Enough to bring balm to the hearts of his fans, who will commemorate the sixth anniversary of his disappearance on Tuesday. As announced, a second unreleased track by Johnny Hallyday is now available to listen to, two weeks after the release of Un cri, song from 2017. Grave-moi le coeur appeared on Friday on Youtube and streaming sites. This song is a French adaptation of Elvis Presley’s hit Love Me Tender.
Recorded in 1996, Grave-moi le coeur appears on the double album Johnny Hallyday Symphonique, which brings together all of the songs of the singer from Allumer le feu reworked in a symphonic version by the arranger Yvan Cassar.
Grave moi le coeur is a ballad, adaptation in French by Jean Fauque, famous lyricist of Alain Bashung, of the Elvis Presley standard Love me tender. The title was rehearsed and put on tape, originally, in anticipation of the Las Vegas show in 1996 and one of the resulting records, Destination Vegas. But Johnny Hallyday did not choose this piece either for the live performance or for the album. Le Taulier preferring to perform it in original version on stage.
“As crazy as it sounds, it was on rehearsal tape and it hadn’t been digitized. Johnny never told me about it, he must have forgotten it himself,” Yvan Cassar confided to AFP. However, the two men spoke for hours about this title of “King”. A founding anthem for Johnny who had seen and heard it as a teenager in the cinema in the film The Twilight Rider, with Elvis as the actor-singer
After isolating the vocal track, Yvan Cassar set it with a new orchestration, while keeping Johnny’s “breath”. “We feel in this song his relationship to life, there is a maturity, an abandonment,” notes the arranger.
Also read “Today, I forgave”: David Hallyday or the memories of a child of idols
According to a connoisseur, interviewed by AFP, other unreleased material could come to the surface, “given the mass of recordings by the singer in his career”. As Xavier Perrot of Universal Music explained to Le Figaro, Grave moi le coeur was found inadvertently. “We discovered it while looking for live vocal takes to allow Yvan to add his symphonic arrangements to classics of the repertoire.” “By emphasizing the piano rather than the guitar, adding minor chords, Cassar gives it a new status,” praised Le Figaro critic Olivier Nuc.
