Marianne Dissard

I ought to preface this post with the disclaimer that I was one of the backers for the crowd-funded project that is Marianne Dissard's new album "Cibola Gold: Best Of 2008-2015" and to be honest I'm just a little bit nervous about writing this post. If Filles Sourires was still around - with it's definitive musical guide to all things Francophone - I suspect Guuz (a long time and vocal admirer of Marianne) would have insisted on penning an article that would have done this album justice. So no pressure then...

"Cibola Gold" - spanning Marianne's recording career to date (from her first 'official' album, 2008's "L'Entredeux", through to last year's "Cologne Vier Takes") - is so much more than a compilation album.

For Marianne - born in Tarbes, but steeped in Americana - this album is a testament - a memoir, if you will - to her twenty years of living, working and performing alongside friends and fellow artists - musicians, composers - in her adopted home of Tucson ("L'Entredeux", "L'Abandon", "The Cat, Not Me")  alongside her atmospheric one afternoon / one-take on-the-road "City" series (songs from both "Paris One Take" and "Cologne Vier Takes" are both featured here). Named in-part after one of the seven cities of gold of the Aztec that was believed by the Conquistadores to be located somewhere in the vast Sonoran desert, which covers some 100,000 square miles of Sonora, Baja California, California and Arizona, but  also serves the elusive and virtual treasure that Marianne brought back from her own quest in the American West.

But this album also owes much to Minneapolis-based  DJ / producer BK-One - a longtime friend and collaborator - who selected and sequenced the tracks (he also penned the touching liner notes that are worth buying the CD for alone) and which ensures that "Cibola Gold" is a true labour of love - a collaboration - between artist and fan...

The first thing that strikes you about this album - after you've picked up all the gold foil from off of the floor as you excitedly rip open all the packaging, devoured the aforementioned liner notes that are part essay, part homage and the lavish booklet, a photomontage - moments frozen in time - of Marianne's life in a south-eastern corner of Arizona - is that the songs don't follow any apparent chronological order. There are - according to my theory - several good reasons for this. Firstly, for an artist who songwriting defies any concept of time, any idea to order songs in chronological order is immediately rendered pointless. Secondly, Marianne, who it seems to me should be expected to do the unexpected, taking songs and albums in new and different directions - much as the wind whips across the desert landscape - making any semblance of an ordered track-listing a somewhat tortuous affair... And I haven't even mentioned the ability to revisit and recreate songs (I recommend checking out her album "Les Draps Sourds") or how she takes genres as seemingly diverse as Chanson, Americana, Cabaret, the rich orchestral hues that so defines Mexican folklórico and blends to craft a style as equally at home in the New World as Old... 

So of course having said that the track listing isn't in chronological order, the album's opening number is a version of "Les draps sourds" from "L'Entredeux." A play on words, "Les draps sourds" is - as Marianne quaintly describes it - a song about two people people fucking - perhaps ever so slightly intoxicated but most certainly deaf to the world around their bed; friends, neighbours, thunder, even the cat...  There's accordion, a hint of a jazz-guitar à la mode Django Reinhardt and Marianne's Gauloises-honed, honey-soothed chanteuse vocals - it's so quintessentially French...


But if "Les draps sourds" sounds as if it should have been  recorded in a studio in Paris, "The one and only" takes the listener musically and geographically back to Tucson (just as it would have Marianne - her bolt-hole from the nomadic life of a touring musician). There may be the same chanteuse's voice, but here it's infused with those wonderfully rich sounds of Americana; free-formed and echoing to the sounds of a soulful organ, blues guitars and a hint of brassy swing. Part homage to the Tucson of old ("...Old Tucson et villes fantômes, Courses à pied dans la rivière..." /"...Good Old Tucson and ghost towns, Barefoot races on the riverbed..."), the song rallies against the creeping gentrification and the resulting urban upheaval ("...Les grands espaces perdent une vis! Cuivre et condos, casinos..." / "...The open spaces have gone crazy! Copper and condos, casinos...")

This mix of Americana and the French language isn't as rare as it seems (after all, I fill this Blog with artists for whom the musical heritage of North America is part of their culture - folklorique - Laurence Hélie being as good an example as any) and artists such as Marianne and Axelle Red have also helped this Francophile Englishman learn to embrace the musical heritage of his adopted home...

So while the accordion - especially on the wheezing bars of "La Marseillaise" that brings "Election" to a close - might suggest the a song in the tradition of Chanson (the truth is that when set to music Marianne's stories are indeed Chansons) - the salon-piano, pop / rock sensibilities and a wailing guitar-fuelled middle-eight pull the song closer to her adopted world. However, the song's pulsating melodies are at odds with the song's melancholic tone as weary, at times angry lyrics convey the aftermath of a rupture  and which suggests there weren't any winners, only losers...

I'd argue that you'll struggle to find two more beautiful composed and yet ultimately heart-wrenching songs than "Cayenne" and "Les confettis" (spoiler alert: my two favourite Marianne Dissard songs). A metaphor for the painful burning sensation that the pepper leaves upon the lips, "Cayenne" is a song of betrayal and heartbreak. Her voice noticeably softened and wracked with a weary and fatalistic resignation - accompanied primarily by acoustic guitar and orchestral strings - Marianne imagines her lover being welcomed in the arms of another; her poetic imagery describing the desolate salt plains littered with the bleached white bones of men and animals glistening in the unforgiving desert sun ("...Sur les plaines de sel, les os des hommes, et ceux des bêtes luisent de même....") serving as the  analogy to a love that has long since died.

