Un Ami Américain
No, this is neither a French singer nor a French song. But it’s a singer living in Paris for years, an album produced in a Breton studio including a wonderfully sparse song about a fille Terry Lee Hale met in a Parisian café some time ago. Hale himself, a man of 60 years now, was Seattle-based during the high times of Grunge in the mid-Eighties, a singer/ songwriter in the wrong place at the wrong time; he never got a recording contract in the U.S. and was discovered by German indie labels Normal and Glitterhouse in the 90s. His new album The Long Draw is admirable stuff all the way, the work of an ami Americain, the last song Gold Mine telling a quiet, unmistakably French story of hello and goodbye.