Last year, Bristol-based French folk singer Julie Abbé (pictured above with Amy Cox and Nick Rasle) released her debut album Numberless Dreams, a Featured Album of the Month on Folk Radio UK. In his review of the album, Thomas Blake concluded:
It is hard to believe that Numberless Dreams is Julie Abbé’s first album as a folk singer. Her singing is passionate but composed, her arrangements delicate but assured, and her musical palette runs from light to dark in a way that perfectly suits her material, particularly the strange and wild poems of Yeats whose words skirt the occult and brim with the deep knowledge of nature and human love. Like the sound of the wind in the reeds from which Yeats took inspiration, Abbé’s music is full of shifting natural beauty, whispers and sighs that could be sounds of sorrow or of love. Numberless Dreams is masterful in its delivery and intriguing in its opacity.
Julie returns today with a stunningly beautiful and deeply romantic new single, “Derrière Chez Nous”. Enriched with 3-part harmonies, Amy Cox’s warm cello and exquisite guitar solo by Nick Rasle (from the band Me and My Friends), Julie Abbé’s new take on this French folk classic demonstrates once again her ability to give a whole new lease of life and meaning to well-known traditional songs.
Julie’s evocative vocals are brought to the fore in a beautiful and moving arrangement. Derrière Chez Nous is an irresistible single that glows with that same exquisite craftsmanship we witnessed on her debut. Listen and read the story behind the song below.
“Behind our home there is a mountain, me and my lover often climb it…” With her characteristic warmth and sensitivity of interpretation, Julie Abbé skilfully transforms a dynamic “bourrée à 2 temps” into a soulful ballad by adding once-disappeared lyrics and changing the feel of the tune.
Julie recorded this song six years ago as a demo for a bal folk trio she used to have with Nick Rasle and Amy Cox, but it had never been released. Recorded and mixed at the time by Sid Goldsmith, it has just been mastered by Tim Thomas. Pastel painting by Aurore Puifferrat (www.aurore-pastel.com)
“Most people on the French folk scene will be familiar with the melody of this “bourrée à deux temps” which is often played in bals in quite a dynamic way. It was made famous by the band Maluzerne in the early 1980s. Their “Anthologie” album was one of my parents’ favourite vinyls and we used to dance to it at every family party we had. I grew up with their deeply beautiful version of this song which had only one verse and one chorus: Behind our home, there is a mountain, me and my lover often climb it. While climbing it, my God it’s difficult, descending it’s such a relief!
One night about ten years ago I was performing my ballad-y version of it at an open mic in Bristol and a French woman I had recently befriended fell in love with the song but regretted that there were such few lyrics. So she took it on herself to research it for me and a few weeks later came back with a whole series of verses I had no idea existed! There were two potential threads you could tease out of it. One said things like:
“Lovers are often unhappy… love is an illness that doctors can’t cure… no plants can bring any relief… my poor lover I am not allowed to love you… I’d rather die in a solitary place in the cleft of a rock at the top of the mountain”, etc. and I thought oh no I don’t want to turn this tune I love so much into another impossible-love-story-ending-in-a-terrible-tragedy kind of folk songs, I’ve already got enough in my repertoire!
But then in that same string of verses, I could see that another potential story could emerge too, which was much more nourishing and rejoicing. It said: “In my garden a nightingale sings every morning at dawn: to make love, one needs to know how to do it: talk very little and stroke a lot… Behind our place there is a fountain all surrounded by love laurels. Let’s go there my lovely woman whom I love, we will take there the sweetest of pleasures.”
I thought: yes, that’s much better, I’ll go with that; that sounds much more aligned with this joyful and deeply romantic melody I’m so fond of.
Since then, I’ve tried researching the song myself and found that there were at least two or three traditional French songs starting with this familiar first verse and chorus, with different tunes and lyrics and from various origins, one from the Pyrenean region of Bearn and another from the Ain region (in the French Alps just west of Geneva). So it’s possible that the lyrics my friend found were originally from another tune and that somehow my version has amalgamated several songs into one.”
Lyrics (trad. / arr. Julie Abbé)
French
Derrière chez nous
Il y a une montagne
Moi et mon amant
La montons bien souvent
En la montant mon dieu qu’il y a de peine
En descendant quel soulagement
Dans mon jardin
Le Rossignol chante
Chaque matin
À la pointe du jour:
« Pour faire l’amour
Il faut savoir le faire :
Très peu parler
Et beaucoup caresser »
Derrière chez nous
Il y a une fontaine
Toute entourée
De beaux lauriers d’amour
Allons y donc ma charmante que j’aime
Nous y prendrons les plaisirs les plus doux
English
Behind our home
There is a mountain
Me and my lover
Often climb it
While climbing it, my God it’s difficult,
Descending it’s such a relief!
In my garden
A nightingale sings
Every morning
At dawn:
“To make love,
One needs to know how to do it:
Talk very little
and stroke a lot.”
Behind our place
There is a fountain
All surrounded
By love laurels.
Let’s go there my lovely woman whom I love
We will take there the sweetest of pleasures.
Derrière Chez Nous is available on streaming services and is also available via Bandcamp where we encourage you to discover her other music: https://julieabbe.bandcamp.com/
Follow Julie on Instagram and Facebook @julieabbemusic
Join her mailing list: www.julieabbe.com