A collection of the now 80 years old Canadian singer Ginette Raynault. Early on she chose to write her artist’s name phonetically as Reno. Because that is how you pronounce it in Canadian French. I never heard of her before, and I don’t quite know why I bought her record. It was probably cheap. I do love the song The windmills of your mind, chances are that is what made me choose it.
Windmills was written in 1968 as Les Moulins de mon cœur for the movie The Thomas Crown affair. It was sung in that movie by the English actor Noel Harrison, but already in a translated version. A translation that didn’t come without conflicts: British-born Harrison knew that in the expression the sun shone the last word is pronounced short. But the full text: Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own / Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone wouldn’t rime. The writer insisted he would sing it like it would rime, with a long o, like “shown”. The stubborn singer got his way: in the recorded version he sings in the right kind of English. And so is Reno on this record. A more famous version by Dusty Springfield however, is not.