Grace

Third contribution to his series on Girls Singing Wiz a French Accent, by Roger Grund

There are many ways to say goodbye in French. So it comes as no surprise that many ‘leaving songs’ feature in the French songbook, each taking a particular angle. In Gainsbourg’s Je suis venue te dire que je m’en vais the singer casually informs his lover of his decision to leave, ‘and your tears are not going to change a thing’. Jacques Brel on the other hand in Ne me quitte pas, begs his lover to stay, and, in a delirous case of amour fou, makes impossible promises to support his plea. Yet again, Pars, written by Jacques Higelin and released in 1978, takes an opposite stance, with the singer urging his (or her) lover to leave immediately and not come back: ‘Alors pars, et surtout ne te retourne pas’. In a David Lynch-ian way, the deceptively simple lyric of Pars hints towards a complex story that the listener only starts to uncover.
Grace Jones, the Jamaican-born model-turned-singer gave exposure to Higelin’s Pars to the wider world on her 1980 album Warm Leatherette (in the same way that Jo Lemaire opened a new audience to Serge Gainsbourg with her iconic version of Je suis venue...). Musically, we hear the Island Records studio band in its prime, with a central role for the fluid yet polygonal rhythms of Sly and Robbie. On Pars the fusion of chanson and slow reggae, previously attempted by the ubiquitous Gainsbourg, is a near-to-perfect. Grace Jones, who at the time of her disco version of Piaf’s La vie en rose was regarded as an opportunistic disco queen, approached Serious Artist status on the strengh of her outstanding version of Pars. And her French is good as it gets for a non-native French speaker…

Grace Jones - Pars
Jacques Higelin - Pars (merci Wouter)