43. Jacques Brel - Olympia 64 (1964)

Parles vous

1. My first listen through this was pretty jarring — this is, and I don’t say this lightly — extremely distinct from the rest of the albums I’ve listened to, a totally unique and distinctly French genre of big band. At first, it almost sounded like a parody of French music. The accordion comes in quickly and sticks around; the rolled r’s and growls in the French pronunciations are aggressive; the cymbals smash through the sounds. This is like if Sinatra were singing opera music written in a French parlor. This is not The Beatles, or Sam Cooke, or Bob Dylan.
2. My second listen through came while cooking a Provençal style garlic soup for dinner, which was incredibly perfect. The soup was fine (I’m very glad I used a chicken broth instead of water and a whole head of garlic instead of four cloves, how do you call something a garlic soup with only four cloves of garlic??); the musical accompaniment made the experience quite fun. I felt like Remy in Ratatouille; my kitchen was no longer in San Francisco, but Paris.
3. This album is big. Big sounds, big emotion, big audience reactions, big everything. I want to know what on earth Brel is saying; he’s clearly a storyteller, laughing along with his characters, crying in anguish, sighing in resignation, taunting, playing. He does all of this in a single song (my essential pick, below). It’s an album that grew on my with repeated listens. I suspect it will you, too.
4. If you had handed this to me in 1964, I would’ve obsessed over seeing him live myself. If I’d seen him live, I suspect I would not have let anyone hear the end of it.
5. Considering how singular this style of music is compared to American pop (I’m sure the chanson style was more pervasive in Europe and not limited to Brel), it’s wild to see the list of acts who’ve covered his music, from the expected (Liza Minelli) to the interesting (David Bowie) to the wtf (Nirvana).

One Essential Song:

Listen on Spotify: