Gal Musette Watching the Sky

Grace Freeman, better known as Gal Musette began writing songs for piano and guitar at the age of 10. She would go on to perform at Open mics in her hometown of San Clemente, CA. A bit later at just age 14, inspired by The Magnetic Fields’ triple album “69 Love Songs,” Gal recorded her own collection titled “70 Love Songs”. So impressed with her they were that she would join them on a few shows on their  Midwestern U.S. tour at the time as an opening act.

Her brief but promising stint with The Magnetic Fields would be the start of a beautiful career that’s still flourishing to this day. She had the opportunity to open shows for artists such as  Suzanne Vega, Todd Snyder, and Donavon Frankenreiter. in 2021, her Debut album, ” Backwards Lullaby,” featured renowned Canadian singer, songwriter, and composer Rufus Wainwright in a vocal duet.

As baroque as you want it, or as the name implies. Gal Musette is elegant, buoyant, exuberant, and complex. her every verse is penned with grace and delivered with a quasi-religious devotion to the craft, making her music feel laboriously shaped into this airy, delicacy that is almost a sin to consume… almost.

She looks and sounds dainty and elegant, but also far from weak. There’s a fierce confidence in her tone and the demeanour she carries herself with on every song, and that particular quality is very noticeable in her latest music video  “Je vois le Ciel”.

“Je Vois Le Ciel” or “I see the Sky” is written and sung entirely in French (giving deeper historical veracity to the baroqueness of the track, maybe?) and it is heavily inspired by surrealist French poetry, according to Gal herself. Translations of the text confirm that the song indeed talks about the passage of time and a cold, contemplative stillness that seems to overtake the narrator all throughout. “Je Vois Le Ciel” calls out to futility, it calls out to loneliness and the drudge of the mundane, and it does so with incredible charm and an almost playful attitude in its whimsical rhythms. The track includes a faint, ghostly theremin wail in the background that I think is supremely fitting for the Halloween season.

To complete the package, Gal shot a film-noir-inspired black-and-white music video for the song, relying on cultural familiarity with French Cinema tropes to really bring the aesthetic experience to its proper cusp. The music video, as absurdist as it may seem at times, is in its own way a perfect vision of the lyrical themes explored by the lyrics and vocals. Reminders of the passage of time are blatantly engraved into each shot, rhythmically edited to represent the doldrums of each day gnawing at Gal Musette’s character who then goes on to discover an older couple who seem to be deeply in love, developing a fascination and even an obsession with the special connection that they have and that her character obviously yearns.

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