Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Yann Tierson: A classicist with a punk sensibility

Soir De Fete- Yann Teirsen The brilliant French contemporary composer Yann Teirsen originally recorded this song for his album, Rue Des Cascades but included it on the soundtrack of the popular French movie Le Fabuleux Destin D'Amelie Poulain a.k.a. Amelie from Montmartre in the English speaking regions of the world. The film became a vehicle for the talents of actress Audrey Tantou. Yann Tiersen's soundtrack was the musical backdrop that captured the visual beauty of the Montmartre district of Paris where most of the location footage for the film was shot by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

On this particular song, Soir De Fete, Tiersen is influenced the French/gypsy music which is commonly called "musette." I love the opening with the handclapping and the penny whistle imitating a birdsong. The music is quite mysterious. There are so many different things going on at the same time in Tiersen's music. I love the interplay of the bouzouki (mandolin), the banjo, the squeeze box accordion and the violin in this song.

Did you notice how Tierson ends the song with a fade out of main Soir De Fete melody line, which slowly fades into the sound of an old fashioned music box playing the Al Jolson song Zippidty Doo Dah? It's that sort of signature act of playful irreverance that makes Tiersen such an appealing musical iconoclast.

Tiersen's music has been compared to the classical minimalists like Phillip Glass, Erik Satie, Michael Nyman and Fredrick Chopin, however Tiersen's music is a pastiche of so many exotic, strange and wonderous influences he's become more of a musical globalist.

Tiersen was born in Brittany, France, in 1970 and received classical training at several musical academies, including those in Rennes, Nantes, and Boulogne. Tiersen was a musical prodigy who mastered piano, violin, guitar, accordion, drums before age 12 and now plays nearly every orchestral instrument on his albums and soundtracks. Tiersen frequently uses non-conventional musical instruments like toy piano, banjo, harpsichord, melodica, autoharp, pennywhistle and carillon into his musical compositions.

Tierson's musical oeuvre is far more subversive those of his minimalist peers because Tiersen rebelled against his classical training and is the product of the early Eighties post-punk movement.

In the early 1980s as a teenager he was influenced by the post-punk culture of bands like The Stooges and Joy Division. Tiersen rebelled against his classical training and spent most of his teen years and early twenties playing guitar in post punk bands. At the same time, Tiersen was also composing soundtracks for short films and accompaniment for plays. Several of these pieces ended up on his first album, Valse des Monstres.

Tiersen first obtained noteriety in France for multi-instrumental one-man shows and the theatrical appeal of his playing earned him a spot performing in the Avignon Festival.

What was unusual about Tiersen's music was his own unique pluralistic approach i.e... Tiersen refuses to make any categorical distinctions between his own classical training and the grassroots influences of the ethnic folkways and popular music upon his music. For Tiersen, the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the U.K. was every bit as valid a musical statement as Fredric Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66. Tiersen frequently borrows elements from his diverse stream of influences like punk, ethic folkways and classical music within the same composition.

Since then Tiersen has collaborated with such noted indie artists as Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Frazer, Lisa Germano, Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon, and Dominique A.

Tiersen has become a towering figure in contemporary French music but is still under the radar in the United State where he remains a cult figure. For those intrested in Tiersen's music you won't find a better starting point than his 2006 soundtrack to Amelie from Montmartre.



BONUS TRACK: Also embedded below is Kala one of the beautiful songs Tiersen recorded with the Elizabeth Frazer for the soundtrack of the film La Traversée.

Flower Child

Thank you for your excellent review of Soir de Fete! I have never heard of this man or his music and I'm so glad you added it in your journal for us. I have to say, its a rather topsy-turvy piece and I thoroughly enjoyed it because of the fact. The music makes me feel like I'm in the middle of wacky haunted circus of sorts. I love music that has a hint of madness in it, and this gets a definite two thumbs up from little old me.
Partly too, because I just can't fathom how someone can think something like this up in their head...and then go about recreating it in real life. It just blows my mind. Anyway, great review and thanks for introducing this very interesting composer.

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Françoise Hardy: French pop superstar and avatar of fashion style.


