A LIMITED EDITION BOX SET
A co-production with Brooklyn’s Barbès Records
The box set has sold out.
This commemorative boxed set includes selections of musician and translator de Gaillande’s skillful English translations of Brassens’s legendary songs; Barbes’s CD, released earlier this year, of de Gaillande performing Brassens with his band; an exclusive, limited-run 7-inch record of two songs not on the CD; artwork by New York artist Hannah Cole. Numbered and signed by de Gaillande.
Georges Brassens is an icon in the world of French music, yet he is largely unknown in the States. Brassens, who performed from the nineteen-fifties into the late nineteen-seventies, was revered in France for his complex, witty, and shocking poetry. His songs, which weaved hilarious tales of love, sex, and everyday life while condemning the hypocrisies of society, contained rich poetry and explicit imagery. They were banned on the radio when he first appeared, but Brassens quickly became a best-selling star of the French musical tradition.
De Gaillande ... has faithfully translated Brassens’s lyrics into English, preserving both their raunchiness and their defiance.
The New Yorker
The person who taught me the most about ethics—more than any priest and for a long time more than any philosopher—was the singer Georges Brassens. Everyone knew he did not believe in God, yet his ethics, though admittedly not in conformity with those of the Vatican, bore the imprint of the Gospels and remained essentially faithful to them, conveying what philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau has described as an ethics 'with neither obligation nor punishment.' Perhaps the songs of Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie or the Beatles played a similar role in the English-speaking world.
André Comte-Sponville
Musician and translator Pierre de Gaillande was born in Paris, France, spent his formative years in California, and moved to New York City in 1994, where he played with cow-punk band Morning Glories and C. Gibbs Review. He formed Melomane as singer/guitarist/songwriter in 1999 and continues to tour internationally with that band, as well as with the band The Snow. He also composes music for film, television, and performance. For the last two years de Gaillande has been translating and recording the songs of iconic French singer Georges Brassens, work for which he was granted a residency at Ucross Foundation in 2009. The resulting album, Bad Reputation, was released by Barbes Records in 2010 in conjunction with this special edition box set from UDP.
Vinyl
Vinyl. 44 pp, 8.5 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: December 18 2010
Distribution: Direct Only