Previously at Café 42: Music is a very important thing in my life, essential even. Indee, within the last year, I’ve discovered that music has the power to shift my vibrational state, to open wide my imagination gates, to realign my energy, to allow my body to dance and my soul to sing. This is why, when I decided to create Café 42, I wanted to share a playlist of my most significant songs with my community, like a life’s soundtrack.
Today’s song “Au Bout de mes Rêves” is by a french singer called Jean-Jacques Goldman who is kind of a french pop culture national treasure. Each of the songs he wrote from the early 80’s to mid 2000’s - when he decided to retire from music business for good - have become hits.
As well as being a great composer and songwriter, he is an extraordinary human being, close to his fans and to the musicians he worked with, always humble and generous. Indeed, during the mid-90’s, though he had a thriving solo career, he decided to build a trio band with his guitarist, Michael Jones, and one of his back vocal singers, Carol Fredericks, and offered them success with touring throughout France for a decade before Carol suddenly died of a heart attack. That’s when Jean-Jacques Goldman decided to put an end to his career.
Two decades before that, in the mid-80’s, Coluche, one of the greatest french stand-up comedian, though stand-up didn’t really exist in France at that time, not in its actual form anyway, after failing to run for president a few years earlier, decided to create a national soup kitchen called “Les Restos du Coeur” (The Restaurants from the Heart) to allow indigent people to have something to eat during winter season. He thought his organization would last for a couple of year but, unfortunately, it is still very active up until today, feeding families as well as students since Covid, for unemployment and poverty have been growing fiercely in France for the past four years. Anyway, to raise funds for his charity project, Coluche decided to record a song with all his artist friends and sell the records to finance it. Jean-Jacques Goldman composed and wrote the song – which is not the one I’m actually writing about today for my playlist though I know it doesn’t really show until now but I never get tired of telling the story of beautiful human beings.
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