Mon Amie la Rose- Françoise Hardy Françoise Hardy was one of the first megastars of Europop in the Sixties and became an icon of fashion style all over the world during that era. Jane Birkin, Bridget Bardot, Marianne Faithfull, Jane Asher and a bevy of European fashion designers borrowed from Françoise's trademark "ye ye girl" syle of long straight hair and fashionable mod clothing. Françoise's uniquely continental fashion "look" has been recycled over and over by European and American designers for nearly a half century. I showed some old Sixties photos of Françoise to my wife she guessed that Mme. Hardy was a contemporary supermodel wearing from the latest fall line of Gucci fashions. The downside of the equation was Françoise's status as a fashion icon and international beauty frequently overshadowed her talents as a singer, guitar player and songwriter.



The beautifully restored embedded YouTube video of 1964 hit, Mon Amie la Rose showcases Françoise's unique musical talents. The video is filmed with a stationary camera that frames a tight shot of her face. As was frequently the case, the allure Mme. Hardy's high cheekbones and photogenic magnetism is almost a distraction from the beauty of the song she is singing.

Hardy is still adored in France and over the years she has produced an impressive body of work including La Question a 1971 collection of songs that set the standard for lights-low seductive ambient music.


Mon Amie la Rose has beautiful sad melody, though — not that Hardy was ever short of those at the time — related with the existential stoicism of an aging woman who, like the most beautiful rose in the garden, eventually loses her bloom of youthful beauty. Although the opening section is wholly acoustic, it soon glides into a more up-tempo part with band backup, the softly insistent beat keeping the whole performance from tipping too far into corniness. As was the case with many early Hardy tracks, a Greek chorus of sorts enters via backup harmony singers whose sorrowful tones express more explicit despair than Françoise's lead vocals do. It's back to the rhythm-less acoustic mode, though, for the final pass through the verse, ending on delicate plucks of the guitar that sound like tears falling into a glass.





Here's my own quick and dirty translation of the lyrics to Mon Amie la Rose

Chorus
We are truly insignificant
And that's what my friend the rose
Told me this morning

I was born at dawn
Baptised in dew
I blossomed
In the rays of the sun
Happy and in love
I closed my petals at night
And when I awoke I was old.
Yet I had been beautiful
Yes, I was the most beautiful
Of all the flowers in your garden

See, the God that made me
Now makes me bow my head
And I feel I'm falling
And I feel I'm falling
My heart is almost bare
I have a foot in my grave
Already I am nothing
You admired me only yesterday
And I shall be dust
Forever, tomorrow

Chorus
We are truly insignificant
And my friend the rose
Died this morning

Last night the moon
Kept vigil over my friend
And in a dream I saw
Her soul, dancing
Dazzling and naked,
Above the heavens,
Smiling on me.
Let those who can, believe
But I need Hope
Or else I am nothing

BONUS SONG: Mon Amie la Rose- Natacha Atlas In 1999 Natacha Atlas recorded a version of Françoise's song on her third album. For several years Natacha Atlas was the singer for the pioneering global fusion/electronica group the Transglobal Underground and her arrangement of Mon Amie la Rose has a lively Middle Eastern feel to it. Her production of the video has a flavor of international intrigue, like an outtake from an old James Bond movie.

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Neil Hannon: England's pop satirist and musical subversive


The Happy Goth- Neil Hannon The kitschy lounge music of Neil Hannon never fails to bring a smile to my face. Neil was involved in the Divine Comedy a more conventional Britpop band that was frequently mentioned in the same conversations with Blur, Oasis and the Stone Roses in the early Nineties. After a couple of years and a couple of unsucessful albums, Hannon had done away with most of the band's original members, except the drummer and turned the Divine Comedy into a vehicle for his own idosyncratic brand of tongue-in-cheek Europop.

Neil Hannon's artistic oeuvre is located somewhere in the strange uncharted region of pop music that lies beyond the musical territory of Scott Walker, Ray Davies, Randy Newman, Monty Pyton and the classic 007 soundtrack music of John Barry.

