SONG OF THE DAY

“Non, je ne regrette rien” by Edith Piaf (sin­gle, 1960). Writ­ten by Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire.

MY TAKE

WARNING: This song can get stuck in your head, for reals, so play that video with cau­tion. It has got to be the “da-DA-da-DA” (see below, the “Inter­est­ing Facts” section).

I saw La vie en rose a month ago, and haven’t got­ten this song out of my head for even one day since. It’s the pre­mier clas­sic of clas­sic french songs, so you have to know it if you want to at all appear worldly or knowl­edge­able. I quoted it last week on face­book and was rather impressed with myself, if I do say so myself. I’d love to do a cover of it some­day; you know, when I’m record­ing my French album or some­thing. But no more talk of cov­ers: the orig­i­nal is so wor­thy of atten­tion, praise and com­ment. The orig­i­nal is so bril­liantly painful. I would have killed to see her per­form this live. I mean, it’s the story of her life, of her strug­gles, it’s a woman bru­tally bat­tling with ill­ness and addic­tion at the end of her star-streak of a life, stand­ing firm on the stage and telling the audi­ence “No, no, I have no regrets”. That’s some pow­er­ful stuff. Edith Piaf is the only per­former who will truly breathe that kind of life into the song, since it was spe­cially writ­ten for her brief return to the Olympia stage before ill­ness pre­sented her from per­form­ing for the remain­der of her life. It’s a swan song not unlike Bil­lie Holiday’s “I’m A Fool To Want You” from her final album Lady In Satin, only Bil­lie spent her whole life strug­gling with and through her rela­tion­ships with men. So, for her, those rela­tion­ships echo in her final mes­sage. But for Edith Piaf, the final mes­sage to the world isn’t just about men, or drugs, or alco­hol, or her daughter’s tragic death, or her street per­form­ing days, or her par­ents, or any sin­gle thing. The final mes­sage is about each and every thing that she’s done in the world dur­ing her short life. She regrets none of it, she pro­claims. It made her who she was at the end, both good and bad. It all brought the ill­ness, sure, but it also brought the fame, the love, the friend­ships. Good or bad, no regrets. What a sweet note to end on.

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- “Non, je ne regrette rien” (trans­la­tion: “No, I regret noth­ing”) is a French song com­posed by Charles Dumont, with lyrics by Michel Vau­caire.
– It was writ­ten in 1956, and is best known through its 1960 record­ing by Édith Piaf.
– Piaf ded­i­cated her record­ing of the song to the French For­eign Legion. At the time of the record­ing, France was engaged in a mil­i­tary con­flict, the Alger­ian War (1956–1962), and the 1st REP (1st For­eign Para­chute Reg­i­ment) — which backed a tem­po­rary putsch of 1961 by the French mil­i­tary against the civil­ian lead­er­ship of Alge­ria — adopted the song when their resis­tance was bro­ken. The lead­er­ship of the Reg­i­ment was arrested and tried but the non-commissioned offi­cers, cor­po­rals and Legion­naires were assigned to other For­eign Legion for­ma­tions. They left the bar­racks singing the song, which has now become part of the French For­eign Legion her­itage and is sung when they are on parade.
– The song has been recorded by at least a dozen other artists.
– It is used as the finale of the film La Vie En Rose, a biog­ra­phy of Piaf. The film closes with her debut­ing the song at The Olympia in Novem­ber, 1960.
– The song was played over the pub­lic address at the Stade de France, Paris, fol­low­ing the French Rugby Union team’s elim­i­na­tion from the 2007 Rugby World Cup semi-finals.
– It also accom­pa­nied Anna Bessonova and Ukrain­ian team of rhyth­mic gym­nas­tics at Gym­nas­tics Gala of Bei­jing Olympics games 2008.
– The song is fea­tured in many movies, includ­ing Bull Durham (1988) in which a char­ac­ter refers to Piaf as a “crazy Mex­i­can singer”; Doris Dörrie’s Ger­man film Keiner liebt mich(1994), titled Nobody Loves Me in Eng­lish; Babe: Pig in the City (1998); Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Dream­ers (2003); the Coen Broth­ers’ film Intol­er­a­ble Cru­elty; the 2005 film Mon­amour; the British ani­mated WWII film Valiant in which mem­bers of the French Resis­tance “play” it, 12 years before the song was writ­ten; mashed up as part of the song “Nique la police,” in the French film La Haine (1995). It is fea­tured exten­sively in Chris Nolan’s 2010 film Incep­tion, which stars Mar­ion Cotil­lard who por­trayed Piaf in La Vie En Rose.
– The song is fea­tured in many tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials, includ­ing an eBay com­mer­cial in which a woman drops her ring down the sink.
– The Ger­man band Ramm­stein bor­rows the lines “Oh non rien de rien, Oh non je ne regrette rien” for the song “Frühling in Paris” off their 2009 album “Liebe Ist Für Alle Da”.
– Britain’s Got Tal­ent con­tes­tant Janey Cut­ler sang the Eng­lish trans­la­tion this song for the first round audi­tion and the final in series 4.
– The rhymes of the words echo the rhythm of the melody fol­low­ing typ­i­cal French meter, where words almost always stress the final syl­la­ble, in spondaic (da-DA-da-DA) — the cadence imi­tated by com­poser Hans Zim­mer for a movie score based on the song – and anapes­tic (da-da-DA-da-da-DA) com­po­si­tions.
– A lit­eral trans­la­tion is unable to main­tain the inter­nal har­mony of lyric and tune, since Eng­lish words usu­ally stress an ear­lier syl­la­ble and are most often suited to iambic (DA-da-DA-da) and trochaic (DA-da-da-DA-da-da) meter.
– A vari­ety of Eng­lish lan­guage ver­sions have been recorded. Dis­cus­sion of their mer­its are ongo­ing.
– Elaine Paige recorded the song for her 1994 album, Piaf, which was released to coin­cide with her por­trayal of the lead char­ac­ter in the play of the same name.
– Singer Shirley Bassey cov­ered this song on the album Love Songs.
– Brazil­ian singer Cássia Eller opened her Acústico MTV album (2001) with a cover of this song. It would be her final album before her death, in the same year.

VIDEO OF THE DAY