The singer and actress Jane Birkin, found dead at her home in Paris, had an extensive career in both the field of music and cinema. These are some of her most famous songs.
Sung as a duet with his partner Serge Gainsbourg, author of the music and lyrics, who had recorded it a year earlier with the voice of his lover Brigitte Bardot, causing a great scandal due to the clearly sexual moans of the female voice. Soon, Gainsbourg met Birkin and recorded this new version. The song reproduces a sexual encounter, through the dialogue, between whispers, of the two lovers.
Song by Neil Young from 1992 with a markedly folk character covered by Birkin on his album Fictions (2006). The lyrics celebrate the persistence of love in long-term relationships. The voice of the Anglo-French singer gives a very personal tone to this melancholic ballad.
Another song by Serge Gainsbourg (with whom Birkin sings it as a duet), from Melody Nelson’s influential Histoire album, which is narratively structured around the relationship between a young, virgin, redheaded girl and an older man. Each theme is like a chapter of the story.
In 2004, Birkin teamed up with great lyricists for the Rendez-vous album. Several singers, such as Bryan Ferry, Brian Molko (Placebo), Feist or Miossec, interpret the songs with her. In this one, in particular, she couples her voice to that of Manu Chao and both, in a state of grace, achieved a hit endorsed by the public.
Theme that opens his self-titled first solo album, with songs written by Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier in which Birkin plays a girl with great sexual desire. The lyrics of this song, the most successful on the album, are inspired by the interpreter’s adolescence, with her transformations of her female body.
Another theme composed by Serge Gainsbourg in which Birkin makes a self-description between administrative and poetic in which we discover that he has disappeared and it is a police report on the facts.