With the release of the album Cassanova in 1996, Hannon's full blown artistic vision was realized. Two singles from Cassonova did well on the UK music charts. Something for the Weekend (at once soaring, cheeky, leering, and truly weird, with lyrics detailing a guy led astray by his lover and attacked by her secret thug companions) and Becoming More Like Alfie (a sly '60s acoustic pop number with solid percussion, sampling the Michael Caine movie in question and reflecting on how all the wrong people in life seem to get the girls) became Top Ten charters.

Recruiting the equivalent of a full orchestra didn't hurt Hannon's musical efforts either, fleshing out the classical/art rock/pop Divine Comedy fusion to even more expansive ranges than before, while drummer Darren Allison and Hannon continued overseeing and co-producing everything, again demonstrating their careful collective ear for the proceedings.

The Happy Goth comes from the Divine Comedy's 2004 album Absent Friends. It's an amusing observation of the Goth subculture. The video was shot on one of the rare occasions when Hannon performs a live concert with the full orchestral ensemble of the Divine Comedy that he makes his studio recordings with.



BONUS SONG: Perfect Lovesong- The Divine Comedy Perfect Lovesong gives you a pretty good idea of the sort of straight forward Britpop music Neil Hannon does when he isn't doing his off kilter parody of Sixties MOR baroque pop. Perfect Lovesong reminds me of the breezy SoCal pop of the Pet Sounds era Beachboys. I love the dorky garage band concept for the video, it reminds me of my own teenage years in the garageland.

Flower Child

Wow, if those lyrics don't pierce you through the heart, I don't know any that will! Very interesting girl, too. I'm terribly curious- did she write this herself? If so, I'm very impressed. And also I feel that song is so much more believable it seems, being that she was so pretty in her youth and now she is actually living out the reality of her song. Though I suspect she is still beautiful even in her older years. And finally, excellent review. You definitely have a way with words.

Gavin B.

Above is a picture of Francoise Hardy today at age 65. I think she still as beautiful as ever, but it has to do more with her inner beauty. Francoise wrote nearly all her songs. Mon Amie la Rose was written when she was 20 years old. Even in her youth, Francoise showed a great deal of self awareness about the limitations of her own beauty.

French women age far gracefully than their youth obsessed American counterparts. I think it has a lot to do with French philsopher Simone de Beauvoir's idea that one is not born a woman, but becomes woman with age and experience. I'm guessing that Francoise Hardy didn't need to have a tryst with a cabanna boy in St. Tropez to affirm her womanhood when she turned age 40. She had confronted her own mortality at age 20, when she was still young and beautiful, if Mon Amie la Rose is any indication.

Francoise recently recorded this sentimental duet of the great jazz standard I'll Be Seeing You with none other than Iggy Pop with whom she's had a long friendship. Iggy is 62 years old if I'm counting right.

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


The cover to Jim Lowe's first and only album.

Green Door- Jim Lowe Green Door was a 1957 song recorded by Jim Lowe. Lowe is a guy that nobody knows a heck of a lot because he didn't leave much of a mark on music history, except for the song Green Door. At first the song sounds like a typical banal hit parade song of that era, but there's something else going on here, if you follow the story line of the song. I've been listening to Green Door since I was a kid and there is a sense of mystery in the song that is seductive.

Could it be that all kinds of depravity and evil lurk behind the green door? Listen to the lyrics... The green door could be the portal to a speakeasy, a house of ill repute, a coven of Satanists, a homosexual bar, a cell meeting of communists or almost any other form of "evil". There is lilting blend of Tin Pan Alley/rockabilly sensibility to the song which is counterpointed by a metronome ticks away like a time bomb. Green Door still induces an anxiety attack for me, if think about the lyrics too much.

A mint condition copy of Jim Lowe's album Songs from Behind the Green Door can fetch a price of $30 to $40 on the collector's market. I've always thought it was a high price to pay for ownership of a certain album, but music collectors are driven by their uncontrollable fetish to own a very specific item. On a few occasions I've profited handsomely by acting as a broker between a seller and a buyer for bulk sale of an entire record collection. The Lowe album is on the wish list of nearly every collector of Fifties music. Estate sales are a great place to find rare and collectable vinyl issue albums.

