Fleur De Lys

Excerpts from a now deleted blog post from Juliana on her official site in 2008:

I took a My Bloody Valentine song — “Only Shallow” (one of the most gorgeous, hypnotic songs ever recorded) — and its four intro chords, with their rhythm, and switched them around so that the last two chords were in reverse order to what was on the MBV recording.

I wanted “Fleur De Lys” to rhyme, in French, partly just because I thought it would be funny. The awkwardness/retardedness of the words, translated to English, is due to the fact that I was bending and shaping the phrases (with my limited knowledge of spoken/sung French) to try and make them fit into rhyming patterns. In my effort to make it rhyme I sacrificed some coherence in both the English and the French (though I tried to be as grammatically correct as I could) and that makes the song funnier. Keep in mind that I wasn’t fluent in French and that this song was a goofy (but sincere, sort of) throwaway, in terms of content, utilizing a classic “I want you/I want you to want me/Why don’t you want me?” type of scenario. This is, I think, how my bad, sort-of French translates: