D'abord Vous Obtenez le Sucre

First: we're playing a monster three-set show that will run run us from around 9 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. here on Friday. Come check us out if you actually live in this town!

Second: next Tuesday we're playing at a St. Jean Baptiste day celebration. St. Jean Baptiste day, a.k.a. La Fête Nationale, is a holiday that somehow (too lazy to go on Wikipedia) has basically turned into "Quebec Day" and is often an occasion for nationalist/separatist/anti-anglo sentiments...or roving lynch mobs (just kidding, Mom). For anyone who doesn't follow Montreal news, there's a bit of a brouhaha about English bands playing at these things, and we're a band made up of an American, two English Canadians and two Montreal Anglophones. We sort of represent a constellation of everything les Quebecois detest in principle.

To alleviate any language tensions that might arise, we thought it would be a nice goodwill gesture (or hopelessly patronizing insult, but...you know) to translate one of our cover songs into French. Our keyboardist--one of the Montreal Anglos, but fully fluent in French--suggested we do it with "As the Years Go By" by early-70s Montreal-born one-hit-wonders Mashmakan. What he discovered when doing the translation is that the lyrics actually read more smoothly in French than in English, even when keeping the grammatical structure intact:

A child asks his mother, do you love me
And it really means, will you protect me
His mother answers him, I love you
And it really means, you've been a good boy

And as the years go by
True love will never die

Becomes:

Un fils dit à sa mère, "m'aimes-tu?"
Et ça veut dire, "me protégeras-tu?"
Sa mère lui répondit, "je t'aime,"
Qui veut dire, "t'es un garçon sage."

Et au fil des années,

L'amour mourra jamais. (it even rhymes!)

He did a bit of research and it turns out that, sure enough, the lead singer of the band was French, even though the rest of the band were Anglos. Its like he wrote the lyrics in French and ran them through whatever people used for awkward translations before Google translator and BabelFish. Weird. I guess all you die-hard Mashmakan fans who read my blog now have something to ponder.