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Lyrics, music, arrangements, recording, mixing:
Xavier Vibert (2007-2008)
Lyrics and translations
The Cradle of the Mind is my first full album. It's never been published, but I'm proud of it anyway because I made it myself from the beginning to the end. I hope you will enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.
A pale blue dot -- En route to Hope -- Angel -- Battle for a cradle -- Blind
Jean -- L'âge où l'on repense -- The Queen of Nowhere -- Sunday comes -- Cormoran
A PALE BLUE DOT
We succeeded in taking that picture from deep space, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
CARL SAGAN (1934 - 1996)
EN ROUTE TO HOPE
We're leaving the Earth at a time when everything is going down down down.
There's no coming back and so we won't be around to see it drown
We gotta be patient, our journey is gonna take a while (what a boring time).
A bit more than four years, we're gonna be sleeping all the time (yeah yeah yeah)
We're on our way to Hope
When we arrive we're gonna party like no one ever did (yes we will).
We'll be the first ones to settle down on an extra solar planet (Hope is the name)
We'll get down to work because we were sent in to complete a mission (a holy one).
There's nothing more sacred than be the ones to achieve the vision (you and I)
We're on our way to Hope
We'll be on our own to build our brave new world, from chaos to order, from the oyster to the perl.
We'll be working for the future, for the heirs of our sons to be proud of what we've done and ready to carry on
We carry in our bags memories of a world where we left all we had for better or for worse.
As philosophers say, to know where to we're heading, we gotta know for sure about our origins
We're on our way to Hope
ANGEL
One more angel in the sky, one more life to the ash.
Somewhere grows another life to replace the one in the trash
From the womb, I assume, our doom is a tomb
One more star will shine tonight as your eyes shut for the last time
I haven't even had the chance of being there when you passed away
to tell you goobye through your trance, oh all the things I had to say
I'll see you, 'cause me too, I am due to the catacombs
One more angel in the sky and this time it made me cry
BATTLE FOR A CRADLE
The sunset is beautiful, though I live in a sad city.
This is the only world we have and war is raging on it,
We should be protecting it, we should be loving it
I suggest we do what's not been done before,
A battle for a cradle, a battle for a cradle
We have been saying it for years now,
Our speck in space is pacing past its lonely path
It's travelling through time my friend (so swell)
Let us fight for the last time
Let's fight with only one thing in mind
This time, it's a battle for a cradle, yours and mine
BLIND
The shimmering lights of the station that night are fading out on me
and I thought to myself I'll never see you again
The train is leaving the station in a silent roar
I'm blind, I'm blind
I'm all alone in the middle of the crowd
I'm floating, I'm floating away
Years have passed, you're just a shadow in my memory
I'm fine, I'm fine
JEAN
Jean, she says you can buy anything, Jean, you can buy anything but love
and when she's singing 'Imagine', Jean, she sees the world as pure and clean
She clearly lives in a world of dreams where sky is blue and grass is green and little birds happily sing
That's Jean
Jean, next week she would have been eighteen, Jean,
if she had not been abducted by people who did not believe, Jean,
that sky is blue and grass is green in the countries you would have been where little birds happily sing,
you would have loved it being here, dear Jean
Jean, she said you can buy anything, Jean, you can buy anything but love
When she was singing 'Imagine', Jean, she saw the world as pure and clean
L'ÂGE OÙ L'ON REPENSE
translation
C'est un enfant qui attend aux portes du ciel, il attend le repos de la vie éternelle
Il a perdu l'envie de vivre quand son père lui apprit qu'il ne verrait plus jamais sa mère
Et l'enfant qui sommeillait se dresse dans son lit, affolé sans son père ni sa mère près de lui
Il se rappelle alors ce lointain jour maudit où la lumière du jour se transforma en nuit
Je les entends encore nous narguer dans leur langue quand nous les suppliions de nous laisser en vie
Ils se délectaient de nos visages exsangues, ils riaient il dansaient au rythme de nos cris
Je me dis en croisant le regard ennemi qu'en d'autres circonstances nous aurions pu être amis
mais la volonté de l'uniforme mit en lui les souvenirs sanglants qui hantent encore ses nuits
Il n'y a pas un jour où je ne pense à elle, au dernier regard jeté dans sa direction
Je n'ai jamais revu de femme plus belle, je ne me suis jamais pardonné mon inaction
Le temps n'a pas réussi à effacer les traces que ma génération porte comme stigmates
Il y aura toujours au fond de mon coeur cette image de ma mère assommée par la peur
Je suis arrivé à un âge où l'on repense à tous ceux qu'on a connus qui n'ont pas vieilli
Même le rire des enfants ne cache pas l'absence des visages qui sourient sur les photos jaunies
THE QUEEN OF NOWHERE
All right, let me tell you the story of that girl...
