WHAT THESE SONGS MEAN TO ME...
BY MADELEINE RAMEAU
Bonsoir, mon amis! Madeleine here. First of all, thank you to everyone who has bought the album, it has done way better than I expected... it won't break me commercially to the mainstream, but it has apparently been "critically acclaimed", which is good, I think. Anyway, today is the day where I explain what I was trying to convey with these songs... each one of them (minus the reprise) has a deep and lengthy explanation, but I'll try to make it as concise as possible. Here we go.
At HomeI think that you can pretty much guess the meaning of the song just from the title... it is a tribute to my home city of Marseille and the sort of feeling that I get whenever I visit there again. However, it does go slightly deeper than that. It is also very much a homage to growing up, to realising your own mortality and... in many ways, just carrying on as much as you can with life despite all the shit that it will throw at you. The bittersweet moment of realising that you can never truly go back to your childhood... that, whatever happens to you, life will go on for other people. It's a bit of a pessimistic song, but I think it starts the album off well. The purpose of it is to set a theme for the rest of the album. I actually wrote this song not too long ago... only a few months, if that. I was, of course, visiting Marseille, and this wasn't too long after the Mind tour and I genuinely thought that it was make or break for me. If I didn't succeed now, I would never. This differs from the childhood simplicity that we all long for.
Rabbits FeetAutomatically, this seems like a happier song, but you are mistaken. This is one of the darkest on the whole album really, and I wrote this when I was in a really low place a couple of years back... just got out of a bad break up and I really did try with it, despite the fact that I was only 16. It was silly, stupid teenage angst, but I feel as if I got a pretty good song out of it, so it was worth it. The person that I broke up with was a guitarist, and he was the one who I learned guitar for... I had spent about 5 years just learning the guitar so that he would take notice of me, but, once I got with him, I realised he was a bit of a bastard. The title of the song is an ironic take on the deprivation of luck I was going through back then, even though I was just being... yeah, as I said, an adolescent. I wrote the music about half a year ago, when I was going through a slightly rockier phase. I was also influenced by the wall of sound and distortion effects that some artists were using on their folk music, sort of Lo-Fi stuff... this was my attempt to emulate that, really. You can never achieve greatness without following in the footsteps of others.
ParisThis was the first song that I ever recorded, back for my first EP. It was written when I was going through a massive creative spurt... basically, I had just moved to Paris and I started to get influenced by the local indie and folk scenes that were emerging in certain parts of the city. Whilst At Home was looking in the past to find solace, this very much represents the future and how, in reality, things aren't all that bad. It is relatively poppy and definitely catchy, which is the way I intended... I wanted this to be accessible and I wanted people to immediately feel a connection, regardless of language or lyrical content. The updated version for this album was loads of fun to record, seriously. We had to do it all in a live studio environment, all as one band, as opposed to just recording certain parts separately. By doing this, the song feels much more natural and genuinely joyous. Getting all those instruments, like accordions, into one little booth was hilarious. I don't want to spoil this song by giving too much away, so I'll leave it there.
Rule the NightThe rockiest song on the album by far and one of the my favourites. I was really into indie and baroque bands by this point, and I wanted to make an indie rock song. I had a lot of lyrics lying about and, as soon as I was losing hope and thinking that I'd have to write a completely fresh song, I stumbled across this gem that I thought I'd lost about a year ago. Attached to it was a CD, so I put it in and found an acoustic version of this (that'll pop up at some point, don't worry). Naturally, I wanted to make a new version, so I added some more instruments, made it electric and added the chorus in to let it breathe a little more. To be honest, the writing process of this is a little hazy. I think I was high at the time. Looking back, it was probably just about misbehaving and rebelling against conformity, and just... you know, attempting to make people accept it. The chorus, the only part I remember writing, is blatantly about pressure from people and how... well, I guess, you are now pressured into revealing your talents, whether you're ready for it or not. It's like all those shitty reality programmes, where kids are made to go on by their parents. The "feral child" bit is about the policy of said programmes to make a freak show out of the people on it, as if they're alien, or feral.
Le Plus Angoissantes de BonheurHehe, this is a very fun song... although it appears to basically be a song that was created through multiple hallucinogenic drugs, and in part it was, it does have some very deep hidden meaning to it. It is a scream for attention, a desire to be noticed and turning to pretension to achieve this. There is a hint of wasted talent as well... discarding your actual skills and gifts by just trying to be famous and get noticed. The character in this song, by the end of it, just turns to living a very dark life and (s)he develops an obsession with macabre and the darkness, just anything to detach themselves from the monotonous tedium of everyday life. They start to resent their being, but instead of resorting to desperate measures, they shrug their shoulders and delve deeper into insanity. Weird shit. Musically, most of it was made in a jam session that me and some of my friends had when we were blazed out of our minds. It was random polyrhythms and weird melodies, as you find in the song. When I listened to it the next day though, out of the 40 minutes we were recording, there was about 5 minutes of really usable, really cool sounding stuff, that proceeded to then turn into this song.
