Françoise Hardy’s favourite Bob Dylan song
France was one of the most significant contributors to the development of popular culture in the 1960s, with many musicians, filmmakers, and other famous figures leaving a lasting impact on the world. While the French New Wave was in full swing, transforming the course of modern cinema, musicians like Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Dutronc, Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy were dominating the country’s musical scene.
Hardy shared her first song, ‘Tous les garçons et les filles’, when she was 18, releasing her debut album of the same name a few months later. As the ‘60s progressed, Hardy was recognised for her talents as a musician, as well as appreciated for her style, subsequently becoming a French icon. She starred in several movies, such as Roger Vadim’s Château en Suède and Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin, although music remained her main passion.
Hardy consistently released albums over the following decades, releasing her latest, Personne d’autre, in 2018. The musician has created countless classic French tunes, such as ‘Comment te dire adieu’, ‘Voilà’ and ‘Le temps de l’amour’.
In the mid-1960s, she met Bob Dylan, a musician she greatly admired, who was infatuated with the French singer. Hardy was unaware that Dylan felt so strongly for her, and her lack of ability to speak strong English meant that their meeting was dominated by singing and sharing music rather than talking.
He played her a track called ‘Just Like A Woman’, which she revealed in a Pitchfork interview to be one of her favourites. “Dylan has composed and recorded a lot of marvellous songs, but this one is really moving,” she explained.
Hardy revealed that Dylan “seemed very shy” when he played the piece, and her poor English meant that she “didn’t really understand the words for ‘Just Like a Woman’” at the time. She added, “I only understood, ‘You make love just like a woman/Then you ache just like a woman/But you break just like a little girl,’ which was moving to me, very sentimental.”
The track appeared on Dylan’s 1965 album Blonde on Blonde; however, many people, unlike Hardy, are not fans of the lyrics. Predominantly, because of the lines listed above, several critics have labelled the song as sexist, although this still remains a topic of debate.
Hardy doesn’t seem to agree, thinking of Dylan as more of a true romantic. She continues her discussion of the track by talking about the letters that he wrote to the French icon, presumably confessing his feelings. She said, “He was impressed with me, but not by the singer; by the girl, I think. He had a kind of romantic fixation on a photo of me, but I didn’t take it too seriously at that time. Recently, I got two drafts of letters written by him for me, and I finally realised that he was very serious about this fixation when he was very young. It moved me deeply when I read those letters.”
Revisit the song below.
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