Happy birthday to Mathilde Gerner, who turns 25 today.
Who is Mathilde Gerner? She is the French singer better known by her stage name, Hoshi. But you probably guessed that already.
So named because of her love of Japanese culture, Hoshi writes and performs songs with deep and complex emotion. She's been part of the music scene in France for a decade, between reality music competitions, street music, and finally recording her own music on her own terms.
She's an underappreciated gem, and thanks to Spotify for pointing her out to me.
So, this week, I decided to share it all with you. So, without further ado, music I've discovered solely because Cœur de Pirate is in heavy rotation.
We start with Kyo, a group of French guys who shared a love of American grunge and decided to make a band out of it. They formed in the early 2000's, took an extended hiatus, and have now come back. This is their latest single, and it is a banger. The opening rift is a clear lookback to "Lithium", with the rest of the song hitting some 90's alternative vibes. Lyrically, it's something of a sad and painful song, with the sentiment "Je ne veux pas rester seul" - I don't want to be alone - repeated throughout.
It was a little cruel of me to start with this song, because the video is actually Chapter 2 in a story. You would have met the characters in Chapter 1. I'll have to post that sometime.
Imagine 17 year old me, rushing to the record store on the day that Maria McKee released her first solo album.
Yes, this is what I was listening to as a teenager. And that album was really the third Lone Justice album - with a lot of the same personnel. I was a huge Lone Justice fan (still am). So, I had high expectations of this, and it did not let me down. The first two songs were a heck of a one-two punch. This was the 2nd single and 2nd track. It was a slower, but beautiful and emotion-filled song.
But that first track - I think I wore my cassette out on this track. It was the powerhouse vocal I had come to expect from Maria McKee. There is no video for this song that I could find, but I couldn't not share it, because it's spectacular - right from the first guitar that predated "Laid" by James by several years. The song just builds and builds, and showcases McKee's vocal range throughout.
Literally. This song has been out for a WEEK. It was a midnight release on September 2nd, and I had listened to it no less than 30 times by 2am. I even tweeted about it.
I stayed up late to listen to the new @beatricepirate song like thirty times.
If you had asked me in February if the term "la chanson française" was going to be used more than once on this blog in 2021, I would have said you were crazy. And yet, here I am, copying and pasting that damn œ for like the fifth time this year. (I went back and looked. It's the seventh time, which might even beat my Charli XCX rate of posting).
But now I am going to tell you why this one is different and it has absolutely nothing to do with Béatrice Martin's pregnancy. You see, I started down this journey into francophone music near the end of February, when I really wanted to find an artist that sang in French who was also Canadian to feature in my little #MapleLeafMarch thing. And, I stumbled about this one accidentally - when I was researching another post by another artist that I'll gush over another day - and did a deeper dive.
What I found was an incredibly complex artist that had a foot in the modern world and another in a classic French music world. Her entire catalog was spectacular and unlike anything I had ever heard - a lot of piano, for sure, and a lot of words I did not understand. In fact, French had been a language that completely baffled me, despite my background in romance languages.
During this deep dive, some new music was released, literally all of which has been covered on this blog. It's all been exceptional.
Then came September 2nd, and a new song was released, and I was excited to hear it. What I heard, however.... it was far far far more than I expected. You see, in a life, there are songs you may hear that just make you stop and remember where you are. These are songs that you can hear over and over again, and never get sick of them. They are songs that change the way you look at music forever.
I've had that feeling a few times in my life, and I can tell you exactly where I was when I first heard each one of them. From the disco-tinged opening violin strains of this song, to the very last "tremble", this song had me. I urge you to listen to this song. You are going to forget it's entirely in French.
The video was recorded in Lachine, QC, Canada, at the famous lighthouse there, and no, none of those balloons went in the water. It also looks to me like it was done in one take, without edits, but I have no proof of that.
(Update: 9 September): Since I wrote this, literally today, her new album Impossible à aimer was announced, including this song, to be released October 15th.
12 year old me did not know this song was about female masturbation. I just knew that I loved the song. And yet this song was on the PMRC's "Filthiest 15" list of truly filthy, filthy songs. That's right. The "Parental Advisory" sticker on some albums is largely due to this song.
It was, despite that, a huge hit song. And why wouldn't it be? It's darned catchy. The video, which is probably part of the song's overall appeal, is considerably more wholesome than this filthy, filthy song.
Is it more obviously filthy in its acoustic version? Maybe. It's more obvious to me that I should have realized what the song was about at 12.
I seriously, SERIOUSLY debated whether or not to post this song. The 2nd verse, in a modern era, is really troubling. Indeed, the Canadian Broadcast Services Council has banned the song in an unedited form, because of that lyric. And I don't really disagree with that decision.
In context, I decided to do it. Here's why:
1) the narrator of the song is intended to be an ignorant man. The use of that one slur IS intentional, and not complementary to the narrator. Mark Knopfler intentionally wrote an ignorant character you are supposed to despise.
2) from a historical standpoint, coming four years after the advent of MTV, it was the first big hit song to acknowledge that channel's influence.
3) MTV still uses Sting's "I Want My MTV" that he sang for this song in their promotional materials.
4) I wanted to illustrate how far we have come as a society since 1985. That slur was just casually tossed about in the 1980s - and today, it's horrifying to hear.
Forgetting that lyric for a moment, the song itself is great, combining the 80s synth sound with some terrific guitar work. The song itself is a gem, the video iconic.
What happens when a couple of prog-rock veteran guitarists get together and make a straight-ahead rock album? Well, that's what Steve Howe of Yes and Steve Hackett of Genesis did when they got together and formed GTR.
The project was short-lived, but yielded one pretty good album. Also featuring Jonathan Mover from Marillion on drums and Max Bacon on vocals, it was quite the superproject. This was their debut single and went to #14 in 1986. The band fell apart when their studio sound - sans keyboards (because Steve Howe was sick of that sound from his time in Asia) - didn't work live.
But let's go back to this song. It's a standard 80's rock song - less prog, more straightahead - but that doesn't make it bad. It's a good song. Co-written by Hackett and Howe, and produced by another Yes/Asia alum, Geoff Downes, it's a song that sounds dated and yet still present.