La LinotteA very different song to the last... possibly my favourite song on the album and definitely the best one. If I ever have a masterpiece, this will be it. It's very emotional, but I feel comfortable enough with those emotions, that I think I can explain it... it's basically about holiday romance and stuff. I know, sounds stupid, but... when I was young, like, 7-12 years old young, I used to go on a holiday every 6 months to Spain... it wasn't really that far away, but it always felt special to me. There was this kid, Raymond, who was the same age as me who also stayed around the same time as us, and we started a friendship, as did our parents. This resulted in us meeting constantly and developing crushes on each other. I won't say love, because you never know for sure when you're that young, but it certainly felt like it at the time. However, one day, I found out that him and his parents were moving to America and wouldn't be able to holiday over here anymore... I still thought that we could meet up and stuff, but it would have been impossible. I forgot about this until a couple of years ago, when his parents got in contact with me through the wonder of social media... apparently, Raymond had died as soon as they got to America from a car crash, of which they themselves were badly injured. I don't really wanna go much further than that, but it resulted in this song. Musically, it was a bitch to record, since it's so densely layered and there are so many little bitty parts that had to be exactly correct... all the symphonic elements as well are there, and they were REALLY hard to perfect. This song itself took about 3 weeks nonstop recording and practicing to get right, but everyone was so proud of the result.
Biting ThroughThe most "traditional" song on the album and probably the least lyrically relevant, since it repeats a single chorus. Yet again, rebellion is a major theme and, since that's what we French are known for, I decided to interplay some of the French Revolution into it, by name dropping Robespierre. Keep carrying on is the message of this song, and it sorta has meaning within the context of the album, keep on pushing forward and discover what delights lay ahead. We didn't need much production on this, it was done in a live environment and had been prepared for a long time. It would have sounded right if there were any orchestral pieces or synths, it would have just made it too weird and it would have made the song lose its soul.
Kissed by the WindI guess you could call this my "breakthrough" song. A nice, gentle, optimistic folk pop song. It isn't anything special musically, but it will definitely make you feel slightly happier and more at peace. It is in a weird place, I guess, because this album is hardly all about hope and happiness, but it still makes sense. It is a reminder that there is light at the end of every tunnel, no matter how dark. There wasn't any deeper emotional significance, I just finally wanted to write something nice and happy that wasn't too cheesy and I think I achieved my goal with this song. The guitar melody is amongst the best I have ever written I think, since it's technical, but still very hummable. This song works because it is different from all the others.
Elle a DitWhat's this, another optimistic song?! But yeah, this is very different, in both placement and context. It's lyrics are quite folky, more traditional than most on this album and musically, it is a complete departure from both Indie and Folk. It sorta flirts with pop, jazz and Chanson at certain points. It was fun to record as well, because of the variety of instruments and the masses of things we could do afterwards to help the song and to enhance the feeling that I wanted with it.I would release it as the next single if only it wasn't entirely in French. The lyrics for this are practically ancient... I've been writing this since I was, like, 14 or 15 onwards. I guess that comes through, it's quite emotionally immature and a bit happy go lucky. This song was also another one that was on the Paris EP, but it predates that by a while as well. I think I might go further with this musical style on my next album, we will see, I guess.
Sing Sing SingI think that this is musically the darkest and most developed song on the album... it has this feeling of incoming pain and desperation, as if something bad is bound to happen. It does eventually get happier and the listener ends on a good note with the reprise, but, for a moment, it looks like all hope is gone. The lyrics are arguably the best I've ever done. They were written quite recently, in another bout of homesickness, and me feeling as if I were stranded on my own in an alien city. I was scraping all remnants of my memory that I had left for this song. Once it was written, I immediately felt much better. This song is very bass heavy and this is for a reason. I tried the bassline on guitar and it just sounded weird... it needed to be darker and murkier, and using a bass was the only way I could achieve this. The symphonic elements were contributed again by the Prague Symphony Orchestra, and they are what the song will be remembered by, and rightfully so. After all the tension and atmosphere building of the previous songs, this is what finally crashes it down to Earth, this is when the listener finally realises what's happening around them. It will take people out of the stream of consciousness and into reality. It is the perfect way to round off the album, and signify the emotional impact it has had on me.
At Home (continued)See at home. It's basically the same. Of course though, this represents a full cycle and it is designed to make the listener feel as if they are on comfortable ground again and to calm them down after the last track.
Well, I hope that has been insightful! Please, there is never such thing as too many comments. Leave your opinions below on the album.
