The Coming Of Age Film That Is Cleo Bulle’s Music Career – And Her Newest Single ‘AUTOMNE’

It’s the summer of 2006 on the dreamy Mediterranean island of Corsica. As the sun begins to set and vibrant oranges wash into deep royal blues, a group of musicians begin to set up a concert on the street. It’s not small by any means, especially to the six-year-old girl who’s watching from the steps with the biggest brown eyes. Music begins to flow through the streets like the water caressing the shore and the stars dancing in the night sky. The little girl can’t help but watch in amazement and become almost comically fascinated by the violinist of the group. “This is fantastic,” she thinks with a gasp. For the now 20-year-old Cleo Bulle, that’s all it took for her to dive into music.

As the young French musician sits across from me in a slightly pixelated and laggy Zoom call, her Disney princess-like charm is still ever so present. She’s soft-spoken, even when telling a stressful story of how her music teacher would hit her with the violin bow at the slightest mistakes. She is an exact personification of her discography- a mix of indie and folk music full of soft acoustics and wistful melodies. But as she tells me more about her journey on the unpredictable path of music and the rough change in her sound with her February release ‘AUTOMNE’, the more she sounds like a coming-of-age film’s protagonist rather than Snow White.

When I ask about another major episode in her career, she responds with 2016 Paris. Her 14-year-old self had gotten up early to accompany her father to one of France’s major radio shows, where he would be interviewed about a new play he was directing. The peaceful day took quite the turn when her father suddenly got a call from a journalist at the show. Cleo retells the fateful call, mimicking the journalist with “our band is not coming… but you’re coming here with your daughter, right? She can sing?” This lead to Cleo performing for the first time outside her bedroom with a cover of the song ‘Jimmy’ by Moriarty. Cleo laughs as she recalls how incompetent she felt for the task. “I hadn’t played for three months and my guitar was missing three strings and it was completely out of tune” she says. Despite the challenges, she received a video message from the original composer the next day, saying they loved her rendition of the song. Looking back on the peculiar experience now, she’s actually quite proud of herself.

One (including her parents) would think that with such experiences with the art form and clearly having the talent (singing, songwriting, and playing multiple instruments) for it, she would end up studying music at university and officially pursue a career in the field. But it’s now spring of 2022, and she’s studying acting and physical theatre at the East 15 Acting School in Southend-on-Sea. “Music school was never really an option for me”, she says. Because like many young people around the world, she’s still trying to figure out who she is. “Everyone, even now, associates me with music. I really wanted to prove to myself and to others that I could do something other than music, and theatre was definitely something that I didn’t feel was my thing”.

It’s obvious she thinks about these internal debates a lot, about her identity and the lessons of life itself, not only because she takes longer pauses than usual to explain them, but because she embeds them into her music. “I think most of the songs just start from me wanting to write a reminder for myself. Not just like go do your shopping, but more like I learned something there! I’m going to try to write a song about it”, Cleo excitedly explains.

Much of her music speaks to the universal struggles of growing up and time passing by. She specifically singles out her moody track ‘Oublie’, French for forgotten, to talk about the bittersweet feeling of forgetting all the good memories after the end of a friendship. The musician also mentions the fast-paced ‘When It Comes To You’ and details her conflicting feelings of wanting to say her opinion but never feeling knowledgeable enough to do so. Her latest release, ‘AUTOMNE’ is no different.

“The overall topic, if there is a topic, is melancholia. Just the feeling of seeing everything passing so fast and not really being able to grab, like… moments and memories,” she says about ‘AUTOMNE’. She then follows up with “it’s not melancholia in a bad way but more like enjoying the slow…” and hilariously sighs with regret as soon as she says it because she feels like she sounds arrogant. The song, which is currently available on her YouTube channel as a collaboration with Lorello Beats, someone she met at an audition two years ago, took only an hour for her to write. Cleo takes on a spoken-word style on top of a hip-hop beat for this one, sounding nothing like the gentle, stringy sound that she’s made somewhat her signature style. But even though her sound did a full 180, she still manages to mold herself into music form and convey the feelings of growing up without a hitch.

After my hour-long talk with the musician it hit me that it’s possible to have a passion for something and still be unsure of what the future holds. We’re so used to seeing artists be portrayed as people who knew exactly what they wanted and worked towards it for most of their life, but Cleo’s a different story. She has music planned to release as soon as she finds the time to make a visual for it, but she’s now also interested in combining theatre and music to make something new. With all the uncertainty and decisions to be made, I ask her if she’s happy with what she’s chosen to do. And just like a coming-of-age protagonist would, she responds with “definitely”.