Bruni's new album, Comme si de rien n'�tait (As if nothing happened), received its first review in Le Figaro this week, where critic Bertrand Dicale called it a distinctive change from the plain folk of her earlier works. "In short: less America, more France and more Beatles," he wrote.
"I am a child despite my 40 years and 30 lovers," Bruni sings on Une Enfant (A Child), which works out - in case anyone is counting - to at least 1.2 lovers a year. On a song called You Are My Drug, Bruni sings of a narcotic lover: "You are my drug. More lethal than heroin from Afghanistan and more dangerous than Colombian cocaine."
While Sarkozy may indeed be as lethal as a pack-a-day Gauloises habit and as dangerous as a Parisian taxi driver, Bruni has repeatedly denied that any of the album's lyrics are related to her husband. The lyrics were written before she met Sarkozy, she said. "I have had to protect myself. I made the album in a bubble with my musical entourage," she told French magazine VSD.
Nicolas Sarkozy, 53, began dating 40-year-old Bruni in November, just months after divorcing his previous wife. The press lavished attention on the love affair, finding understandable glamour in the president's trysts with a millionaire model and singer. While they were married on February 2, the media saturation began to take its toll - this spring saw Sarkozy's standing plunge in the polls.
And though Bruni now signs her name Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, her new album bears just the name Carla Bruni - as if trying to draw attention away from her husband.
"Perceptions will not only be musical," she told VSD. "Criticism, which is useful, risks being blurred, for good or for bad, by the fact that I am the president's wife."
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