What passes for popular music today on the radio today is an embarrassment.
I am not speaking as some old curmudgeon wishing for the old days. On my car radio, I can tune into a station featuring hits from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, the music of my youth. It’s almost as bad. Compare today’s music to the songs popular before 1960, and we have descended into barbarism, or at least, into embarrassing juvenilia. It’s music aimed at sixteen year olds.
I wondered: Did anyone write music for adults anymore?
Then I encountered Marie-Christine Adam.
I am not speaking as some old curmudgeon wishing for the old days. On my car radio, I can tune into a station featuring hits from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, the music of my youth. It’s almost as bad. Compare today’s music to the songs popular before 1960, and we have descended into barbarism, or at least, into embarrassing juvenilia. It’s music aimed at sixteen year olds.
I wondered: Did anyone write music for adults anymore?
Then I encountered Marie-Christine Adam.
Marie-Christine stumbled across an online article I had written and wrote from France to tell me how much she had enjoyed it. I responded to her email, and soon we became regular correspondents. We exchanged some details of our lives; I learned, for instance, that Marie-Christine lives in a thousand-year-old French castle remodeled into apartments, that she has two children, that she had spent most of her adult life in Paris teaching English and French to adult students, including some European sports celebrities, that she cares for her elderly father, and that she designs and sells her own line of gift cards. I learned a little about French politics, and she was kind enough, at my request, to insert some bits of French into her emails so that I might attempt to revive my long-dormant acquaintance with that language.
I also discovered that Marie-Christine was a songwriter and singer.
When I expressed an interest in learning more about her music, she sent me a CD of her album, Pictures Of Time.
I must confess I wasn’t expecting much. Lots of people make albums, publish their own books, or call themselves poets or artists.
Which is why, when I popped Pictures Of Time into my Honda’s CD player, I was blown away.
There were several reasons her music moved me.
First, the songs are in English. I can dope out the general sense of an article in a French newspaper, but can’t follow spoken French, much less French songs. Her songs I could understand.
Then there is Marie-Christine’s voice. Here is a sixty-something woman who has the vocal chords of someone thirty years younger, a voice pure and clear as a mountain stream. Her English is impeccable, her style a blend of folk and jazz. She sings with strong emotional control, which adds truth to the words of the songs she has written.
Those words also bring pleasure in her music. Marie-Christine is a poet. Though she numbers among her musical icons such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Emilylou Harris, and Joan Baez, her “pictures of time” belong to her alone, a journal put to song, an autobiography of past emotions: love and loss, sorrow and hope.
Here, for example, are the opening lines of “The Dream Is Over:”
Nothing more in my heart
Than the sound of its bleeding
All my dreams fall apart
Never thought we could be leaving.
“The sound of its bleeding” is one of many verbal surprises that pop up in these songs.
In “Dying By The Ocean,” Marie-Christine tells us of a man at the time of his death:
And when the clouds turn to gold
At the time when waves recede
His yesterdays will have grown old
And his tomorrows he won’t read
For the book of his life is closed.
Finally, the woman who wrote these songs has seen much of life, loved with all her heart, and suffered her share of losses. Unlike so much of what passes for music these days, Pictures Of Time in its themes and presentation is for grown-ups. She sings that “my truth is my sorrow,” and the listener nods sympathetically. That sentiment grows stronger as we grow older.
Merci beaucoup, Marie-Christine.
If you would like to listen to Marie-Christine Adam or purchase this album, please click on this link: https://marie-christine.bandcamp.com/.
I also discovered that Marie-Christine was a songwriter and singer.
When I expressed an interest in learning more about her music, she sent me a CD of her album, Pictures Of Time.
I must confess I wasn’t expecting much. Lots of people make albums, publish their own books, or call themselves poets or artists.
Which is why, when I popped Pictures Of Time into my Honda’s CD player, I was blown away.
There were several reasons her music moved me.
First, the songs are in English. I can dope out the general sense of an article in a French newspaper, but can’t follow spoken French, much less French songs. Her songs I could understand.
Then there is Marie-Christine’s voice. Here is a sixty-something woman who has the vocal chords of someone thirty years younger, a voice pure and clear as a mountain stream. Her English is impeccable, her style a blend of folk and jazz. She sings with strong emotional control, which adds truth to the words of the songs she has written.
Those words also bring pleasure in her music. Marie-Christine is a poet. Though she numbers among her musical icons such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Emilylou Harris, and Joan Baez, her “pictures of time” belong to her alone, a journal put to song, an autobiography of past emotions: love and loss, sorrow and hope.
Here, for example, are the opening lines of “The Dream Is Over:”
Nothing more in my heart
Than the sound of its bleeding
All my dreams fall apart
Never thought we could be leaving.
“The sound of its bleeding” is one of many verbal surprises that pop up in these songs.
In “Dying By The Ocean,” Marie-Christine tells us of a man at the time of his death:
And when the clouds turn to gold
At the time when waves recede
His yesterdays will have grown old
And his tomorrows he won’t read
For the book of his life is closed.
Finally, the woman who wrote these songs has seen much of life, loved with all her heart, and suffered her share of losses. Unlike so much of what passes for music these days, Pictures Of Time in its themes and presentation is for grown-ups. She sings that “my truth is my sorrow,” and the listener nods sympathetically. That sentiment grows stronger as we grow older.
Merci beaucoup, Marie-Christine.
If you would like to listen to Marie-Christine Adam or purchase this album, please click on this link: https://marie-christine.bandcamp.com/.
RSS Feed