Irene Rible (FMA Admin)

Marianne Dissard is a native of France who has been living in Tuscon, Arizona for the past two decades.  She came to America for film school in the early nineties, a time when she began filming Drunken Bees, a documentary about the Tuscon band Giant Sand.  In Tuscon she found a musical kinship with artists such as Naim Amor of the Amor Belhom Duo and Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico, who helped write and produce many of the songs featured on the Paris One Takes compilation of Dissard’s work. 

Aside from her French collaborator and contemporary Françoiz Breut, the closest musical comparison to Dissard is Lhasa de Sela.  Both artists make the unlikely fusion of Calexico’s alternative mariachi music, with the sultry, brooding tradition of a classic old world chanteuse.  My heart sunk when I discovered that Lhasa de Sela died at the beginning of this year.  Perhaps unfair to Dissard, but as I listened to this album, I couldn’t help but feel Lhasa’s spirit haunting in the background, like watching an actor bring an icon back to life in a biopic.

Lhasa always burned with the pathos of Edith Piaf or Chavela Vargas, like someone captured on a 78 record, a time capsule of an era before post-sincerity.  As with Lhasa, Dissard’s fusion of genres from Europe and the Americas reflects similar longing and conflicts of identity.  Yet Dissard’s melancholy isn’t quite so unrelenting.  Rather than Lhasa’s fiery wails, the songs on her albums feel more like cool exhales of smoke after long, jaded drags on a cigarette (much like the character she plays in Calexico’s music video for “The Ballad of Cable Hogue”), which just goes to prove that she really is French at heart.

While I can guess that most of these songs involve themes of loss, regret, disappointment, frustration, and fleeting moments of unsustainable passion, as a typical mono-linguistic ugly American, I have no idea what Marianne Dissard is actually singing about in her lyrics.  Much like Francis Lai’s Un homme et une femme theme song, it’s all pretty “buh buh buh duh duhs” and “la la dee dees” to my ears.  Yet on a nonverbal level I think I understand what she means:

Q: Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

A: ♫ ♫? ♫ ♫.  Et ♪ ♫ ♩.