Tim Dup
What will be left of it? ... That is the question printed on the cover of the record this song comes from ... Qu'en restera-t-il ? ... and the song's own title answers with a shrug and a waltz ... another love story ... one more ... as if what remains of any of them is simply the next one ...
Tim Dup is a French songwriter who writes in long, wordy, waltzing lines, a chanson that talks fast and turns slowly ... He has said this one grew out of a promise ... he and his collaborator Gaël had told each other for years that they would write together, and when they finally did they built the song out of the pictures they shared, trains, roads, leaving ... "These encounters, whether for work or not, are what give meaning to life," he said ... which is a large thing to say about a song, and he meant it ...
The second voice is Flore Benguigui, who sings for L'Impératrice ... She is not brought in for a duet where the singers take turns being sad ... her voice is laid into the song as a second narrator, so that the same story is told from two ends of the room, call and answer, neither one finishing the other's sentence ... It came out in August 2020, with a black-and-white film, after a spring that had shut every door the record was meant to walk through ...
It is in three, the count a couple uses to cross a floor ... one strong step and two light ones, over and over, which is also how a story gets told when the teller is still deciding how it ends ... Another love story ... the word another is doing the work ... not the first, not the last, and not smaller for that ...