A Queen of Hearts

I have doubted for about... 5 minutes before chosing the topic of the week. "A love at first heard" :)

 

However, there have been quite a lot of new albums released in the last days and weeks like Palatine, Feu! Chatterton, also some isolated projects like this videoclip for a famous song of Georges Brassens, "Les passantes"(The passers-by, 1972):

The song is actually a poem of Antoine Pol set into music, an ode to all these people (here, women) we met once and who eventually vanished in the crowd. Let me quote some verses (again very well translated by David Yendley - whom I mentioned in one of my first articles) of this beautiful text about deep, secret regrets and melancholia.

 

I wish to dedicate this poem

To all of the women that one loves

For just a few secret moments

To those whom you scarcely know

Whom a different fate bears away

And whom you see never again

(...)

To those women already taken

Who, living long and dull hours

With a person too different

Have let you see, pointless folly,

The depth of the melancholy

Of a future deprived of hope.

 

Dear images only half seen

Disappointed hopes of just one day

You’ll be quite forgotten the next 

If the good times should come along.

It is rare that one remembers

Trivial events on life’s way.

 

But if you have missed out on life

You ponder with tinges of envy,

All those moments of bliss you glimpsed

The kisses you did not dare take

The hearts which must be left waiting

The eyes that were not seen again.

 

And so, on wearisome evenings, 

While peopling your loneliness

With the phantoms of memory

One weeps for lips, sadly absent,

Of all those beaut’ful passers-by

Whom you knew not how to keep hold.

 

But, in the videoclip, the bitterness is overtaken by an intent to celebrate in a very spare style the diversity of female beauties and bodies, including their sex, skin, shapes, lines, and colours. I very much like this unexpected focus although I am not 100% convinced by the final result. It is also an original way to bring this magic song up-to-date.

 

In a way, the album I will now introduce to you has something to do with it. A queen of hearts, released in 2016, is about women's inner pain, love pains. 

I discovered it while listening to a radio program about loss, separation, grief, mourning and how those were actually the essence of the psychic life that any human being experiences all life long. An expert was invited, and she had been asked to choose a movie and a song that would be played during the program. She selected "Porque te vas' ('because you are leaving'), a cover of Jeanette by Rosemary Standley originally adapted for the show A queen of hearts. I listened to the whole album right after the program finished. I immediately fell in love. I listened to it four times in a row (you now know how easily I can fall in love with a song :p).

(In case you don't use Deezer, have a look here - maybe you will find another streaming platform to listen to it! Otherwise on YouTube you can find several pieces on line).

 

So before becoming an album, this selection of covers adapted to be performed accompanied by a piano was a kind of musical. Here is the description of the projet I found on YouTube:

 

'Originally devised of as an American-style tour (with a singer and a pianist), A Queen of Hearts pays tribute to glamour and to the melancholy elegance of the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday and Nancy Sinatra. Filmed and faithfully reproduced on DVD, the show directed by Juliette Deschamps has found its natural extension in the private realm of the CD. Underpinned by Sylvain Griotto’s agile accompaniment, Rosemary Standley’s exquisite voice riffles, like a genuine queen of heart, through a top quality songbook which skips from classical music to jazz and French chanson and includes some big names: Kurt Weill, Gershwin, Bashung, Carlos d’Alessio and Nina Simone…'

 

I obviously loved this super eclectic repertoire, I loved the sobriety, I loved the pianist and singer"s ability to jump from one style to another, from one century to another, from one language to another (English, French, Spanish and German, it's not so common in an album or a show!), from a feeling to another, from a beat to another, in the same piece, even in the same phrase. It causes a sensation of both familiarity and distance, intimacy and coldness, sadness and joy. Where are we? At what time? Who is this mysterious woman? Is she telling us something? Shall we pay attention on what she says? How does she actually feel? I absolutely loved the atmosphere created, the whole performance. Let's listen to them all: The director, the singer and the pianist:

Since I don't have the time to translate for you, I will just write some key-quotes :) 

 

"C'est l'histoire d'une femme qui vit un amour puis une rupture amoureuse, puis finit par s'en remettre"

 'It's the story of a woman who experiences a love, then a breakup, then ends up getting over it"

 

'Cette reine de coeur, c'est la reine d'un jour, d'un soir peut-être,

et peut-petre que tout s'effondre quand le rideau se baisse'

"This queen of heart, it's the queen of a day, a night perhaps,

and perhaps everything falls appart when the curtain goes down"

 

I already knew Rosemary Standley, the franco-american singer, but I couldn't recognise her voice at first, it sounds slightly different depending on the language she sings in. She is the famous singer of the excellent band Moriarty, very popular in France, especially since this song:

Okay, on the album, the majority of the songs are in English, apart from... some French poems-songs and songs-poems:

 

-Les chemins de l'amour (Francis Poulenc, 1940)

-Je ne t'aime pas (Kurt Weill , Maurice Magre, 1934)

-La Reine de Coeur (Francis Poulenc, Maurice Carême, 1960)

-India Song (Carlos d’Alessio, Marguerite Duras, 1975, I already mentioned it! Have a look here)

-La nuit je mens (Alain Bashung, Jean Fauque, 1998)

 

I will finish this post with this last song, which means "At night, I lie". The text is rich and can be understood in many ways, so it is very hard to translate for it mixes play on words, meanings, sounds and images.  You should listen to the two versions:

Although I always liked it, I have never been as moved by Bashung's version as I have been to tears by Rosemary Standley's one. Her voice, her way to place the words like a fragile elastic... to make them sound so softly... and this simple arrangement... they just hypnotised me! I hope you will like this piece, and the whole Queen of Hearts, as much as I do.

 

La nuit je mens

Je prends des trains à travers la plaine

La nuit je mens

Effrontément

J'ai dans les bottes des montagnes de questions

Où subsiste encore ton écho

Où subsiste encore ton écho

---

At night I lie

I catch trains across the plain

At night I lie

Shamelessly

In my boots are mountains of questions

Where an echo of you still remains

Where an echo of you still remains