Elle m'oublie

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Elle m'oublie is a French-language chanson , sung by Johnny Hallyday , which was released in June 1978 as a 3:25 minute single - with the B-side La première pierre  - and a week later on a new LP ( Solitudes à deux ) , each on the Philips label. Text and music were written by Didier Barbelivien .

Text and music

The plot of the very melancholy song about a relationship that has apparently just ended by the woman is presented in the form of a monologizing first-person narration by a man working in agriculture . The listener does not find out anything about this relationship, not even why the separation occurred, whether there was a quarrel or whether the contrast between the country dweller and the city dweller played a role in it. He does not utter a single bad word about her, but only deals with his own grief over the loss that the end of the relationship means for him.
Formally, his thoughts about what she might be doing alternate with impressions of his own everyday life. A connection between these two is not explicitly established, apart from the fact that the refrain consists exclusively of the plaintive, threefold statement “She forgets me” (Elle m'oublie) .

The woman left his house at dawn, assumed the male protagonist, who obviously had not expected her departure, took the first bus and is now somewhere on Route Nationale 152 , which runs along the banks of the Loire . He imagines how she looks at the passing landscape under her hair hastily tied into a bun in the morning , maybe mumbling to herself or thinking of God knows what. And later in the day, when the sun goes out, the bus will stop at a restaurant off the road where she has dinner.
At this time he will finish his bottle of wine, stare at the empty table, nibble on his fingernails and finally lie down in the garden to count the stars - in the hope that he will be better tomorrow. His loneliness is clearly expressed in these few words.

However, his thoughts immediately return to the woman and his guesswork as to what she will do each time. Tomorrow morning she will be back in Paris , in her familiar surroundings, and meet her parents and friends again. By then, he is sure, she will have forgotten him. And he is convinced that she will “fall in love again in three weeks at the latest” because in his mind she “is already standing in front of her mirror and is happy” . Then he comes back to his own situation, this time talking about his everyday worries and tasks ("There is still a wheat field where hay has to be made. The tractor is broken, that also fits. Now I should better look into that Take care of the horse ”) before his thoughts return one last time to the woman and to his own emotional pain (“ The summer is coming to an end, she forgets me and I suffer ”) .

The chanson consists of five stanzas each with four lines, all with paired rhymes , and after each end the short refrain follows. In his composition, Barbelivien used for the first time a series of descending chords that the musician Éric Charden had introduced him shortly before. The melody is in E major and composed in four-four time .

Eddie Vartan , a stepbrother of Sylvie Vartan , was the recording manager in the studio ; Hallyday was accompanied by the Roger Loubet Orchestra . The record sleeve of the single release is graphically identical to that of the vinyl LP: it contains a black and white photo on the front of Hallyday, a guitar over his shoulder, standing in a field and communicating with his dog. On the back you can see him from behind, sitting on a stone and playing something on the guitar for this dog. This design is a very vivid illustration of the "loneliness for two", which is not only the title of the LP, but also characterizes the overall mood of Elle m'oublie . Since the mid-1960s and the matching song title Noir c'est noir - the French-language version of the 1966 Los Bravos hit Black Is Black  - this was the first Hallyday cover that was not designed in multiple colors .

Origin, successes and reception

Johnny Hallyday 1978 with accompanying musicians

Didier Barbelivien could not have imagined that this chanson could be sung by Johnny Hallyday of all people - it deviated too far from everything the singer had published over many years. But the author's partner convinced him to play it to Hallyday, and Hallyday loved it. Eddie Vartan, on the other hand, found that the music did not fit the text, but then had to bow to the chansonnier's opinion.

The studio recording sessions took place between late April and late May 1978. The single made it to number 5 in the French charts and sold around 800,000 copies. The chanson was one of only eleven titles on a numbered LP special edition that Philips released three years later under the title Johnny 20 ans on the occasion of his 20th anniversary as an artist. In addition, Elle m'oublie was re-released on a double-digit number of long-playing records between 1984 and 2018. On the occasion of the international music fair in Cannes in 1978 , this chanson was awarded the great record price (Grand Prix du disque) of the French authors and composers association UNAC.

Hallyday ("Johnny National"), who has already become a French icon , always had a keen sense for the musical zeitgeist, and he picked it up here too. With this single release, he proved his great musical versatility: the former rock 'n' roller, Yéyé singer and interpreter of many shallow songs had matured and not only with this song contributed to the finding that it was in France in the second In the middle of the 1970s there was a “mixture of rock and chanson”. The song also inspired Pierre Saka , himself the author of many successful song texts since the 1950s and later the author of several books on the genre chanson, for which the "very beautiful" Elle m'oublie and the J'ai oublié de vivre, also published in 1978, contributed significantly had that the singer was able to close the year artistically and financially “with a favorable balance sheet”. For Didier Barbelivien, too, this chanson marked “an early milestone in his dizzying spiral of success” - regardless of the fact that two other of his songs took third and fourth place in the 23rd Concours Eurovision de la Chanson in the same year .
The journalist and chanson author Christian-Louis Eclimont rates this “French country song” (D'une tonalité country à la française) in a similar way : “The sentimental-depressive epic ” is “one of the author's most successful pieces Benefit from a Hallyday at its best that shouldn't be missed ”.

literature

  • Christian-Louis Eclimont (Ed.): 1000 Chansons françaises de 1920 à nos jours. Flammarion, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-0812-5078-9
  • Fabien Lecœuvre: 1001 histoires secrètes de chansons. Ed. du Rocher, Monaco 2017, ISBN 978-2-2680-9672-8
  • Gilles Verlant (ed.): L'encyclopédie de la Chanson française. Des années 40 à nos jours. Ed. Hors Collection, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-258-04635-1

Web links

Supporting documents and comments

  1. ↑ Lyrics and video at lyricstranslate.com
  2. ↑ a b c d Christian-Louis Eclimont, 1000 Chansons françaises, 2012, p. 577
  3. ^ The RN 152, at that time an important west-east artery between Tours and Orléans , still exists today. However, in 2006 it was downgraded to Départementalstraße D 2152 or D 952 A due to its parallel course with the A 10 car route .
  4. ↑ a b Jérôme Pintoux: Les chanteurs français des années 60. Du côté de chez les yéyés et sur la Rive Gauche. Camion Blanc, Rosières-en-Haye 2015, ISBN 978-2-35779-778-9 , p. 162
  5. ↑ a b Fabien Lecœuvre, 1001 histoires, 2017, p. 117
  6. ↑ see the score of the song at boiteachansons.net
  7. ↑ Philips also released the LP as a tape cassette ; In view of the small format of the cassette cover, only the front photo was used.
  8. ↑ record cover at hallyday.com
  9. ↑ a b Fabien Lecœuvre, 1001 histoires, 2017, p. 118
  10. ↑ according to the data sheet for this song at lescharts.com
  11. ↑ Gilles Verlant (ed.), L'encyclopédie de la Chanson, 1997, p. 150
  12. ↑ Pierre Saka: 50 ans de chanson française. France Loisirs, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-7242-5790-1 , p. 76
  13. ↑ Gilles Verlant (ed.), L'encyclopédie de la Chanson, 1997, p. 155