Françoise Hardy by Françoise Hardy

Released by Vogue Records November, 1962 
(released in the US in 1966 under the title The "Yeh-Yeh" Girl From Paris!)

Artist: Françoise Hardy
Genre: French Pop, Yé-yé

It’s awesome to think that the opportunities to hear music are so much greater with the Internet.  When I was born in 1991 it was much harder to get music (and not just because I was a baby).  Not at your big box store, try the record store.  If it’s not there then…you could try a yard sale, or maybe contact the record label if you happened to know it.  If you wanted to hear something from an independent label or a label without a US distributer you were going to be paying a ton if you we even able to find it.  Now if you want to hear a song now your only limit is your bandwidth, and even eBay, Amazon and similar sites have any album you would want in physical form.  All the music is there for you to find.  

I have heard some people lament that the lost of the scarcity has cheapened the experience.  I’m not here to argue that point because people get different things out of music.  If you need to be one of the 700 people to have an original Shellac release then you can still go after it.  I’m just happy that I have the music.  

This brings me to the artist I cover today.  Françoise Madeleine Hardy is a French musician, actress and French pop icon.  She has release at least 32 albums since her début in 1961 (including an album as recent as 2012).  She has fans in many well known musicians, most notably Bob Dylan who mentioned her in his poem "Some other kinds of songs" which appears in the liner notes of his album “Another Side of Bob Dylan.”  Despite all this I don’t think I’ve ever heard about her other then 2 occasions in my life.  

The first was a comedy article that jokingly named her the first grunge artist.  After I read the article I looked her up, and have been a fan ever since.  The second time was during the Wes Anderson film “Moonrise Kingdom” which not only uses a single from this album, but also uses the album itself in the plot of the film.

I have never heard anyone talk about her music or ever seen a physical copy of any of her music in the years since I first heard this record.  Most people I have showed this music to have either met it with indifference or flat out told me they don’t want to listen to a song they can’t understand the words to.  I don’t speak French, but the songs are really well crafted and the sound so infectious that, that has never stopped me from enjoying it.  The English-speaking world, especially America has always been pretty lukewarm to non-English music, and without the Internet there is a good chance I would have never heard this phenomenal album.  Luckily I don’t live in that world!