De justesse

The setup

Opening track of Garden Party (2022), recorded in Marchet’s living-room studio in Montreuil. Mixing by Loris Bernot. Exception on the album: here, bass and soft synths rather than the customized upright piano that dominates the rest of the record. The choice of timbre signals from the start that De justesse is not an adult testimony but a retrospective return to childhood.

Text structure

Four stanzas punctuated by ages:

• 4 years old (fingers in the socket)
• 12 years old (jumping off the rock, in the Cévennes)
• high school (dangerous parties, suicide attempts)
• 18 years old (mojito-car-plane trees)

Each stanza closes on the same isolated phrase: de justesse (just barely). The chorus tips toward direct address:

“Promets-moi mon amour / De passer ton tour / Promets-moi mon enfant / De rester vivant"
"Promise me, my love / to sit this one out / Promise me, my child / to stay alive”

The device — the avoided cadence

The song would nominally be in A♭ major, but it orbits constantly around its minor degrees: Fm (VIm), B♭m (IIm), Cm (IIIm), with slides toward D♭ (IV). A nominally major key yet inhabited almost exclusively by its minor chords.

The chorus opens on B♭m → E♭ → Cm → D♭ — a sequence that gravitates around the tonic without ever cadencing squarely on it. The resolution toward A♭ is always brushed past, rarely landed on. This is the mechanism of the avoided cadence applied to the entire structure. Harmonically, the track tells the same thing as the lyrics: you pass right by without resolution. Form matches content with a precision that is not accidental — this is a conservatory-trained songwriter writing.

The arrangement

Soft analog synths, round bass, discreet drums, close voice. The choices create a dream-like drift appropriate to the retrospective gaze of the text. The deaths avoided are seen from a distance, without dramatization. The arrangement does not cry — it is that refusal that makes the memories bearable.

Filiation and resonances

The video is illustrated with the Kodachrome slides of photographer Lee Shulman (The Anonymous Project) — anonymous photographs from the 1950s–70s that collect ordinary lives. This visual project is the exact visual equivalent of the nostalgic grain the song produces, and it is explicitly the aesthetic source of the whole Garden Party.

In the catalog: the avoided cadence foreshadows the harmonic ambiguities of Paris-Nice (dominant minor) and Freddie Mercury (two held chords). Three tracks that make non-resolution their grammar.

Reading under the light of the constants

Constant 1 — The sound comes from the place: an acknowledged exception on Garden Party. Not the living-room upright piano but soft synths. The constant does not disappear — it accepts to step aside when the subject demands it (a retrospective return asks for a more floating timbre, not the wood of a present piano).

Constant 2 — Naturalism: surgical enumeration of four ordinary events. No mythology of childhood, no lyricism. Just the facts, dated by age, told flat.

Inverted dramatic arc: a perfect example. The text lays out narrowly avoided deaths, brushed-against suicides, mortal risks. The music floats. No musical element underlines the danger narrated. That refusal is what produces the effect: you cry because the song leaves you the room to do so.

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