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MUSIC

Edward Snowden releases song with French legend

Fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who in 2013 revealed widespread US foreign surveillance, has released a song with French electronic artist Jean-Michel Jarre, the Columbia record company announced on Friday.

Published: 16 April 2016 13:26 CEST
Edward Snowden releases song with French legend
Edward Snowden, who in 2013 revealed widespread US foreign surveillance, has released a song with French electronic artist Jean-Michel Jarre. Photo: Frederick Florin/AFP

The track, titled “Exit”, features Snowden discussing digital surveillance to the backdrop of a lively electronic soundscape created by Jarre.

The song is available to stream online and will appear on Jarre's forthcoming album “Electronica Vol. 2: The Heart of Noise” which will be released on May 6th.

The pair were brought together by Britain's Guardian newspaper after Jarre gave an interview and asked to be put in touch with the former National Security Agency contractor, according to the title.

“Edward is an absolute hero of our times. When I first read about him, it made me think of my mother,” Jarre told the Guardian.

“She joined the French resistance in 1941, when people in France still thought they were just troublemakers, and she always told me that when society is generating things you can’t stand, you have to stand up against it.”

After being put in touch, Jarre, 67, travelled to Moscow to meet Snowden, 32, who lives in Russia in exile, and record the samples that feature on the track.

Other guest contributors on the album will include Gary Numan and the Pet Shop Boys.

In 2013 Edward Snowden revealed to the Guardian the existence of a secret US court order forcing US telephone company Verizon to provide the NSA with daily information on its customers' calls over a four-month period.

The Washington Post and The Guardian later reported that the NSA and FBI had access to the servers of major Internet companies including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and Facebook to monitor the web traffic of people outside the United States.

US authorities subsequently charged Snowden with espionage and the theft of state secrets.

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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