Voilà
by Barbara Pravi
How to study this song
“Voilà” carries 20 French words, 5 adjectives and 24 verb forms — 49 study entries in all, graded A2. Begin with chanteuse, amours and amis: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. This one leans on its verbs: 24 distinct forms against 5 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| FR | EN | ES | IT | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| chanteuse | singer (f.) | cantante (mujer) | cantante (donna) | cantora |
What this song teaches you
Level · A2
- Vocabulary words
- 20
- Adjectives
- 5
- Word combos
- 20
- Expressions
- 15
- Verb forms
- 25
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Voilà» is a French chanson written and performed by Barbara Pravi, released as a single on 6 November 2020 by Capitol Music France. She wrote it with two regular partners, the singer-songwriter Igit and Lili Poe, and it later became the opening track of her first album, «On n’enferme pas les oiseaux», published on 27 August 2021. The recording lasts just under three minutes. The title is one of the most useful little words in French: it can mean "here is", "there you go" or simply "that is it", and in this song it turns into a way of saying "this is who I am".
Barbara Pravi was born Barbara Piévic in Paris on 10 April 1993. Her stage name comes from the Serbian word «pravi», which means "real" or "authentic", and she chose it as a tribute to her Serbian grandfather. She started working in music around 2014, signed with Capitol after her first singles and spent several years writing for other performers as well as for herself. One of those songs is «J’imagine», written with Igit for the young singer Valentina, which won the Junior Eurovision Song Contest for France in 2020.
In an interview published by the site Charts in France on 30 January 2021, she explained that it was Igit who pushed her to enter the French selection for Eurovision, and that she resisted at first. She accepted on one condition: the song had to be entirely hers, not a piece built to fit a television contest. She said she simply tried to write the best song she could, and that the waltz rhythm arrived by itself during the writing. For her, the piece describes where she stood after about five years of trying to live from her music.
The words speak directly to the audience. A singer who feels only half recognised asks people to listen to her, to look at her and to mention her to the ones they love. She says that all she wants is to write stories that travel as far as them, admits that she is afraid of standing there with nothing to hide behind, and begs her listeners not to go, because she would not know how to continue without them. She asks to be loved because she finds it hard to love herself. The music follows the same curve: it begins almost spoken over a piano, then the strings and the tempo grow until the last repetitions of the title are close to a cry.