Petite Celine's 'No No More' Turns a Black-and-White Confession into Bittersweet Heat

Under the bleachers, Petite Celine realized she had made a horrible mistake. She jotted down some lyrics, rife with teenage angst but brutally honest. Then she set them aside.

Fast forward to college, when the fierce young woman experienced a bout of homelessness as a student in Lower Manhattan. Living by her wits, she put the lyrics to music and sang to the crowds she encountered at Washington Square Park. "There were crusty punks, Wall Street sharks, hippies, tourists, kids," she recalls. "They all identified or empathized with this song."

It was "No No More," the French-American singer-songwriter's bold new video. Playing visually with the black-and-white inner dialog of self-judgement and defiance, Celine elevates rough patches into a cry for transformation. The track's stark but potent groove and gorgeous floating harmonies form a perfect backdrop for Celine's voice, which swerves between moments of Blossom Dearie and Amy Winehouse, the racy and the sweet.

"The song came from a real raw place," she says. "It was satisfying to not only reconnect with it but to give it space, to write the music around it and allow it to be. The idea for the video came from that."

A visual artist and accomplished actress--she played a role alongside Sean Penn in Mystic River--Celine grew up listening to pop radio on two continents--and wondering why they sounded so different. "I spent a quarter of every year in France growing up," Celine recalls. "I'd go to Europe and hear songs in all these different languages, with regional instruments. Then I'd come back and be overwhelmed by the monotony of a lot of American pop. It didn't feel like it represented the rest of the good music of the world, or of the US for that matter. I wanted to create music that filled this gap, this need." Celine longed to transform that basic pop framework and add layers and nuances of culture she had experienced in France and in New York, where she spent the rest of her childhood time.

After years of piano lessons, she turned to other expressive media, working toward the career in acting she had prepared for since she was a young girl. But music stuck with her and came to her rescue in one of the most trying periods of her life. "It was only a few months," Celine recounts, "but it was in the middle of winter and I had nowhere to live except the park and the subway and the classrooms at college. It gave me the courage to consider music as a more serious part of my artistic life."

Celine's debut stuck to the singer-songwriter feel, a natural extension of the experiences that forged her as a musician. Yet, inspired by bi-lingual and innovative vocalists and composers like Camille and Regina Spektor, she pushes her arrangements and draws in more sources on her upcoming album, Man Made Fire. "No No More" and the accompanying video captures this new, lusher sound and broader range.

For Celine the visual artist, this new palette makes sense. "Music is a colorful process. I see music," she explains. "Music has always been very visual, geometric and abstract, clouds of color with geometric shapes."

"No No More" the video was guided by this kind of musical sight. Celine considered the song's raw origins, that really bad day under the bleachers. In moments like that, "Things in your head seem really black and white, no room for color or gradients. The judgement in our own heads, of ourselves," she reflects. "The video is bookended by color shots, but the choreography of my mind is black and white. The light shifts over the course of the video, however, and my outfit switches from black to white as I realize that the light at the end of the tunnel existed within all along. My dance begins to incorporate beams of light from my hands, illuminating my path forward and enlightening my perspective."

The rest of the album promises to be in full Technicolor, as Celine ranges farther afield from France and New York. "It started out as kind of a selfish thing, wanting to make music like this," she muses. "But in today's world, it's become an important mission to me. I want to do for music what the internet did to the telephone system: globalize it. People are becoming very polarized. Too many want to close borders.Yet there are people who feel that to overcome our fears of others, we need to push through it and connect. That's how I feel, and that's what my music strives to do."

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