Of all the things I didn’t know about the city of Toulouse, France (which is pretty much everything) the most fascinating is that Toulouse is the centre of France’s space program.
This is fascinating to me because, frankly, I never really considered that France might even have a space program. Not that I doubt their ingenuity or anything; France is an advanced country with plenty of money and a long list of mathematical and scientific geniuses going back centuries.
It’s just that, somehow, the cultural stereotypes surrounding France don’t seem to gel with the idea of aerospace technology. Just allow yourself, for a minute, to picture French ground control in Toulouse:
Banks of computer monitors lie below a haze of smoke from Gauloises cigarettes. Engineers in half-unbuttoned shirts sip tiny cups of coffee while an old Django Reinhardt record plays in the background. Someone asks if they should check the crew’s vitals or establish radio contact, but the others in the room shrug and turn their attention back to their card games, bottles of wine, and discussions of various kissing techniques.
Clearly, I know nothing about French culture, or the town of Toulouse.
But I think I may have just decided to move there.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The super-heavy reverb on the voice that makes it floaty and spacy.
2. The rumbling percussion beginning at 2:04 makes me think of a distant space shuttle at takeoff.
3. The lyrics don’t really have anything to do with the town of Toulouse. But the first verse contains the words “with nothing to lose.” My theory is that as the song was being written, Haux sang the opening verse for a friend, and they misheard it as “Toulouse”. If that’s how the song got its name, I think that’s great.
Recommended listening activity:
Unrolling a croissant.