Woodkid covers Cabrel

Although I somehow didn't get round to organising any kind of formal award ceremony in the closing months of last year, Woodkid's second album S16 was probably this blog's album of the year. 

It's an album that somehow fitted perfectly with the strange year we had. For all the grandeur of the textures he plays with, there's fragile humanity at the centre of it. While apparently inhuman and gigantic forces surround us and bewilder us, rather than simply focusing on the large-scale drama and celebrating it, his focus remains on the human dimension throughout.

For all the industrial-scale mechanics of Goliath, with its epic orchestral and electronic flavours, it asks simple personal questions: Where are you going boy? How did you get so lost?  Amidst the apparently overwhelming situation, with its depersonalising, uncertain and strange unfamiliarity, these questions remain pertinent and unanswered.

Meanwhile, the In your likeness video is set in the inhospitable and unfamiliar environment of an oil rig, lit as strangely as an alien space station in a Hollywood movie. But a song that focuses on one human voice, illuminating the darkness like a distress flare.

A lot of us have been moving towards personal reflection in a year that has seen us confronted by circumstances that are alien to us, frightening and beyond our control. A year where, for many of us, what once were optimistic horizons have become distant battlefields.

With his cover of Francis Cabrel's things are even more personal. The song by Cabrel from his 1994 Samedi soir sur la Terre is one of the songwriter's key works, a love song to his partner and to his child. With Woodkid's version, almost everything is stripped away, the focus is on voice on piano, and it's incredibly affecting.

If Cabrel was at the time thought to be one of the standard-bearers for the French chanson tradition, Woodkid has quietly established his own claim to the title.