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Why Carla Bruni swapped Italian for English

Multilingual pop star Carla Bruni has spent most of her life speaking Italian and French – but English is the language she prefers to sing in.

Published: 5 October 2017 09:36 CEST

Why Carla Bruni swapped Italian for English

Carla Bruni performs in New York on June 13, 2017. Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP

In her native Italian, she explains, reading a simple menu sounds like poetry, but the words can be hard for non-natives to decipher.

French, her main professional language, is wonderful for writers but lacks tonality – “Rr! Rr! Rr! Rr! Rr! Rr!” she explains for emphasis, exaggerating the Gallic uvulars.

But English, in which the singer, model and former first lady of France recorded her latest album, is the language of rock'n'roll.

“It has a rhythm and it has a sort of tempo that Latin languages don't have,” Bruni told AFP.

“English is a natural singing language.”

French Touch, which comes out on Friday, consists entirely of covers, including Crazy by Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man, Miss You by The Rolling Stones and Enjoy Your Silence by Depeche Mode.

It is Bruni's second English album following 2006's No Promises, in which she adapted poetry. Bruni composes music on guitar but says she doesn't feel comfortable writing lyrics in English.

Bruni said she was not so much offering an alternative interpretation of The Stones or others as she was performing songs she loved.

“It has no logic and no reason,” she said of her album with a laugh. “All of these covers were made with a lot of fun – but also with a lot of modesty.”

Photo: Bertrand Langlois/AFP

Carla Bruni sits by her man, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Photo: Bertrand Langlois/AFP

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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