Bee Wilson on Edith Piaf

During and after the war, [Piaf’s] myth shifted again. Her collaboration with Asso was at an end and she started to work with new lyricists, notably Henri Contet and Michel Emer, whose style departed from the realist tradition. She read hundreds of songs before finding one that suited her persona, and even then, she worked for days with the composers and lyricists until every element in a song matched her character. ‘What we write for her is babble,’ Contet once said; ‘she turns it into cries, pleas and prayers.’ In No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, Carolyn Burke describes Piaf’s working methods, sitting for hours at the grand piano, stopping only to eat steak covered with garlic and to drink mint sirop. Her composer Marguerite Monnot would arrive on a motorbike in the afternoons and they worked together for hours. Much as she respected Monnot, Piaf never allowed a composer complete control over the music, humming or playing until a tune felt right to her. As Looseley writes, ‘increasingly, the narrator-in-chief of the imagined Piaf was Piaf herself.’