Mai Lan
This one is for children between four and nine ... and it is free ...
Mai Lan Chapiron makes electronic songs and futuristic ballads, records that arrive with the lights on ... This is not one of those ... It is a lullaby, sung plainly, written to sit beside a picture book she wrote and drew herself ... The book is called Le Loup, the wolf, and it tells the story of a child named Miette, a grown-up who hurt her, and how she found the words to tell someone ... It was made for small children and the adults who read to them, together with a collective of associations whose whole work is prevention ... The song, the book read aloud, and a short film are given away at leloup.org ... The printed book, from La Martinière Jeunesse, is where the money goes ...
She wrote it from her own story ... "It's so recent that I can talk about it publicly," she said when it came out ... "I'm amazed at how at peace I am today" ...
The craft of it is restraint ... the song's one job is to carry a frightening subject into a room without frightening the child, so the music is the gentlest thing she has made ... a voice, a simple tune, nothing that jumps out ... The wolf is the old wolf of every fairy tale, the one a four-year-old already knows how to be afraid of, put to work here so that a small person can point at something and say, that one ...
A song that exists so that a child can say one sentence out loud ... that is the whole of its ambition, and it is enormous ...