LINER NOTES ON STACEY KENT'S RACONTE-MOI by Jake Lamar*
2 February 2010
"Making this record reminded me all over again why I became a musician," Stacey Kent tells me.
I have just fallen in love with the record, Raconte-moi, Stacey's eighth album in a luminous career. This time Stacey, an American, has produced a collection of twelve songs sung entirely in French. Ten of the songs are by French composers. As an American who has lived in France for 17 years and who knows the reverence for la chanson française, my first reaction to Raconte-moi was: Quelle audace!
For Stacey, who grew up in New Jersey and Colorado, the dominant feeling while making this record was not boldness but an "automatic innocence," a cultural naiveté that came from singing in her second language. Not that she was a complete stranger to la chanson française. Her previous record, the superb Breakfast on the Morning Tram, featured two works by one of the masters of the tradition: Serge Gainsbourg.
But a key inspiration for Raconte-moi came from the inimitable Henri Salvador. After meeting on the set of a French television show, the two exchanged albums. Stacey, enchanted by "Jardin d'hiver," Salvador's latter-day signature song, began including it in her concert répertoire. In her interpretation, "Jardin d'hiver" (composed by Benjamin Biolay and Keren Ann) is a song of seduction, an invitation to eternal pleasures. Stacey started searching for more French songs to sing.
The selection on Raconte-moi mixes beloved standards with songs composed especially for Stacey by younger talents. A dreamy sensuality flows through many of the songs, particularly "Au coin du monde" (another Biolay-Keren Ann work), "Mi Amor" by Claire Denamur and "Sait-on jamais?" composed by Camille d'Avril and Stacey's saxophonist, producer and husband, Jim Tomlinson. Stacey's sublime band and Tomlinson's arrangements create a soundscape that is luscious and haunting.
Two songs by the team of Emilie Satt, Jean-Karl Lucas and Bernie Beaupere, the album's title track and its first single "La Vénus du Mélo," highlight one of Stacey's most striking vocal qualities: a playful intimacy, a wit that is both mischievous and endearing.
There is something subtly different about Stacey Kent in French. Her insouciance is spicier. Along the whole range of emotions that Stacey's crystalline voice expresses, there seems to be a certain intensity that the French language brings out. The tender vulnerability of her voice in English (listen to her cover of Stevie Nicks's "Landslide" on Breakfast on the Morning Tram) becomes a transcendent cri de coeur in Stacey's rendering of Barbara's "Mal de Vivre" on Raconte-moi.
Yet Stacey never sounds overwrought. She manages the feat of being both understated and emotionally direct. Listen to her version of Michel Jonasz's (written with Pierre Grosz) "Les vacances au bord de la mer" and try not to get misty-eyed at her evocation of melancholy family life.
Stacey was introduced to the French language by her Russian-born paternal grandfather. As a young man, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, he spent several years in Paris, before joining the rest of his exiled family in the U.S.A. Nostalgic for his Parisian youth, Stacey's grandfather taught her French. He had her reciting poems by Baudelaire before she even understood all that she was saying. As Stacey grew older, she and her grandfather spoke entirely in French together. It was a linguistic bond that he shared exclusively with her, a tender complicity. It was her grandfather who first played Serge Gainsbourg for her.
Stacey went on to become a student of languages (Italian, German and Portuguese, in addition to French) and comparative literature before the passion for making music became a way of life. Academia's loss has become music's magnificent gain. Among Stacey's many honors is a décoration des Arts et Lettres, awarded in 2009. So one could say that Raconte-moi represents a new stage in the mutual affection between Stacey Kent and France.
Stacey’s love for both Brazilian music and the classics of the American songbook is present on Raconte-moi. But the album's effervescent opening track is the French version of Antonio Carlos Jobim's bossa nova gem, "Les eaux des mars," with lyrics by Georges Moustaki. And the French adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's "C'est le printemps" features lyrics (by Jean Sablon and Jean Geiringer) that are even more bittersweet than the American original's.
Rounding out the selection on Raconte-moi are two songs that seem to speak to each other across generations. Paul Misraki's "L'Étang," famously sung by Danielle Darrieux in the 1950s, is so unabashed in its celebration of nature and romance it can seem a bit, well, old-fashioned. But anyone tempted to find fault with that must give a good listening to the album's exquisite final track, "Désuets," by Pierre Dominique Burgaud and André Manoukian. The song reminds us that beauty, especially in a voice like Stacey's, never goes out of style.
I've listened to Raconte-moi countless times now and each time I have the same sensation Stacey Kent tells me she had while making the record. The whole experience is "fresher than fresh."
*Jake Lamar, author of Rendezvous Eighteenth, is a novelist and journalist. Born in the Bronx, New York, he has lived in Paris since 1993.
