SOUNDTRACK: LUCY DACUS-“Ma Vie en Rose” (2019).
Lucy Dacus has been on a roll lately. Her album Historian is fantastic. She has put on some amazing live shows (I’ll be seeing her again in March), she did some amazing work as 1/3 of boygenius and now she has made a delightful version of “Ma Vie en Rose.”
The original is swooning and slow, allowing for the words to linger and tickle every inch of the listener’s ear. But sometimes love isn’t slow and languorous. Sometime, it hits you hard and runs fast with your heart.
So Lucy has recorded a version with this tempo in mind. She says
I want someone to listen to this while running at top speed to the doorstep of the person they adore, ready to profess their deep, undying love.
Musically the song is pulsing beat and piano–electric guitar and bass and it is just relentlessly chipper.
She sings the song first in French and then in English in her gorgeous quiet(ish) voice in under 3 minutes–that’s a minute faster than the original which is only in French.
And she released it just in time for Valentine’s Day.
[READ: February 11, 2019] The City on the Other Side
The book begins on the other side of the veil that separates our world from the fairie realm. It is a very thin but very powerful veil and virtually no one can cross it.
This is a story of fairies and humans. And how our worlds impact one another. When we build buildings, the fairies feel the digging and when the fairies had a war, it caused earthquakes, The massive San Francisco earthquake of 1906? That was caused by a massive fairie war. That fairie war started when the Seelie (the creatures who bless brightness–birds, ferns, humans) and the Unseelie (who celebrate darkness-worms, rotting logs etc) couldn’t agree on a ruler. They are expected to rule the underworld in equal parts–six months at a time. But recently there had been trouble. The leader of the Unseelie didn’t like the way the Seelie seemed to be taking over (because humans were becoming so powerful) so he captured the Seelie leader’s daughter and waged war.
Back on earth we meet a young girl, Isabelle. She is the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat who wishes her to be perfect–clean, respectful, and quiet. In the summertime, she is shunted off to her father–an artist who is more interested in his work than his daughter. But at least she can relax and play and get dirty. It is while she is here that she sees a Seelie with a magical necklace. The Seelie is supposed to get that necklace to the kidnapped daughter of the Seelie leader. But he has been wounded. Since Isabelle is allowed to cross dimensions he pleads with her to help the Seelie.
While heading into the city with a helpful talking mushroom named Button, Isabelle’s necklace is stolen by…another human? This young boy is shocked to discover that she is a human. When he tells his story they agree to work together.
It turns out that the earthquake killed his parents and his discovered a rift between the worlds when the ground opened up. He was rescued by the now-missing Seelie daughter which granted him the power to cross the veil. But no one has seen the daughter for many years so he–who is not welcomed in Fairlieland and has nothing waiting for him in human land–has become a simple thief.
The thief knows his way around the fairie world and has made something of a name for himself. But that also means that Unseelie warriors are aware of what he does and where he goes.
How will these two humans find a princess in the fairie realm? And will they ever even want to go back home?
This story was a little to fast for my liking–everything seems to be very truncated. Maybe that’s because it’s a children’s book? And while I am glad that it wasn’t stretched into two books, it just felt like it took on a lot and resolved it all really fast.
I also didn’t love the artwork. I really didn’t like the fairie characters at all–they seemed hastily drawn and I didn’t really like the main characters all that much either. The whole book felt like it was done very quickly.
Having said that, it’s a good introduction for kids to know about the Seelie and fairie stories–there are so many they can explore later on. I did like how the final pages with Button the mushroom (my favorite character) were informative both about the story process and the history of San Francisco and the earthquake.