With four largely successful and critically acclaimed albums already to their credit, anti-macho men Air have made fans of the entire planet with their spacey, blissful odes to l’amour. Now, with their “fresh and messy” new album about to blow minds yet again, the Parisian duo discusses their creative renaissance, the necessity of lying to one’s lovers, and why Sébastien Tellier should keep it in his pants.

It’s the most beautiful day of the summer in New York City, and Air is fighting jetlag, visibly, as we sit down in EMI’s offices in New York City. The Parisian duo, also known as singers/multi-instrumentalists Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît “J.B.” Dunckel, have just embarked on a four-day press junket, and due to Air being internally out of sorts and this writer feeling unusually nervous to talk to them, no shortage of bizarre moments ensues during our 40 minutes together. Godin, sore from his overnight flight, spends a good portion of the time squatting in front of his chair in various states of agitation, practically doing that reverse-humping thing dogs do when their tailbone itches, and trying to find a position that eases his aching back. At one point, while my nerves are settling, I completely miss my mouth while trying to sip orange juice, and pour it directly between my legs. (I don’t want to acknowledge it by standing up to hunt down a napkin, so I sit in a sizeable puddle and let my pants soak it up. Classy.) And so begins Big Shot’s journey to get to the bottom of how Air’s brilliant new record, Love 2, came to be. Except there’s no actual story behind the title or any particular concept guiding it.

Says Godin, laughing, “We need to find an answer because everyone is asking us and we still don’t know. We just called it that.”

“It creates something interesting in your mind,” J.B. offers. “When we found the name, we liked the act on your brain.”

The new songs present an unlikely, sun-kissed cross-section where romance, desire, Bruce Lee movies, Os Mutantes, African rhythms, ’60s pop music, and ’70s porn soundtracks all converge; it’s no platitude to say their brand-new, custom-designed Atlas Studio is responsible for some of the best music Godin and J.B. have produced in their 14-years as a band.

Air hates being away from Atlas. In fact the pair would rather skip the promotion process for Love 2 entirely— including their upcoming tour—in favor of creating more music. “I think of the studio and think, ‘We have this amazing tool,’” says Godin, “We should record instead of performing shows.” They spent the past year holed up in Atlas conjuring Love 2, and they had to fight to keep their enthusiasm in check. “We didn’t want the album to sound perfect,” he continues. “We want it to sound fresh and messy. When you have your own studio you can spend as long as you want working on a song, so that was a challenge: To have our own studio and still be spontaneous.”

The simplest description of Love 2 is that it’s an about face from 2007’s Pocket Symphony. Produced by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck) and featuring guests like Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker on vocals, Symphony felt designed for dreary autumn days. A hint of melancholy tinged the entire affair, like the Cocker-penned “One Hell of a Party,” which dwelt on the end of all things great as if he were on his deathbed. Even the singles “Mer Du Japon” and “Once Upon a Time” created their shimmering layers through minor chords, the latter ruminating on a love whose time might never come. Hide the shotgun.

Compare that to “Do the Joy,” the triumphant opening cut on Love 2, and you recognize immediately that Air is in a much different headspace in 2009: A sci-fi infused piano and Moog centerpiece, its lyrics encourage, “Do the joy! Do the smile!” “I think it’s a reaction, of course,” Godin says of Love 2, which they wrote, produced and sang by themselves (with help from friend Joey Waronker on drums). “Pocket Symphony was very downtempo, so there’s no way we could make another like that. We wanted to do something with more spirit and energy. And we don’t actually decide these things; we go into the studio and we record something instinctive. Your inspiration goes naturally toward that direction.”

Nothing feels forced about the album’s first single, “Sing Sang Sung,” whose buoyant, Brian Wilson-esque melody perfectly complements the childlike naiveté of its lyrics. And on “So Light is Her Footfall,” the best ballad here, J.B. describes a voyeuristic fantasy, in which the woman he desires is within view but out of his reach. “I wish I could help her / She is in danger,” he sings, as an electric guitar strikes a single haunting note.

“You can’t say to your girlfriend, ‘No, no, no. This song isn’t about you, it’s about a girl that I met on tour and I couldn’t make love with her, so I made a song for her.’ You can’t say that, so you have to lie.”

