Creating a sense of time and place within a song is no easy feat. Many songwriters just avoid it completely, instead leaving their songs in some indefinable location somewhere in the present. But when a songwriter can add these elements, it immensely deepens the listening experience.
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The title of the song “Paris 1919” by John Cale lets you know where and when we are. Cale then develops a personal tale amidst lyrics that evoke that particular setting.
No Longer Velvet
John Cale didn’t seem like the singer-songwriter type. The Welshman had first earned notoriety as one of the Velvet Underground, playing a variety of instruments and bringing a touch of the musical avant-garde to Lou Reed’s streetwise songs.
When he and Reed fell out and he left the Underground, he showed his skill as a producer, working with The Stooges and his former bandmate Nico. Cale recorded a pair of solo records, Vintage Violence and The Academy In Peril, that found him trying a little bit of everything. But he wasn’t thrilled about the end result in either case.
When he started making Paris 1919, the album released in 1973, Cale was living in Los Angeles. Perhaps a bit of homesickness started to form, because he started writing songs with a distinctly European bent in the lyrics, occasionally looking back through history.
“Paris 1919” takes a kind of chamber pop approach with its oh-so-proper brass and strings. Although the title isn’t mentioned in the lyrics, it hints to the listener that the song occurs during a crucial time in history at the end of World War I. It was a time when the ground was shifting under the feet of everyone on the European continent.
Examining the Lyrics of “Paris 1919”
Many people have interpreted the protagonists in Cale’s song as being the countries of Europe, each trying to make sense of the new order of things. Or it could be the story of one individual man and the relationship that haunts him that happens in the time and place mentioned in the title.
In any case, the language that Cale uses trips along in light-footed, jaunty fashion. The narrator describes his lack of power in a relationship. “Just a visitor you see,” Cale sings. “So much wanting to be seen/She’d open up the doors and vaguely carry us away.”
The narrator admits to being a “proud man in his grief” in the second verse. Once again, he lacks any control over this entity that’s hounding him. “And on Fridays she’d be there,” he laments. “But on Mondays not at all/Just casually appearing from the clock across the hall.”
“The continent’s just fallen in disgrace,” Cale sings in the second verse, his most blatant reference to the geopolitical situation of the times. He also hints that there’s no turning back from it, no matter the “maids of honor singing, crying, singing tediously.” All that’s left to do is drown their sorrows in wine: “How the Beaujolais is raining/Downed the darkened meetings on the Champs Elysees.”
In the refrains, the narrator promises to contain this ghost who is intermittently coming near and flitting away. “Paris 1919” could be a love song, it could be a sly commentary on the post-WWII landscape, or it could be a bit of both. But it definitely drops you into the middle of that specific time and place while you’re listening.
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