Jean-Louis Murat
Two letters after the album's name ... Baby Love D.C. In the France of 2020 everyone knew what they stood for — déconfiné, let out of lockdown ... Jean-Louis Murat had made Baby Love, a record that surprised people because it grooved, closer to disco than to the folk-rock he was known for, and then the country shut its doors, and he made it again, unplugged, at home, and added a few songs that had not been on the first one ... This was one of them...
He was from the Auvergne, the volcanic middle of France, and he stayed there, making close to a record a year for forty years, writing like someone who read more than he talked ... Restless is the word that follows him around ... he never made the same record twice, and Baby Love was the proof — a man past sixty who had fallen for Earth, Wind & Fire and let it show ... He died in 2023 ...
L'arc en ciel is the rainbow ... Whatever the song does with it, the title is what a person names a song in the spring a whole country spent indoors, looking out of windows at weather ...
The measure of it is the stripping down ... The parent record's groove was taken out of the arrangements and what was left was the acoustic bones, recorded during the lockdown weeks, so that a rainbow song from a disco record arrives with no band at all — just what one man could reach from his chair ...