"My Favorite French Actress"

“My Favorite French Actress” - written by John P. Adams © 2006 John P. Adams

Just prior to finally getting my first teaching license, I was working as a paraeducator and long-term sub at a high school. There was a teacher there named John with whom I eventually became friends, mostly around the common ground of music. He was (is) a guitarist, singer, and songwriter. In 2006 (if the internet is to be believed), he convinced me to join him in the RPM Challenge. RPM stands for Record Production Month, and the Challenge was to write and record a record (minimum 10 songs or at least 35 minutes) explicitly in the 28 days of February. The result was an eponymous album by our two-person band, Those Charming Deviationists (an obscure Rolling Stones reference). We later did an EP, In Love, including his song “My Favorite French Actress.” A live version of TCD included my brother Will on second guitar.

Given the content of the original, my immediate thought was to sing the song in French, despite not being even remotely fluent. This led to the master inspiration for the track: my wife and I were listening to Grace Jones’s version of Édith Piaf’s signature song, “La Vie en rose,” sung in French (c'est vrai) with a Bossa Nova beat. As it happened, I own a Lowery L2 Wandering Genie organ with a built-in analog drum box with… a Bossa Nova preset. As it happens, this model was used by the band Neutral Milk Hotel, one of John’s playlist populators. I wanted to avoid the guitar rock vibe of the original, so I strummed away on my Cthukulele, a finish-your-own uke my son had given me as a gift that I promptly painted as an Eldritch  horror. The French singing and mumbled asides were accomplished by feeding each line into a popular online translation app and then singing the result. S'il te plaît, pardonne-moi.