The queen of French singer-songwriters is gone, but not forgotten...

Her long fight is over, finally over. Literally just after posting the last All Pearls, No Swine volume the news dropped that Françoise Hardy had died. Having already fought a cancer in the 2000s, she was fighting cancer anew since 2019, having been deprived of having any saliva after 45 rounds of radio therapy. She could not only not sing any more, but hardly breathe, and battled incessant nosebleeds. Things got so bad that she openly campaigned for medically assisted dying options in France and the possibility to end her own life due to her suffering. 

But that's not what we should remember about Françoise Hardy, that monstre sacré du chanson français. Even the first eulogies that came in of course had to mention her as an icon of "yé-yé", the French girl pop influenced by the British invasion bands and notably the Beatles. But Hardy was only "Yé-Yé" by association, mainly because she came up at the very same time as France Gall and Sheila and the other "Yé-Yé" girls, not to mention that the term itself was derogative and supposed to make fun of the English-language aping young girls and the pop confections their producers put on them. But that was never Françoise Hardy. Hardy was, first and foremost, a true singer-songwriter. Unlike the girls she was lumped in with, she always wrote her own lyrics and most often her music.

The other thing that comes to mind when thinking about Françoise Hardy is the enormous amount of melancholy that permeats her music. She once described the theme of her music as "the impossibility of love", and that idea - that love is ephemeral, not eternal - runs through her music like a through line. It also defines the songs on our One Buck Record of the day. I'm currently compiling a Françoise Hardy album that will go up in a day or two, so for today If You Listen will have to do to remember la grande Hardy.  

If You Listen was Hardy's fourth English-language album, though it wasn't called that anywhere at the time. In France it was self-titled, down under it was known as Let My Name Be Sorrow and in South Africa it was very unimaginatively, if correctly, titled 4th English Album. As was the custom of the time, in the late 1960s Hardy put out a number of songs and albums for international markets. Hardy also sang in German and had a number of hits in the land of Lederhosen and brought out an album in Italian. But she most often returned to English .While albums like En Anglais was a rather ramshackle mix of pop covers of recent hits, with none of the arrangements particularly great and reaching for the biggest mainstream audience possible, One-Nine-Seven Zero and If You Listen thankfully were not that. 

If You Listen is a different beast from her earlier international forays, much closer to Hardy's sensibilities and her signature melancholic sound. The song selection includes two songs by Buffy St. Marie and Beverly Martin each, as well as covers of Randy Newman ("I Think It's Gonna Rain Today") and Neil Young ("Till The Morning Comes"), but also more obscure folk music sources like Trees ("The Garden Of Jane Delawney") and Allen Taylor's at the time super-recent "Sometimes". There are also two songs - including the 'new' title song - by The State of Micky & Tommy, Tommy Brown and Micky Jones, who by this time had settled on arranging, producing and writing in France. Micky Jones would of course move on to bigger and better (?) things as the founder of Foreigner. Hardy herself even manages to sneak a single original, sung in French, into the line up.

Get ready for more Françoise Hardy soon, but in the meantime spend some fabulous moments of melancholy with her..let her name be sorrow indeed...