My wife and I have been watching the first season of Lost (yes, we’re slow) and one of the episodes featured a classic French song, La Mer by Charles Trenet and after that I just had to search Youtube for the full version of it. In fact, we’d recently spent one evening searching for classic French songs after learning of the surprise win by Marion Cotillard of the Best Actress award for her role in La Vie en Rose, so I thought it would be nice to write a post of some of the songs we found.

When studying the French language at the Centre de Linguistic Appliquée in Besançon, one of the exercises we were given was to transcribe the lyrics of French songs, beginning with nursery rhymes and moving on to classic songs and more modern pop music, which was how I learned about many of these songs. I’d actually guess that most English speakers in Malaysia would actually have heard of them in one form or another, only most won’t know their titles and singers, so here they are.

This is of course La Vie en Rose by Édith Piaf, one of most famous French songs ever, and is probably even more symbolic of France than the French national anthem. The producers of the Bioshock used many music pieces from this period in the game, including the above mentioned La Mer. Ken Levine mentioned in an interview that they tried particularly hard to get the rights to La Vie en Rose but didn’t succeed.

This is Non, je ne regrette rien, also performed by Édith Piaf. She wasn’t the first singer to sing it but she was definitely the one who made it famous. Both of these Piaf songs were used in the transcribing exercise and I can tell you that it wasn’t easy. English speakers like to mock the extreme rolling of the French “r” and this song is a great example of that in action.

Next is Comme d’habitude by Claude François. The cool thing about this song is that I can guarantee that all English speakers have heard of it before, only they know it as My Way by Frank Sinatra. Comme d’habitude was the original though since it was written by Claude François and Jacques Revaux in 1967 and adapted for Frank Sinatra by Paul Anka with completely unrelated English lyrics in 1969.

Finally, here’s the actual French national anthem La Marseillaise. This song isn’t so much sung as bellowed so I freely admit that I find it impossible to tell what the lyrics are. The lyrics are worth reading though because even for a war song, it’s incredibly brutal and bloody. That’s it and I hope you enjoyed my selection of songs!