Elodie Rêverie Elicits the Spirit of a Great and Transformative Romance on “Casa I Don’t Know”

Elodie Rêverie, photo courtesy the artist

Elodie Rêverie brings a great deal of mood and atmosphere to her new track “Casa I Don’t Know.” With her usual sultry and widely expressive voice, Rêverie sings about a love that can and should happen and one that contains an element of mystery because they two people don’t necessarily know each other well or if they do that element of fantasy and purity of feeling toward one another hasn’t evaporated with familiarity. The music video for the song shows Rêverie, looking a little like a young Natalie Wood, frolicking around a private pool and giving attention to an unseen figure capturing intimate but not lurid moments in their life together. In black and white with footage either from or made to look like taken from an old camcorder with the “PLAY” indicater and the rightward pointing triangle in the upper left of the screen and the “SP” in the lower left letting us know it’s being recorded at the speed that produced the best image fidelity on that old technology. This touch and the small video glitches enhance a sense of nostalgia and old fashioned romance perfect for the tenor of this song. The piano melody, the whispery production on parts of the vocals, the slowly sweeping synth tones, it all gives the song a beautifully hazy aspect that lends the sense of romance an appropriately dreamlike quality as something it could all be and putting that intentionality into the songwriting. Many love songs are hackneyed but Rêverie’s ear for classic pop songcraft and imaginative yet sincere emotional performances with attention to dynamic nuances has consistently meant her songs are instantly affecting and durably appealing. Watch the video for “Casa I Don’t Know” on YouTube and follow Elodie Rêverie at the links below.

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Merging Jazz Vocals With the Somber Weightiness of Beethoven, Elodie Rêverie’s “Not All Bright Women Live in Bed” Makes Deep Commentary on Internalized Oppression

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Elodie Rêverie, photo courtesy the artist

Using Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” as the instrumental, piano baseline for “Not All Bright Women Live in Bed,” Elodie Rêverie establishes a somber mood for a song about some weighty topics. It’s not unlike, in a completely different musical context, the way Lingua Ignota used elements of Henry Purcell’s Music For the Funeral of Queen Mary in her song “BUTCHER OF THE WORLD” from the 2019 album Caligula. Both utilize classical structure and musical allusion to make a statement on an age old and persistent ill of the world. Lingua Ignota comments on the violence inflicted on everyone by patriarchal culture, Rêverie on the diminished expectations due to diminished horizons by virtue of the fact of sexism permeating culture down to internalized oppression. Rêverie sings lines like “Life’s too big to watch it through a window,” “I don’t have to go to college, I don’t have to know,” and a lyric that contains the song title “Not all bright women live in bed but some do, and I have but I won’t today.” Which are heavy words to sing but it also points to an acute awareness of one’s internal process and a desire to not be in that state of mind. By externalizing these thoughts in song it’s like a mirror for anyone who might have similar thoughts and being able to articulate them gives one some control over how to process and perhaps overcome them. Rêverie’s jazz style vocals blended with the classical sensibility gives the whole song an unconventional dimensionality that refreshingly transcends that of a pop song or any genre consideration. Listen to “Not All Bright Women Live in Bed” on Soundcloud.