Both "Cayenne" and "Les confettis" were written during the break-up of Marianne's marriage to fellow musician NaÏm Amor and so like nearly all of my favourite songs these feel incredibly autobiographical and I usually end up with a slightly uncomfortable -if irrational - feeling of eavesdropping upon her personal thoughts. But gosh, "Les confettis" has it all; an electrified folk-rock melody and faultless vocals that are perfectly matched to the downbeat lyrics. Again Marianne paints such emotive pictures with her words as the songs builds to a crescendo; love lays scattered upon the floor, torn  and burnt, the extinguished embers of love...



Richly orchestral and layered with piano and strings alongside echoing and ominous brass, "Tortue" is a journey into a darkly nightmarish world.  Half-spoken, ferocious lyrics play like the voice-over to a monochrome film noir -  trapped on a runaway train as it crashes headlong through a wintery forest; cockroaches and rats scurry underfoot, all punctuated by violent sexual imagery - this tortoise shell, far from being her shield leaves Marianne trapped with her demons. "Tortue" is an immensely powerful song - one that fight as you might to turn away from, will leave you transfixed in its frenzied glare.

And sexual imagery is revisited by "Almas perversas" as Marianne travels south through the Sonoran desert as it fearlessly strides between The United States and Los Estados Unidos. Over percolating electric piano the netherworld of Mexican libros cómicos pornográficos slowly emerges from the shadows into the sickly hue of sodium street lighting. Bright brass punctuates the half-spoken verses, much as headlights pierce the gloom. On a street corner, dressed in their flamboyant traje de oro, a banda ranchera strikes up an eerie Mariachi-Ranchera waltz. This underbelly at the edges of society desensitises and dehumanises and Marianne doesn't hold back with her contempt.

After the previous two songs, "Trop exprès" lightens the mood with an R&B / funk grove and psychedelic keys which could have been lifted straight from Booker T & the M.G.'s, and which sounds as if it should have been recorded in Memphis rather than Tucson. I'm not sure Marianne's vocals have ever sounded so sultry, so assured; "...qu’importe que tu dises ou que tu taises, Moi, ça me fait encore la même chose..." / "...who cares if you speak or if you don’t, Me, I really wouldn’t care either way..." As the song throws in some smoky Gainsbourgy whispering you'd swear you've been transported back to les années soixante...

And a cursory listen would suggest that the album's lighter vein continues as "Pomme" launches with jaunty piano, a bouncy melody and ridiculously frothy chorus that all go hand-in-hand with an uplifting musical refrain. However, it's all a careful ruse to mask the underlying tension behind the lyrics. There's a structured, poetic quality to the song's verses and but the key is the way in which Marianne stretches out the words - as if the song's rhythm is purely incidental - and forces you to listen beyond the breezy pop.

The steady rhythm of the percussion also ensure there's a catchy 'bounce' to "La peau du lait" and a fusion of Chanson meets the Old West as the welcome return of the accordion see it play alongside salon piano. However, there's again a contradiction between the melodic 'joviality' and the lyrics - which seems to perfectly capture the song's warning - how we are all becoming desensitised by the media's cold - detached - and disembodied reporting of war in lands far away that fits with the insidious intolerant rhetoric of right to becomes the new 'normal' as life on the home-front continues unaffected;   "...Miette de pain, pain de blé, blé des champs, chant de guerre. Guerre des ondes, ondes de choc, choc des mots... et d’aujourd’hui nous tiennent..." / "...Crumbs of bread, bread of wheat, wheat in fields, fields of war. War of the airwaves, waves of shock, shock of words... and today have a hold on us...."

"L'amour, la guerre" sings Marianne over a pleading, beseeching male voice "Under the watchful eyes of love, It's you I'm thinking of..." - love, war, boys, girls are all caught in the maelstrom of life's rawest emotions. "It's love" floats on an idyllic sea of strings and reverbed guitars as all the while turbulent waters rage not far beneath the surface. As Marianne has demonstrated already with "Les draps sourds" when she writes about love the song tends to come alive with symbolism; raw, steamy and a dripping with a palpable desire - I suspect this may have something to do with the rather grown-up attitude that the French have towards sex. "Un gros chat" is a slow-burning post-coital love song - there's an image of dishevelled Marianne curled upon the bedspread, just like the big cat of the song's title. Half-sung, half-whispered in her smoky, seductive voice, Marianne toys with her younger lover, much in the way a cat plays with its prey...

The album closes with the monumental "Am Letzen" - and while I'm immediately drawn to both "Cayenne" and "Les confettis" - it's hard to argue against this being probably her most compelling and complete song. Everything here - the analogue tape hiss, haunting cello and soothing piano, Marianne's whispered and weary vocals - portray the fragility of a New Year's Eve dawn's hazy light. There's a sense of tranquility - as if every living soul is emerging from a warming slumber, hidden from the bitting cold. But then you realise that you've mistaken tranquility for poignancy and Marianne's voice is fatigued because she has nothing to look forward to - emotionally bereaved - she leaves the house with only the return to look forward to; ("...and I go out to come back in...") I can't think of a more fitting song to close this album.


"Cibola Gold" is a beautifully curated work. However, in reality it's just a hors d'œuvre - a taster, if you like - of the depth of Marianne's formidable back catalogue. Trust me. The main course has yet to arrive...

It goes without saying that this album is Year-listed. And while there will undoubtedly be others that I'll rave just as lyrically about, perhaps even proclaim as the album of the year, I doubt whether any will be this important...

Marianne Dissard (Website), (Bandcamp)
"Cibola Gold: Best of 2008-2015" (Bandcamp)