Vancouver singer-songwriter Jill Barber has basically built her career around constant reinvention, swaying fluidly between folk, rock, pop, and jazz since the mid-2000s, as a solo artist and occasionally alongside her brother Matthew. So it’s hardly surprisingly that her endeavors in French—which began when she translated her 2008 song “All My Dreams” into “Tous mes rêves” for the live stage, and included 2013’s covers album Chansons—have been just as successful. The vintage-sounding Entre nous, however, marks the first time she’s made nearly a full album of original French-language tunes. She actually wrote its title track with Montreal songwriter Maia Davies back when they were working on Barber's 2018 album Metaphora. “It was an amazing exercise,” Barber tells Apple Music, “because I discovered I could say things in French that I would never dream of saying in English.” Here she tells us more about the experience as she talks through all of Entre nous’ songs.
Entre nous
“It’s the very first original song I wrote in French, and it’s truly the starting point for the entire album, so it deserved to be the title track. It’s an intimate, sexy song about love between two people who have been together a long time. It’s a tribute to the intimacy that grows in a couple over a long period of time, a song they could quietly listen to together while sipping a cocktail.”
Chat domestique
“This is a perfect example of lyrics that I’d never be able to sing in English. ‘I’m a house cat, but under my fur, I’m a tigress.’ It’s fun and liberating to be able to sing about this dichotomy between domestic cat and tigress, which corresponds so well to who I am as a wife and mother, and the wild cat that lays dormant within me and sometimes awakens.”
Joue avec le feu
“Dangerous relationships, when you know there’s something risky, a little weird about someone, but passion nonetheless drives you towards them. You have to know how to gauge just how much heat you’re able to tolerate.”
Le monde est beau
“It’s a really lighthearted song that’s meant to bring a little hope into our lives, and that’s something we really need these days. What I wanted to say was simply that when there’s love, the world looks beautiful. It changes your perspective. You see the same things in a completely different light; you see beauty in everything around you.”
Les étés de Montréal (feat. Yann Perreau)
“It’s a tribute to a city I love, one that charmed me, so I wrote a love song for it. It’s based on certain things that happened to me, a few memorable evenings, summed up on a postcard. I wanted a duet between an Anglo and a Francophone, and then I felt like reversing the roles in the translation, with Yann also singing in a different language, English. In each version, one of us has to take on the more vulnerable role. I know Yann was quite nervous about singing in English. The result is a genuinely Canadian duo, one that highlights the two solitudes.”
Comme les fleurs
“It’s one of the two tracks that Maia and I worked on with Randy Bachman [The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive]. It was Maia who suggested it, and I thought it a bit strange collaborating with Mister Takin’ Care of Business, but of course he’s a great singer-songwriter. He knew we were inspired by '60s French pop, and he came up with eight different proposals, without getting involved in the lyrics. The song talks about how everything around us is just temporary; life, love, it’s all ephemeral, and we need to enjoy every passing moment.”
La pluie
“I wrote it during one of those typical rainy days in Vancouver, a dull day that perfectly complemented the gloomy mood I was in. In the song, I wonder when the rain will stop and when I’ll start feeling better. The track is all the more meaningful during these difficult times.”
Reflets
“This is the other composition by Randy Bachman. I thought it sounded a bit like baroque music, and that’s what inspired us to write the very evocative lyrics, like a short film where a woman is looking at herself in the mirror. First, it’s a young girl looking at her mother staring at her reflection, then it’s the girl who’s looking at herself but as a grown woman. And finally, she’s the mature woman who’s looking at her daughter. It’s a reflection on the way women see themselves.”
Suzanne
“It’s the album’s only track that isn’t an original, because, of course, it’s by Leonard Cohen. I’m a huge fan of his work, and he was also an Anglophone artist like me. When I came across this translation of his song ‘Suzanne’ on an old Françoise Hardy record, I found it so poetic. And I like the idea that the Anglophones who follow me will immediately recognize it, but also discover this amazing French version.”
Nos retrouvailles
“It’s a song about my relationship with my loved ones, my family, and about the fact that I often have to be far away from them in order to satisfy my other passion, music. It’s a celebration of that wonderful moment when we can finally touch one another after days or weeks of not being able to. Obviously, I’ve been thinking a bit less about that recently, seeing as we’ve been in lockdown together for weeks.”
Cœur de ma jeunesse
“It’s a conversation between my younger self and the person I am now. I turned 40 this year. It’s a sobering kind of milestone; you think about the future, your career, then you look back at the past and the choices you made, or could have made.”