Sometimes it takes a personal tragedy to catalyse an artist’s practise, a crack in everything, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, that let’s the creative light in. Just such a traumatic fissure occurred in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s life in late 2013 with the sudden death in Paris of her half-sister, the fashion photographer Kate Barry. Reeling from the news and inevitably plunged into an extended period of grieving, the distressing event had transpired just as Charlotte was initiating activity on a new album, the successor to 2010’s IRM. Rather than put a total brake on creative proceedings, however, the anguish would slowly but inexorably find expression in the pages of Charlotte’s journal and thus, eventually, in the lyrics of the songs that she would write for Rest, her long-gestating but ultimately cathartic third studio album.

Previously reliant on collaborators to, as she puts it, “write my thoughts” – notably Jarvis Cocker and Air’s Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel on 2006’s 5.55 album, and Beck on the aforementioned IRM – Charlotte had already begun to explore the possibility of penning her own songs, initially decamping to an island off the Brittany coast with Kiwi songwriter Connan Mockasin, an auxiliary on Stage Whisper, who brought along his guitar to help develop her nascent ideas. “Songwriting had been so paralysing before, but this was quite liberating”, Charlotte recalls. “Connan didn’t care about what I was writing – it was all in French, which he didn’t understand. That gave me a bit of confidence. I was gradually getting a grip on what I felt I wanted to write about. And then my sister died…”

Being profoundly impacted by matters familial is hardly something new to Charlotte Gainsbourg, who first came to prominence in France as a young teenager, singing songs penned by her father, firstly on the controversial single ‘Lemon Incest’ and then the album (and accompanying film) Charlotte Forever. Serge Gainsbourg passed away when Charlotte was 19, and she, along with much of the French nation, felt the loss deeply and protractedly. The shadow of her father’s notoriety and immense artistic reputation, especially his celebrated work with her mother, Jane Birkin, offers a partial explanation for Charlotte’s previous reticence as a songwriter, although, as she readily acknowledges, her iconic bloodline has also been a way in for many of her collaborators. “Naturally, my parents’ style has inspired many of the musicians I’ve worked with. When I recorded with Beck, we talked about my father very often, and with Air it was the same”. Still, the Gainsbourg songwriting genes stubbornly refused to kick in.