Jacques Brel et compagnie

February 13, 2008 8:31 PM

YouTube user lightning49 has 160 of videos of French singers which she has subtitled with her translations. Her biggest collection is of Jacques Brel videos but there are also songs performed by George Brassens, Charles Aznavour, Edith Piaf as well as a smattering of other stuff. To start you off with a few songs here are three of my favorite songs by Brel, Je suis un soir d'éte, Le moribond and La valse à mille temp along with Charles Aznavour's La boheme, Edith Piaf's Milord and Georges Brassens' Les passantes.
posted by Kattullus (13 comments total)

The guy singing with Brassens is Maxime Le Forestier, a French folk superstar of the the 70's. He's covered many songs by Brassens, here he's playing Le père Noël et la petite fille. Le Forestier also wrote and sang San Francisco which, in my opinion, is the best song about 60's San Francisco there is. Here's a recent live version of the song and Le Forestier performing the song with Nana Mouskouri.
posted by Kattullus at 8:39 PM on February 13, 2008

Great stuff. Thank you for this.
posted by vacapinta at 9:09 PM on February 13, 2008

excellent linkage
posted by growabrain at 9:30 PM on February 13, 2008

vraiment top!!
posted by pwedza at 9:44 PM on February 13, 2008

Ah, Monsier Brel for valentines day. Ne me quitte pas...
posted by phrontist at 11:41 PM on February 13, 2008

My kinda youtube post! Hypercool, thank you.
posted by carsonb at 12:08 AM on February 14, 2008

next
posted by johnny novak at 2:01 AM on February 14, 2008

awesome!

La valse à mille temp goes on first.

incidentally, are you familiar with Micheline van Hautem's interpretations of Brel? i've seen her a couple of times live & both rate amongst the best. concerts. ever.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:12 AM on February 14, 2008

I think we broke their account.
posted by chihiro at 6:42 AM on February 14, 2008

Oh crap. That sucks. I hadn't watched all the videos yet. I hope lightning49 doesn't run into any trouble because of this.

And I'm not familiar with van Hautem, UbuRoivas, but she sounds intruiging... I'll have to keep my eyes out for her.
posted by Kattullus at 7:03 AM on February 14, 2008

Uh oh. "Account Suspended". We broke it.
posted by cazoo at 9:45 AM on February 14, 2008

lightning49 est mort.

.
posted by DenOfSizer at 8:09 PM on February 14, 2008

Too bad about that account. I hope I will never cease being amazed by the fact that I can just, any time I want to, go listen to great songs in Albanian, Armenian, Belarusian, Bulgarian (x2), Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, German, Hungarian (x2 x3), Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish (x2), Romanian, Russian (x2), Slovenian, Turkish, Ukrainian...

I used to spend so much time scouring libraries and used book stores (whenever I'd be able to visit a big enough city to do so) for any little snip of some of these languages...
posted by Wolfdog at 8:10 AM on February 15, 2008 [1 favorite]