Toi + Moi

About the song

«Toi + Moi» is the song that introduced Grégoire, born Grégoire Boissenot in Senlis, north of Paris, in 1979, and it came out as a single on 30 June 2008. Its story is inseparable from the way it was paid for. Grégoire was the first artist ever financed through My Major Company, a French website founded in 2007 that invited ordinary internet users to buy shares in unknown musicians. Each share cost ten euros, and once an artist had collected 70,000 euros, he or she could go into the studio. Grégoire signed up on 20 December 2007 and reached the target on 15 February 2008, less than two months later, thanks to 347 people who put in anything from ten euros to just over six thousand. They were not simply fans: they were his producers, and they would share the income from the record.

The song itself is an open invitation. The singer calls out to everyone who wants to come — the person he is singing to, the people around them, and above all those who feel alone — and asks them to step into the dance with him. He insists that together, whether they are two people or a thousand, they are capable of anything, that they can go higher than their dreams and further than the shore. The obstacles that usually hold people back, such as the cold, fear and the everyday misfortunes, are described as nothing more than illusions that can be set aside for once. In one verse he even stops to admit, with a smile, that his song is naive, a little silly and perfectly harmless, and that it will not change the world — but that it still invites the listener to join the circle. At the end he says he wants to see the other person’s eyes full of stars, and everyone free and happy.

Grégoire wrote both the words and the music himself, and the recording was produced by Franck Authié, who also played guitar. The arrangement is built as one long crescendo. It starts quietly, and a new instrument joins roughly every eight bars, so that the track keeps swelling until the final choruses sound like a whole crowd singing; then it suddenly drops back to just the voice and the piano. The song lasts about three minutes, turns around the same four chords in A minor, and moves at a lively 130 beats per minute, which is part of why it became a favourite for school shows, weddings and sing-alongs.

For learners of French, «Toi + Moi» is one of the friendliest songs in the catalogue. The language is simple and very repetitive, and the chorus comes back many times. It is a perfect lesson in the imperative with «vous»: the singer uses a whole chain of commands to call people in, to let things happen and to start again with him. It also shows an idiom built on «danse», which means to join in, the useful phrase «laisser tomber», meaning to drop or forget about something, the restriction «ne … que» in the sense of «only», the demonstrative «ceux qui» for «those who», the impersonal «il faut» with a pronoun, and «même si» for «even if». There are a few words worth learning carefully, such as «insouciance», a carefree state of mind, «ardeur», which means fervour, and «grève», used here in its old literary sense of a sandy shore rather than a strike.