Sunday, May 2, 2010

La Fille Damnee

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One of my new favourite artists is Cécile Corbel. Thanks to Ms Corbel, I think I am finally recovering from my hatred of the French language. Allow me to elaborate, living in the bilingual country of Canada, French is offered in school, and I was required to take it from grade 6 until the end of high school. I was not happy about this, and hence French has always been my enemy. Having been out of high school for some time now, I have had time to get over my dislike of the French language, just in time to enjoy the songs of Cécile.

Her instrument of choice is the harp, giving her songs a Celtic sound to them. She sings in both English and French. Her song “La Fille Damnee” is hauntingly beautiful. It is from her album, Songbook Vol 2. There is also a music video for the song, which can be found on YouTube (and I’ve posted it below). One of the things that irritated me about the comments for the video was that people kept asking for the lyrics and yet the lyrics were there in the comments section! This is why before you ask anything in a YouTube video check the video description and the comments section. Your question may have already have been answered. Such was the case in the music video for “La Fille Damnee”.

As for what the song is about, user PoirotAndCo () explained in the comments: “Its the story about a [man] who goes to a blacksmith to shoe his horse. As the blacksmith starts working, the horse starts speaking with the voice of the man's dead daughter Jeanne. She tells her father that she was damned because she met every night with a strange man in the moor. She [begs] her father to take "her body, her heart and her dress", to burn them and to throw the ashes into the wind...”

User BugBug81 () provided the French lyrics...