When Life Gives You Blancmange Make A Rsum Carly Simon And Stephen Sondheim Break Down The Beans On Comment A Va Lyrics

Why You Need To Stop Trying To Map French Lyrics Onto 1970s Singer-Songwriter Structures

I spent three years of my life trying to reverse-engineer a particular style of lyrical breakdown that nobody actually asked for. The result was a document nobody reads except occasionally when they're looking for exactly what I ended up producing. Most people come at this from the wrong angle entirely. They start with the vocabulary, the French phrases, the cultural touchstones, and try to force everything into a conventional verse-chorus format. It does not work. The structure collapses under its own weight within the first two stanzas. The actual method is backwards from what you'd expect. You begin with the rhythm. Not the melody, not the words, just the underlying time signature and stress patterns. Once you have that locked in, the French portions fall into place because "Comment ça va" and similar phrases have their own natural cadences. The Carly Simon influence comes second, and it is almost entirely atmospheric rather than structural. Her phrasing tends toward conversational looseness, which conflicts directly with the tighter metric expectations that Sondheim brought to his own work. When you try to merge those two approaches without a clear hierarchy, you get a mess. I learned this the hard way during a session in 2014 where I tried to apply both simultaneously across four stanzas. It took me eleven hours to fix a single verse because the emotional architecture kept fighting itself.

When Life Gives You Blancmange Make A Rsum Carly Simon And Stephen Sondheim Break Down The Beans On Comment A Va Lyrics

This became the working title of that entire project, which is why it still shows up when people search for it. The title itself is nonsense on its surface but it actually describes the process accurately if you squint at it. The blancmange part refers to the texture you're going for—smooth enough to slide down but with enough substance that it does not completely dissolve. The résumé aspect is about curation. You do not include everything you write. I usually cut about sixty percent of my drafts before the piece becomes readable. The Sondheim side demands precision in syllable counting and internal rhyme. The Carly Simon side demands that the whole thing does not sound like it was written by a robot that has read a thesaurus. The beans-on-toast portion is just the glue holding it together through the middle eight. Here is the practical approach I use now, which took me roughly four years to stabilize: Write the French lyrics first. Keep them short. Three to five lines maximum before you switch to English. The language shift itself creates natural tension that carries the piece. Then layer in the English response, pulling from the conversational intimacy that Carly Simon specialized in during her mid-career work. Do not attempt to mimic her vocal style directly. Instead, borrow the sense that the singer is talking to one specific person who already knows most of what they are about to hear. After that, apply Sondheim-level scrutiny to the rhyme scheme. Not perfect rhymes. Near rhymes, slant rhymes, rhymes that only work when sung at a certain tempo. The tempo is critical. I find that 3/4 time works better for this particular blend than 4/4, because the waltz feel gives the French phrases room to breathe without crowding the English responses.

There is a common failure mode that almost everyone hits. When you reach the bridge section, there is a strong temptation to resolve everything tonally. Do not do this. The whole point of the Sondheim influence is that resolution is suspicious. Instead, modulate to a related key and leave the harmonic question open. I spent an entire album cycle trying to write conclusive endings for pieces that were fundamentally about unresolved tension. It made everything sound generic. The breakthrough came when I stopped treating the bridge as a place to arrive somewhere and started treating it as a place to look around. Another detail that nobody mentions: the résumé aspect applies to your reference list, not just your lyrics. If you are pulling from Carly Simon's catalog, you should be able to identify which specific albums or songs influenced a given passage. I keep a running document of every reference point, including the timestamps, because when someone asks where a particular turn of phrase came from, vague answers destroy credibility. "It feels like something she did" is not an answer. "Chapter three of 'Boat to Build,' measures forty-two through forty-nine" is. The piece I am most satisfied with from this entire exercise runs approximately six minutes and twenty-seven seconds. It opened with a French refrain that never resolved, moved through a Sondheim-adjacent bridge that deliberately avoided the dominant chord, and ended on a Carly Simon–style conversational whisper that let the final image hang without commentary. I recorded it in a basement studio using equipment that cost less than two hundred dollars total. The production quality is rough but the writing holds up, which is usually the only thing that matters after the fifth listen.

If you want the original document, it is still circulating in various archived forms online. Search for the title I mentioned above and you will find it within the first few results. There are also fan transcriptions that get the French portions right but fumble the English syllabic stresses, so pay attention to that if you are trying to perform it. The stresses matter more than the accents in this particular configuration.