In 1981 the Cramps included a revved up version of Green Door on their album Psychedelic Jungle. I came across an interview with Lux Interior, the Cramp's bass player, and he had a similar theory to my own about the banality of evil being expressed in the lyrics of Green Door. That's not much of a comfort to me, since Lux Interior is a truly derranged man who once wrote fan letters to serial killer John Wayne Gacy. I don't love the Cramps any less for Lux's quirky hero worship of serial killers, but I generally maintain a safe distance from larger-than-life rock stars like Lux Interior.



BONUS TRACK: Hernando's Hideaway- Archie Bleyer Hernando's Hideaway is another novelty song with a similar theme predates Jim Lowe's Green Door. In 1954 a long time jazz band leader, Archie Bleyer wrote Hernando's Hideaway, a catchy little castinet driven tango for the score of the Broadway musical the Pajama Game. The lyrics are far more tongue-in-cheek than those of Green Door.

Songs like Green Door and Hernando's Hideaway are interesting musical artifacts because many of the novelty songs of the Fifties authentically reflected the reign of sexual and social repression that existed in the United States. The attitude of our national leaders and opinion makers was best summarized as: conform or perish. During the Eisenhower years, Hollywood movies were censored, Joe McCarthy was busy blacklisting communists, homosexuality was taboo, smoking marijuanna was (and still is) criminal and even seeking a divorce from your spouse was grounds for social banishment. On television the married couple, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were forced to sleep in separate beds on I Love Lucy because networks censors thought showing married couple in the same bed was too sexually graphic. To a certain extent, nearly everybody was hiding a part of themselves behind the green door during the Eisenhower years.

So all those "amoral" folks who failed to conform to the fake Christian social mores of the 1950s were driven underground and were forced to have a secret rendezvous with an illicit lover or fellow traveller at Hernado's Hideway. The cultural revolution of the Sixties changed a lot of people's ideas about what illicit and deviant behavior was. Nearly everyone was in violation of the restrictive sexual and social taboos of the Fifties and it wasn't just homosexuals who came out the closet in the wake of the Sixties cultural upheaval. Beat era writers like Jack Keroac and comedians like Lenny Bruce who defied the authority of the the morality police state became harbingers of the coming cultural rebellion in the Sixties.

Embedded below is the Hit Parade version of Hernado's Hideway released by Archie Bleyer in 1954, but it was John Raitt, the father of rock vocalist and guitarist Bonnie Raitt, who sang Hernando's Hideway in the Broadway cast of the play and it's Raitt who sings it on both the Broadway and movie soundtrack.

NumberNineDream

I don't know why it's just now that I decide to read your journal. It's fascinating. On this page alone, you're talking about 2 of my favorite singer/composers.

Oh and Mon amie la Rose is a poem written by Cécile Caulier. I always loved that song, the lyrics are so heartfelt and the melody is sublime.
btw, are you familiar with Natacha Atlas' version of the song, really nice cover.

And great Tiersen review, I'm supposed to be going to his concert next month . It should be good.

Edit: I just saw your video of Natasha Atlas, so I guess you're familiar with her lol.

__________________

Gavin B.

Thanks for your kind words, #9. Good to know that there are other fellow travellers who love great French musicians like Yann Tiersen and Francoise Hardy. Here in America I doubt if 1 in 500 people have heard of either artist.

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Old Crow Medicine Show- Old time music with new ideas

I Hear Them All- The Old Crow Medicine Show- I don't know a whole lot about OCMS except that they've opened a lot of shows for Gillian Welch who is my 2nd favorite country singer, next to Tammy Wynette.

It's self evident that OCMs is a young group of very talented musicians. Maybe if we were living in 1963 instead of 2009. I Hear Them All might have come from the pen of Bob Dylan. It's been a damn long time since somebody has written a socially relevant song that is so good I get a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye listening to it. The song and video pack a real wallop in these times of political apathy. The song is dedicated to the people of New Orleans where the video was filmed.

Good luck to Old Crow Medicine Show...we need more bands with new ideas, particularly in the world of country music which has become the stronghold of Babylon over the past couple of decades.