J’ai Deux Amours, Mon Pays et Paris: The Music of Madeleine Peyroux

By Lucinda Blumenfeld I left Paris for New York in early November. Nearly a year after the fact, I am still longing to be there, remembering and revisiting. Music helps, somehow.  During my fist visit to Paris as a child, it was Edith Piaf playing always on the stereo as we ate our pain au chocolat in mornings and looked over the sunny Place des Vosges.  On my second, longer visit ten years later, in the dark mustard glow of my apartment on the rue Galande, it was Carla LeBruni that I hummed along to: “Tout le monde a cherché quelque chose un jour, mais tout le monde ne l’a pas trouvé” [Every one has sought something, not everyone had found it.] The lyrics felt sadly appropriate: I had just ended a serious relationship, and the American friends I spent the school year with had gone. I was still in Paris, searching for something I hadn’t yet found.

My favorite memory of music in Paris  comes from that very month of aimless wandering and tentative obligation. Crossing the rue Mouffetard, I suddenly heard the sound of a banjo, then a base, then a throaty female voice, all of which seemed so, well, un-Parisian. If anything, Colorado. Good old-fashioned bluegrass. At that moment, I experienced a kind of dual recognition, because approaching from my left was the ex-boyfriend I had spent the last few weeks trying to forget. And as I looked away from him toward the music, taking a few moments to prepare myself, I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the female voice belonged to a very good New York friend from long ago. The coincidence appears more preposterous than it was: at 19, anyone who was cool and culturally in the know was spending the summer in Paris. Listening to that little piece of America alongside someone I loved, watching the friend I had known, grown up and gorgeous, her voice so strong and sultry that she had every passerby stopped in his tracks, all this, amongst the colors of ripe fruit and the wafting smell of freshly baked bread -- it was nothing short of glorious.

Jenny and her band, The Crooners, have also returned to Manhattan; they now attract even larger crowds at local bars, or on warm afternoons in Union Square.  And I have found a new voice, one whose “smoke-and-whiskey” tunes sound very much like Jenny’s: one who, also like Jenny, began her musical career on the streets of Paris.  Her name is Madeleine Peyroux – a strangely French name for an American – and her album Careless Love has been indispensable to me as I lumber through a spring in Manhattan, knowing full well what it could be like in Paris.  “Manhattan est belle, mais à quoi bon le nier? Ce qui m’ensorcelle, c’est Paris, c’est Paris tout entier,” [Manhattan’s beautiful, why deny it? It’s Paris that enchants me, It’s Paris in entirety] she croons, to an old favorite by Josephine Baker, “J’ai Deux Amours, Mon Pays et Paris.” It is her only song in French, which she sings with the accent of a native. Most of her music, as implied by the title of the album, is comprised of ballads taken from North American artists, among them Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. The effect of their timeless, crafted lyrics rendered by a voice so soulful and capacious is often heart wrenching. Dance Me to the End of Love, the song for which she is best known, speaks directly to the lover who, foreseeing the finish of his affair, prefers to prolong the illusion of romance until it can be prolonged no more. How very French to be so indulgent, so romantic. Practicality, after all, is an American friend; to France it is forever foe.

Mostly, Peyroux’s music is light and melodic. When my boyfriend misbehaves, I tease him, singing “If you think that time can change your ways, don’t wait to long.”  If he’s particularly sweet, I choose her rendition of Dylan, “You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m doing, staying far behind without you, you’re gonna make me wonder what I’m saying, gonna make me give myself a good talking to.”