone, and a best-selling live album which debuted at #1 on the French album charts in 1998.

Her English-language debut album--also titled Lara Fabian--was released in the U.S. in 2000. Driven in part by the #1 Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play hit, "I Will Love Again," her first American album debuted at #1 on the Billboard Heatseekers new album chart.

Her music has been featured in numerous film and television soundtracks including "Songs From Dawson's Creek, Vol. 2," "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," and Steven Spielberg's "A.I." Most recently, she appears in Irwin Winkler's Cole Porter bio-pic "De-Lovely," performing Porter's "So In Love" with Mario Frangoulis.

Her best-selling European DVD and CD, En Toute Intimité, released in October 2003, was an intimate, acoustic piano-based collection showcasing Ms. Fabian performing songs in English, Italian and French.

Lara Fabian's Official Website:

http://www.larafabian.com