Carla Bruni is an Italian singer, songwriter and model, who also famously became the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy in February of this year. She has a new album coming out in July. Some days ago, I saw a reference to the fact that she covers a Bob Dylan song on it, but it didn’t particularly spark my curiosity. Today, however, I was more interested when I looked at Dylan-related news on Google and saw the title of the song pop out. It’s none other than his big hit from the 1950s, You Belong To Me. From the Telegraph:

The Italian-born model-turned-singer’s third album contains her own rendition of Bob Dylan’s dewy-eyed ballad You Belong To Me, with blatant references to exotic destinations she and the French President visited last year during their lightning romance.

“See the pyramids along the Nile… Just remember darling, all the while, you belong to me,” she croons in the Dylan song.

Egypt was the couple’s first foreign destination last December, where they were photographed smooching and strolling hand in hand by the edge of the desert sands.

[...]

“See the market place in old Algiers… Just remember till your dream appears, You belong to me,” the Dylan lyrics go on.

Commentators suggest this refers to the President’s trip to Algeria, when he left his fiancee alone back in Paris amid controversy over their public displays of affection.

The final line includes the words, “Fly the ocean in a silver plane… Just remember till you’re home again… You belong to me’.

This is said to be a parallel with Mr Sarkozy’s frequent overseas trips on the presidential jet.

French daily France-Soir, one of the first to hear Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy’s version of the track, said: “Bruni is an intelligent woman and will well aware of all the references to her own life and her romance with the president.

“She is far too clever for this to be a coincidence.”

Carla is clever indeed. The journalists involved in this story are somewhat less so. Actually it’s more of a mind-boggling laziness, in the age of the internet and Allmusic.com. A quick check would have told them, for instance, that Bob Dylan was a precocious eleven-year-old when Jo Stafford had her big hit with his song in 1952. It kind of makes you wonder what eventually led him to run away to New York and a hard-scrabble existence, with all those royalties rolling in to the homestead in Hibbing.

Alright. Bob Dylan is generally believed to have recorded his lovely acoustic version of the song You Belong To Me during the Good As I Been To You sessions, which would be 1992. It wasn’t released on that album but appeared on the soundtrack of the film “Natural Born Killers” in 1994. Who actually did write the song? The consensus is that it was basically written by one Chilton Price. For business reasons, she then split the writing credit with Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart. First recorded by a singer named Sue Thompson, it became a multi-million seller when sung by the aforementioned Jo Stafford.

Personally, until I heard Bob’s recording of it, I always thought of it as a Dean Martin song. And honestly — although I absolutely love Dylan’s version, which features a truly wonderful and heartbreaking vocal performance — I still really think of it as a Dino song. (And then Dylan later did a cover of another Dino song, of-course, and that was Return To Me which was released on a “Sopranos” soundtrack album. I, for one, am eagerly awaiting his version of On An Evening In Roma. )

You can find audio of Bob’s version of You Belong To Me on YouTube, but here, then, is that scamp Dean Martin, delivering what is a pretty awesome vocal performance of his own. Although you might not be able to believe that he means every word of this song, you can believe that he wants her to believe that he does, and that’s a sincerity of sorts, isn’t it?

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• Feel the power
• While on others thou art calling
• Not so radical