It’s become a tradition: spring for me comes with a French soundtrack.
Today it’s Juliette Armanet and her À la folie.
A beautiful song — a great melody, beautifully sung, incredibly well put together!
Notice how Juliette emphasizes the endings of words. She marks them like punctuation at the end of sentences. It adds clarity, transparency, and creates the right rhythm for this song: a heartbeat, a dance, passion.
What’s interesting is this: the song is about losing control, yet the delivery is meticulous. It sounds like an attempt to hold oneself together through the music, to stay afloat. Like a spell. Like a ritual chant:
Fête… défaite… tête-à-tête…
Danse… cadence… chance…
Without those crisp endings, everything would fall apart — the words would blur together, losing their shape like hazy memories.
And the words themselves form striking contrasts:
- fête / défaite — celebration and defeat
- tête-à-tête — intimacy, closeness, but also enclosure
- danse / cadence / chance — everything spins and moves, like life or fate
French speech usually flows — soft transitions, fluid connections, as if everything melts into everything else. But here, it’s different: the endings cut through. The rhythm becomes broken, almost sharp — like breath caught at an emotional peak.
The stress on endings feels like a fixation of tension, like a point of no return.
A great example of how form serves content. In a song about mad love, where everything might fall apart at any moment, these precise endings bring ritual order.
Highly recommended listening!
