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You may not be familiar with Woodkid yet but chances are you’re one of the 330million odd people that have watched his music videos on YouTube. The acclaimed French director turned musician is already an award winner for his music videos – including Drake and Rihanna’s ‘Take Care’, Lana Del Rey’s ‘Born to Die’, Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’ and Taylor Swift’s ‘Back To December’ – but this month releases his first solo album, ‘The Golden Age’ under the moniker Woodkid. We meet up with him to find out why the time is right to expand his creative portfolio. I’ve always been a musician, from an early age. I’ve always played the piano and I’ve always loved singing but I was doing my films before I started any music of my own. The first time that I made music for one of my short films was when I started to artistically understand the connection between my sound and my videos, and that it was working well. Music was helping my directing and vice versa. I just started producing tracks in connection with my sensibilities as a director, I kept them cinematic of course and very connected to my visuals. So I made my first EP, then ‘Iron’ got big and it just snowballed. People started asking for more music so I though okay, let’s make an album, I’ll pretend to be a musician. There was never a specific moment that I remember falling in love with it, it all seemed like a natural progression.It happened very progressively. It was always a dream for me but when I was a kid I never thought that it would be my job. I studied visual art and was very interested in studying animated films as music videos. I bought my first camera and I made a video for my friend for free and a production company got in touch and said they were interested in working with me. Little by little I started getting more jobs  and it went from there. I’m still surprised by it. I’ve been doing videos for ten years, people still think I’m a newcomer but I’ve made maybe 50 or 60 videos so far.I don’t even see it as a new step for me. I don’t like to be too comfortable. I was comfortable as a director, I could have the budgets I wanted, the team I wanted, I could work with amazing artists, so when you get to that level of comfort it becomes hard to creatively renew yourself. You need to be in danger to continue to be creative. I found out by going further into my own music that I was more in danger creatively there and there was more of a challenge. Challenge is called for, you need to expose yourself to go forward.I knew that if I was going to do a music project it had to be different to anything else that was out but also on some level it needed to be acceptable. People had to feel strongly about it and I found out that the way to do it was to write pop songs that you could play on the piano, people became attached to them. Whatever you do in music the most important part is the song – production is just a surface thing that classifies your music into one genre or another. So we decided to make pop music with everything but pop instruments, there’s no guitar, no drums, no bass in the album. We went for classical piano and orchestral sounds and beats that were more like  percussion and we produced the album like an electronic album. It might sound real but everything is fake on there. The album ended up sounding half digital and half organic which I found very interesting.The themes are personal. It’s emotions that I went through as a child and now as an adult – love stories from my past, questions about the world, about war. I write about emotional subjects that can still shock people and make them feel something, but I created the story of a child that is more universal as I didn’t want the album to be too egocentric. The boy’s stotry is of course fed by my story but I hope that it resonates with everyone, somehow. When you look at ‘Iron’ there’s no set, parts are missing and it makes people question what they’re seeing. I see the album as much as an art project   as a musical one.I don’t really care about awards. I know how manipulated and how political they are so the most rewarding to me is seeing people at my gigs, and seeing my music mean something to people. Of course I’m proud of the awards, being Grammy nominated for Woodkid and for my direction of other artists makes me proud but it’s not what it’s all about for me. I’m not blind to the industry but it is always good to be recognised.No because I have been nominated for ‘Run Boy Run’, which is my personal project, so I guess it means that it’s connecting. When I heard about the Grammy nomination I assumed it was for Lana Del Rey or Drake. I was twice nominated in one ceremony so I don’t feel pressure for the album because I’ve never wanted to b