Coeur de Pirate: Béatrice Martin and the Big Apple

Guest post time! Here, regular guest contributor to Filles Sourires, Mark Sullivan suggests that Canada’s greatest 21st-century creator of popular music, Béatrice Martin (Coeur de Pirate) could come to replace Edith Piaf as the Francophone singer most associated with New York.

Lets start with the premise that Edith Piaf is probably the most famous Francophone singer to be associated with the city. It's true that the iconic Françoise Hardy also visited New York, although her quiet elegance and reticent character did not fit with popular American culture of the time. Piaf's links with the Big Apple (a city that she adored) were ultimately celebrated last September, some 50 years after her death, by a concert at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway, which was featured at the time by Filles Sourires here.

More than half a century on, Béatrice Martin looks the most likely Francophone singer-songwriter to be drawn to New York and to capture its audiences’ hearts. During the "Blonde" tour that took her to four US cities in 2012; her disarming introduction of herself at New York’s Highline Ballroom on 27 January 2012 shows an open, outgoing style that matches the city’s tone and one which Françoise could never have adopted... Having established that the audience was half English-speaking, half-Francophone, she says, "I guess I’ll do a bilingual concert then.... For those of you who don’t know me I’m Coeur de Pirate, or Corda Pyrit...”

Béatrice's skill in talking in both French and English, so that everyone felt included can be best demonstrated as she introduces, below, "Comme des enfants"... "If you don’t speak French, you can mumble along to the song..."

(Ed - I can confirm that at her Los Angeles show she similarly won the audience over in an instant as she apologised for her jokes being in English, while the songs would be - désolé - in French. It's a trick that Carla Bruni also pulled off to devastating effect in LA earlier this year).

Below is the clip where Coeur de Pirate stakes her claim to follow Piaf into the hearts of the New York audience; her happy, sunny version of “Mon manège à moi” at the Beacon Theatre (you can see more of the concert here).

However, it’s probably the video below that perhaps illustrates how seamlessly Coeur de Pirate could integrate into the average New Yorker’s conscious. Her cover of Phoenix’s “Lasso,” set to to a slide show and video montage of the Big Apple perfectly captures the spirit of both the city and artist...

After all, should she ever tire of Montréal, New York is only 400 miles away...

And if that wasn't enough, we have Béatrice's next album, expected to be performed mainly in English, to look forward to next year...