Bénabar’s songs are really great for anyone learning French – very lyrical, story driven songs with a great variety of vocabulary and natural expressions, and on top of that they are clearly sung by a man who’s voice is not intensely annoying like so many other French singers of the genre. I suspect his songs are in no danger of being labelled particularly cool, but most of them are catchy and often amusing.

Unfortunately the album is not yet available to purchase from Amazon of iTunes in the UK or the USA so the widgets to the left are both from the French departments of those stores.

The album contains a roughly half and half mixture of English and French lyrics, including, incidentally, a cover of The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.

My favourite track on the album is probably “Ain’t off to the back.” but my first translation is of the first French track on the album, “Soulman“.

I will take this opportunity to plug my work-in-progress at FrenchVerbTest.com to which I will soon be adding a section related the vocabulary charts which are included with each song translation on GreatFrenchSongs.com.

In the run-up to the UK election I had wanted to keep things reasonably topical, and luckily this fits well (excuse the pun), the title summing up the attitude of some of our politicians’ spending plans for the future, and the song being about the quality of information we demand, and receive, from the media.

Puits Sans Fond, “Bottomless pit” is from the excellent album Compter Les Corps.

Living in London and being used to hearing and seeing a new plane every couple of minutes, it feels very bizarre to be plunged back into the nineteenth century.

In recognition of this, here is a translation of Le Ciel est Gris (The Sky is Grey) by Volo. This is from the 2006 album Blancs Manteaux à Volo, although I think his latest album (En Attendant, Sep 2009) is much better.

I should mention that the correlation between the song and current events begins and ends with the title!

Now, this song choice is not supposed to indicate in any way my political preference (not much), suffice to say that it feels quite pertinent.

Ok, so the comparisons break down on closer inspection, it feels a bit harsh to bring his mother into it, but we’ll find out on the first Thursday in May if this is broadly how the nation feels about our Great Leader Gordon Brown.

Il Faut Que Tu T’en Ailles (You really have to go) is the opening song on the 2005 album Inoxydable. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of Quebec’s Marie Mai – I’m not aware of any female artists in the UK producing this quality of pop rock.

The classic style of half singing and half talking in French songs is something that has never tickled me, but Renaud produces albums that are consistently full of great tunes and interesting lyrics.

Arrêter la clope is sung from a smoker to his wife.

Above all, I don’t want to die
Especially not from something so damn stupid
To leave you alone and have you tell me
That after thirty years of profound mourning
You might look at another guy

“La clope” is the argot slang for fag so the song is about quitting smoking. I quit myself in Jan 2009 but fell off the wagon a few weeks ago when I found myself smoking cigars in front of the Swiss Alps.

If you fancy quitting yourself, you might find the lyrics are quite inspirational.

I love translating Renaud’s songs, (see here, here and here), as my knowledge of French slang gets a boost each time – if I had the time I’d sit down and translate every song he’s ever recorded for this very reason.

The Amazon widget above left lets you preview the studio version, while the iTunes button links to a live version.

Buy this song on

Vulgaires Machins latest album, Requiem Pour Les Sourds was released on March 3rd. Compter Les Corps is one of my favourite rock albums and I’d been looking forward to the band’s next release for months. It was worth the wait, but it may be a while longer before it will overtake their previous offering in my list of top francophone albums.

I’m going to dive straight in and translate the first track on the album, Presque Complet “Almost Complete”.

To start the new year here is my list of the ten best French language albums of 2009.

Broadly speaking we have one hip hop, two rock, three ska, one reggae and three humorous, which are predominantly rock-based.

There were several albums that I was expecting to put on this list but discovered were in fact late 2008 releases. It all goes by far too quickly for me.

In the next post I’ll highlight some of the releases that we can look forward to over the next year. While 2009 has been a great year for ska, there is promise from bands such as Vulgaires Machins that we’ll have some top quality rock to get our ears around in 2010.

Like all their albums, this release contains some of the worst singing you are ever likely to hear outside of the X Factor but sometimes the inanity of a record such as Dans Mon Corps is exactly what the moment calls for.

Dan Mon Corps came out in October and sees the band from Quebec in just as ridiculous and joyful form as ever. The track Croquer des cous is one of my favourites but gives the game away that these guys, despite their attempts to pretend otherwise, are in fact pretty talented punk/rock songwriters and musicians.

I would have liked to have included Diam’s S.O.S. here but her incessant talking, worse, her incessant whispering between tracks drives me bonkers.

I also considered Diam’s close friend Sinik’s album Ballon D’or in its place. I had wanted to translate the song 4-4-2 from Ballon D’or shortly after the world cup draw a few days after the release of the album at the end of November.

L’ecrasement De Tête is more intersting and enjoyable than either Diam’s or Sinik’s latest releases which I why I have chosen it here.

Their music is also fairly humorous and lighthearted but less shameless than either that of Les Singes Savants or their Canadian counterparts, Les Trois Accords, despite having represented France in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007.

There are clearly strong influences from bands such as The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys (Black and Blue is almost obscenely Monkeyesque) and when you start listening to the key riff in Bouche B you will be forgiven for thinking you are listening to Queens of the Stone Age. At one point there is even a blatant, though probably unintentional, Pulp riff.

Although there are 15 tracks, over half of them are under three minutes and none of them are over four minutes. I listened to this album for the first time on my iPod while on the treadmill and it did a fine job of keeping me running. It’s rare that I outrun an album and have to “rewind”, but that’s what happened.

La Belle Étoile was their first release for five years and was a quite a different offering from the previous albums. This album would make my top ten albums of the decade. In any language.

Their latest release, A Tout Moment, released in October this year is contained within the Amazon widget to the left. I’ve just bought this album today and as I write this have not yet listened to it – this is today’s motivation to get to the gym. A treadmill full of Eiffel awaits me once I’ve published this post. Or should that be “an Eiffel of treadmill?”.

UPDATE: I’ve had my first listen to the album and there are a two or three tracks that sound great – in particular there is some blinding drumming and some truly dramatic sections of the film soundtrack kind. The clean guitar on Mort J’Appelle put me in mind of the acoustic sections that intersperse W.A.S.P.’s The Crimson Idol, an album which is one of my guilty pleasures and is currently coming nostalgically through my computer’s speakers. God, I’d forgotten how much I loved that damn album. When it finishes I am going to listen to Eiffel’s offering again and see if I can’t write a readable review.

The song I am going to translate here is A Tout Moment La Rue which you can listen to in its entirety online on their website where you can also find the lyrics.

We find another left-wing reference à la this song. Thanks to the community at the Word Reference Forums I now know that the “trois cent familles” is a reference to the concept that a small number of privileged and wealthy families are running the country.

We have a problem in the translation. Avoir pignon sur rue means to be well-established. In the lyric “ces trois cent familles qui sur la rue ont pignon à tout moment elle peut aussi dire non” the “elle” refers to “la rue” so we have to keep the word street in the translation of the expression. Which frankly isn’t possible so the translation is rather a hack. Ideas welcome.