Comme des enfants

About the song

«Comme des enfants» is the song that introduced Cœur de pirate, the stage name of the Montreal singer and pianist Béatrice Martin, to the whole French-speaking world. It comes from her first album, simply titled «Cœur de pirate», which the independent Quebec label Grosse Boîte released in Canada on 16 September 2008, when Martin was still eighteen. The record was made in Montreal and produced and arranged by David Brunet, with Martin herself as co-producer. The following spring, on 19 May 2009, Barclay brought the album to France, and «Comme des enfants» became the song that carried it there, released as a single in its own right on 28 September 2009.

Musically it is very simple, and that is a large part of its charm. The song is built on a bright, bouncing piano figure, the kind of pattern a trained pianist plays almost without thinking, with light accompaniment around it and a young, slightly fragile voice on top. It is short, under three minutes, and it moves quickly from its verses to a chorus that returns again and again until it takes over the whole second half. The contrast between that cheerful, almost playground-like melody and what the words are actually saying is what makes it stick.

Because the story it tells is not a happy one. The narrator is caught between two people. One man still loves her, and she knows it, but she has come to love somebody else a little more. The verses describe the confusion that comes with that: feelings getting tangled, the sense of being a puzzle to the person she loves, the fear of losing her footing, and the uncomfortable feeling of being split into two versions of herself. The new couple behave like children, walking forward hand in hand with a kind of naive happiness, even while their own common sense tells them to stop. The chorus does not resolve anything. It simply states the two facts side by side, over and over, and the repetition becomes the point: she cannot choose, and the song does not choose for her.

For a learner of French, the song is a compact lesson in everyday grammar. Object pronouns are everywhere, attached to almost every verb, and the chorus is a clear model of how French places them before the verb and elides them before a vowel. The verses bring in the simple future, several infinitive constructions after prepositions, the pronominal verbs that French uses for reciprocal and reflexive actions, and a handful of idioms that native speakers use constantly, such as the phrases for losing one’s grip, setting something aside and saying that enough is enough. The vocabulary is almost all common, and the few rarer words are easy to remember because they carry the emotional weight of the song.