The much anticipated debut album from Seattle adopted Swiss Girl – Martine. Catchy melodies, fresh pop/rock heartfelt songs, served with assertive guitar riffs and mellifluous bilingual vocals.
Little perfections
You know what they say, it depends on how you see your glass. First and foremost, mine is a wheat beer one with extra lemon and it is half full. Well, most of the time. I try really hard to see it half full. And this is what Little Perfections is all about: the awareness and the grain of salt necessary to a blissful existence. I’m very passionate about that, I read a lot about the science of happiness and could talk about it for hours: did you know that your brain will automatically store a negative emotion over a positive one? Happiness really requires conscious effort.
Swiss girl
Aaaah! The title song! You could think I am a little self-absorbed, but what the heck! It really came about because I had to explain where I would come from soooo many times, and the hows and the whys…. I love Yakup’s rock and bold arrangement, which makes me sound like “here I am, get out of my sun kind of girl”. Even though the start was easy, it was hard to finish the song. Ok, I’m a Swiss girl in Seattle, now what? Precisely; now what?! I’ve been missing my peeps sooo much for sooo many years. The difficulty of finalizing this song made me realize how immature and ungrateful I was to complain about my situation. It really helped me get closure on how to live my life here for what it is now and not dwelling on what I don’t have or where I’m not. See, again, I needed to make a conscious decision to be my happy self anywhere.
Deep breath of rhythm
First song I ever wrote, first song I ever sang a capela to a group of friends. Yakup and I barely changed the form and I added some lyrics. It is a dark song, very much like the thoughts I had as the teenager I was when I wrote it. I was listening to Springsteen, Tracy Chapman a lot at the time and you can definitely hear their influence in the whole revolt/survival theme and the folky melodic phrases. At 18, my girl was running away from a bad lover. At almost 40, I write about her running from an incestuous father and a whole accomplice community. I was working on it while the pedophile scandal of the Catholic Church was uncovered. I actually wanted to talk about the hypocrisy of the church and how innocence is sacrificed in the name of religion. Anyway, I was advised against it. I kept it mild, so to speak... Maybe someday, I will dare making a proper socio political engaged song.
J’aurais pu
I LOVE this song! Though I have to confess, when Yakup brought me the arrangement, I almost cried. It was supposed to be an acoustic jazzy reggae kind of song, with an acoustic bass and percussions and here it is, with distortion on the drums and super pop. And he said “wait and listen, wait and listen again. Trust me, your song is a pop song!” And he was right: I could not hear it otherwise. The guy is goooood, he did a killer job on this one!
I wrote it while living in Montréal, hence the French. It means I could have. I could have done this, should be doing that. It’s about the fear of connecting to ourselves and others, the difficulty of embracing what we are, where we’re at and how we numb and distract ourselves in so many treacherous ways from the very core of our inspiration and creativity: stillness and silence.
“I should have insisted and resisted the urge of escaping my own self, the vertigo that gripped me at the edge of my emptiness”. That’s the idea. I could translate it for you if you want. Do you?
J’aime
“I love”, meaning I’m in love and life is good. This song was part of an assignment for a course that I took back in Switzerland. At the time I was struggling with depression, unemployed, broke and not knowing what the hell I was gonna do with myself. So I took this class in music management. Why not?
Here I am, learning about show biz and not having anything to sell but good intentions. And here was the catch: at the end of the class, I had to perform my own music, live, in a pretty big venue, come to think of it. Ah-Ha! Had I known that, ‘cause I did not know when I signed up, mind you!…. So I find myself sleeping all day, waking up at dusk, feeding exclusively in bed and on spring rolls saturated with soy sauce and writing a happy go lucky song, with absolutely no idea how on earth, I was going to perform it. It was a success! The bloke played a few chords on the guitar, while I was belting my song out. Yakup heard the potential in it and made me sing it faster. In the end, he tricked me in making me record it way faster that I thought, the little bastard! And it works!
Life has its ways, sometimes, to show us we don’t need to always be in control.
The Peacocks
I discovered the Peacocks while studying at Cornish and always wanted to record it someday. It’s a tune from pianist Jimmy Rowles, which was first recorded in 1975 as an instrumental piece with Stan Getz and Rowles sharing the lead of an intimate duet. In 1993, British lyricist and Jazz singer Norma Winstone wrote the lyrics for the Peacocks - A Timeless Place for her album Well Kept Secret, recordedwith Jimmy Rowles as well. I truly revere her words about the ache of disillusion and loss. For a singer, this song is absolutely grandiose to perform and yet so hard. Its melancholy is as poignant and complex as the dissonant melodic lines weaving through the chords. I am very proud of our daring arrangement and grateful for Jon Hamar ‘s beautiful performance on acoustic bass.
What can I do
This song started as a final music theory class assignment at Cornish. It was the very first time I had to write chords with a melody and perform it. I remember being challenged by it. What still blows my mind is how I went from not knowing anything about chord progression or being an instrumentalist to being able to fiddle with the piano and write a complete song. Thank you teachers! Just need to learn how to use Pro Tools and arrange now! Anyway, this song talks about how we give our feel good power away and the choice we have to take it back. It was originally much more dramatic, but I eventually grew out of my misery and shook it out with a light bossa feel.
Fire
A tribute to Bruce Springsteen. This is what it is, plain and simple. Everybody knows: I love his music and I love the man. I would change myself into a fly to watch him work up close. You could think that like any other infatuated teenage fan, I was simply identifying with stories like Growing up, Thunder Road, The River or Born to Run. Of course I was. He was singing about me, better yet, he was singing to me. His music still brings about an exuberant love of life and passion for social justice. But he also instilled in me a profound fascination for United States and the cracks in the American dream. At 18, I was ready to go. It did not happen, but I’m here now, and boy, what a blast!
Je pars
The break up song of the album. Yes. I know. It’s sad, but for the record I didn’t leave him and am still happily married. It’s just that I was reaaaally pissed, so I might as well have written a song, don’t you think? Sometimes I have a hard time not crying when I perform it. It’s silly, but I guess it’s a pretty damn good song.
Here, you have it, the how’s and the when’s of Swiss Girl, hope you enjoyed it!