I’ve heard rumors that this song was written by someone actually dying (perhaps J. Terry himself?). Is this true? It certainly sounds like it could be.
Can anyone out there shed some light on the background of this song??
TIA
- Dirk
Try this.
(Jacques Brel meets Rod McKuen? That is just TOO weird.)
Terry Jacks 
It’s actually Terry Jacks, not Jack Terry.
Nice explanation, but it still comes of as a suicide note…
What I meant was, it’s good to know the background behind the song, but … it still sounds like a suicide note.
Duh…
Of course Terry Jacks…Jack Terry is a guy in town that I know…
d’0h!
:smack:
And thanks for the link, Ukelele Ike…good info!
Yeah, that’s called “writing.” It’s what Brel did for his living.
He wrote this particular piece of deathless pop-songery in 1961, and managed to make it all the way to 1978 before dying of cancer. No suicide.
Wow. I have never heard of or thought of that explanation. Perhaps it is because I’m old enough to remember when it came out. For me it was always clear that the man was passing away and he was thanking those who made his life brighter. It maudlin, yes, but suicide never seemed to me to be the message.
I never interpreted it as a suicide note, just a goodbye from someone terminally ill. The chorus makes reference to the pleasent things in life that the speaker will be missing, and even forgives his wife for cheating on him with his best friend. I have always wondered, though, if the friend that Franciose cheated with is Emile from the first verse.
I rember when it was broadcast on BBC tv for the long running show “Top of the Pops” they didn’t manage to get Terry Jacks over to sing the song live, and they didn’t have a film of him singin either, so they came up with what must have been the forerunners to music video.
The song, film was pretty standard thing, by the good old Beeb and most of them were pretty poor, “Seasons in the sun” showed a young WW1 soldier kind of staggering around the trenches(probably a building site actually) and generally looking out of sorts, though there was no obvious reason why this should be so - no injuries and his uniform was just like it came back from the dry cleaner so you couldn’t imagine he’d just been in action seeing his mates get shot.
I think I recall a ‘history’, sort of, but it was probably urban legend and invented to give this approach more credibility, and that the song somehow referred itself back to some WW1 poetry, almost like a poem set to music.
To give an example of the strange way the BBC short film department worked, you may remeber the song “Young girl” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.(a good karaoke favourite and murdered by drunks every Friday night)
The film that the BBC came up with featured the band wandering around to no apparent purpose in Confederate army uniforms, which seems somewhat disconnected from the song lyrics.
Wow. I always thought the lyric was “Goodby to you, my trusted friend…”
And now I find out it’s “Adieu Emile, my trusted friend”?
Did anyone else mishear the lyrics to that?
What’s it about? At 4:51, it’s about 5 minutes too long.
As Dave Barry said in Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs, “It’s about someone dying, but not fast enough.”
I’ve always hated this song – the maudlin lyrics, he weird voice, and the wa the tempo picks up and slows down makes it sound as if it’s being plyed on the world’s only phonograph record with the hole deliberately drilled off-center.
That’s a whole different bad song.
Yes, I too thought that it was “goodbye to you my trusted friend.” So do these sites: Here and here and several others that I found…
Terry Jacks sang “Goodbye to you” instead of “Adieu Emile.” Obviously translated for the English speaking record buyers.