Well, to tell you the truth, nobody really cared about her (I tell you the truth)
She was one of these street kids who had a very very lousy childhood (nobody cared about that girl)
Her father used to beat her up and her mother? well... (her own parents were...)
She was on drugs, so... What do you expect? (...deceiving her, she finally refused to trust anyone)
When she turned twenty, she met this Tony guy (When she turned twenty)
in a seedy bar on 62nd street, she fell in love at once (she fell in love with a really dirty scumbag)
and started dreaming about having a normal life at last (she was hoping)
Alas, Tony was nothing but a mundane conman (that she would be happy)
who regarded her as a cute and sexy toy (but was once more deceived in her feelings)
After a couple of years wasted in drugs and alcohol (In spite of all that)
she moved to the South to try and start a new life (she still believed)
Sadly, she never made it there (that some day she would be a queen)
She was found in a meadow with a crown of leaves on her head (and you know what her tombstone now reads)
Now and forever, she was a Queen, the Queen of Nowhere
SUNDAY COMES
Monday comes and you feel that the world is yours to take
Tuesday is a dream you think that you're never gonna wake up from
Now these days have been a game and the week goes on
Wednesday you work in a team and welcome the newbies
Thursday's more like a routine, the later and the more you're bored
You gained in wisdom, you gained in patience, the week is almost done
Friday you stay at your desk and think back to your week
You know you ain't never gonna get such another treat
You take your things and say goodbye now the week is gone
Saturday is quite a day, you keep going everywhere
Sunday comes and you go sit in the garden by the trees
A breeze is blowing and you smile as the sun sets on your week
CORMORAN
translation
Je suis mort dans un accident
et mon corps flotte obstinément
à la surface de l'océan
tel un cormoran, tel un cormoran
THE AGE WHEN ONE RECONSIDERS
original french lyrics
The child is waiting at the gates of heaven, he's waiting for eternal rest
He lost the will to live when his father told him he would never see his mother again
And the sleeping child sticks up in his bed, distraught without his mother or father by his side
And he recalls this cursed, distant day when the light of day turned into the night
I can still hear them mock us in their language as we begged them to spare our lives
They delighted in our bloodless faces, they laughed and danced to the sound of our cries
I thought to myself when watching the enemy's eyes that under other circumstances, we could have been friends
but the will of the uniform placed in him the bloody memories that still haunt his dreams
There isn't a single day when I don't think about her, about the last glance I threw in her direction
I never saw a more beautiful woman again, I never forgave myself for my inaction
Time has not succeeded in erasing the marks that my generation bears like stigmas
Deep in my heart there will always be this image of my mother, crushed with fear
I came to an age when I reconsider all those I have known who have not aged
Even the laughter of the children cannot conceal the absence of the faces who smile on old photographs
CORMORANT
original french lyrics
I died in an accident
and my body doggedly floats
at the surface of the ocean
like a cormorant, like a cormorant
About
"A pale blue dot" is a photograph of planet Earth made by Voyager 1 from a record distance, showing it against the vastness of space. It is also the title of a 1994 book by astronomer Carl Sagan that was inspired by the photo. In 2001, it was selected by Space.com as one of the top ten space science photos.
On February 14, 1990, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission, to turn around to photograph the planets of the Solar System. One image Voyager returned was of Earth, showing up as a pale blue dot in the grainy photo.
Back to the lyrics
Earth, as seen from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometers, looks like a mere, pale blue dot.