You may not know much about Air’s back story or their stunning discography, but now is hardly the time for that—they’re about to start talking about sex. (Ugh, fine. Fans can skip ahead to the next paragraph: Godin and Dunckel met at college and formed Air in 1995; they produced the essential Moon Safari in 1998 [and re-released it last year to commemorate its spectacularness] and followed it with the eerie soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides. Their sophomore release 10,000Hz Legend divided fans with its eccentricity, but the subsequent remix album was pretty dope and their next platter, 2004’s Talkie Walkie, is like an aural pheromone. Somewhere in there they provided background accompaniment to a ballet and an Italian spoken word performance by Alessandro Baricca, and Dunckel put out a fun solo record as Darkel; then in 2006 they composed the music for Charlotte Gainsbourg’s album 5:55, which led to them working with Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon on Pocket Symphony because those guys penned Charlotte’s lyrics. Air’s hits include “Sexy Boy,” “Radio #1,” “Playground Love” and “Cherry Blossom Girl,” and all told they’ve sold 5.5 million albums worldwide. Also, they’re quite solid as a live act. Nothing’s pre-programmed. Can we move on now? I mean, Jesus.)

“We do music to forget reality,” J.B. explains. “It’s like a bubble. When we go to the studio, we don’t have to deal with real people and relationship stuff.”

All you really need to know about Air is this: In bedrooms, dorms, studio apartments, public parks and dim lounges all over the world, one thing and one thing only happens when you are alone with a new friend and you play Air at the correct volume: Success! It’s true, the world swoons in unison for Air. (I’d like to posit that it’s no coincidence the abortion rate spiked 4.8 percent in the U.K. and Netherlands in 1998, the same year Air debuted.) Let there be no doubt: The duo takes great pride in fostering your sexytime.

“We are responsible for many children, I think,” J.B. says laughing. “Because it’s music of caress, and there is no aggression, so it helps a lot for things to happen.”

Neither Godin nor Dunckel is married, but they’ve sired six children, ages 2-15, between them, which signals that they’ve had their share of muses through the years. (“It’s a cliché but it’s pretty natural,” J.B. says, “because you want to prove to your muse that you are doing beautiful things.”) While the men will let a woman know if a song literally is about her (it’s a rare occurrence), they can claim the good misfortune of sometimes having more muses-in-waiting than they have songs. In other words, women often want to know if a specific song is about them.

J.B. laughs, when asked how he handles that. “You can’t say to your girlfriend, ‘No, no, no. This song isn’t about you, it’s about a girl that I met on tour and I couldn’t make love with her, so I made a song for her.’ You can’t say that, so you have to lie. A lot of our songs, we are thinking about girls and being in love. But it’s a song and when you write it, it goes in directions that you don’t expect. Sometimes you don’t have somebody in mind. The process is just a concept, and of course the songs are the means to have someone.”

Godin adds, “I think we are very shy people, so we need love to get the balls to talk to a girl. Some friends of mine, they are playboys and have no fear, so they don’t need to be in love.”

One wonders what they think of contemporaries like their pal Sébastien Tellier, who also places his artistic stake in the boudoir, but approaches his lyrics (“Where’s your crotch?”) with an explicit candor that strikes both men as “very bizarre.” Says J.B., “It’s like he discovered sex at 30 years old. There’s so much to say about love and sex in a poetic way. Like, if we say ‘I’m going to give you my love,’ you can imagine what we mean. But if we say ‘I’m going to lie down with you and we’re going to make love—’”

“We don’t dare to say these things,” Godin cuts in. “I think it’s a cliché, boys who show off and use sex as a tool for competition, listing their girls, like a mathematics contest, you know? Quantity stuff. I don’t like it even in private conversations with friends. Sex should be sex; it’s something good that you do with someone, and you shouldn’t put any more importance on it. I was shocked that Séb wanted to tell all of these things, but it was a concept album inspired by porn soundtracks in the ’80s. Now us,” he says with a laugh, “we’re more influenced by the porn soundtracks of the ’70s. So maybe it’s just a matter of 10 years.”

The experience of talking to Air parallels in odd ways the act of listening to their music: Understatement. They know all about it. If you’ve heard any of Air’s previous releases (Love 2 is a great place to start), you’re aware that on first listen their songs often sound simple because their subtle layers require repeated plays to appreciate. Likewise, the musicality of J.B. and Godin’s French accents entrances the ears when it’s applied to the English language. Poring over the recording of the interview days later, I discovered they were answering every question candidly, speaking in much greater detail than my ears were capable of retrieving the first time around (For instance, at one point J.B. called one of Tellier’s girlfriends “a bitch.” Who knew?)

And that’s the great pleasure of doing the joy with Air. They create a new world with each album, one that you can hum along to as background music just as readily as you can sink your teeth into as an escape. “We do music to forget reality,” J.B. explains. “It’s like a bubble. When we go to the studio, we don’t have to deal with real people and relationship stuff. That’s like a nightmare. When you write a song about someone you’re thinking about, it links you to reality, so we try to do the opposite. We try to space out with our music.”

Words: Christian W. Smith
Image for Big Shot: Bert Spangemacher

as featured in Issue 29