As a singer and songwriter, Carla Bruni usually follows the labyrinthine tracks in French music established by artists such as Georges Brassens, Jane Birkin, and Pierre Barouh. Therefore, cutting a collection of standards from rock, pop, and jazz might seem out of character. The songs on French Touch are those Bruni sang and played on the guitar between the ages of nine and 29. The album was initiated by Grammy-winning producer, arranger (and then-head of Verve Records) David Foster. He was knocked out by a Bruni performance in Los Angeles and offered to produce an album. She is accompanied by her regular band and a slew of studio aces including drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist Dean Parks, and harmonica ace Mickey Raphael -- who appears on a lovely, Caribbean-inspired version of "Crazy" that also features its composer, Willie Nelson in duet.While these readings are intimate, they are imbued without nostalgia or artifice. Foster arranges these songs according to Bruni's particular needs as a singer: her breathy contralto, though always intimate and tender, is surprisingly expressive in the English language. She opens with a moody yet sparse read of Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" as a poignant ballad with Cyril Barbessol's ghostly piano, minimal percussion, strings, and nylon-string and slide guitars. Bruni follows with reading of the Clash's "Jimmy Jazz," complete with fingerpops and Fats Waller-esque piano, muted trumpet, and clarinet derived from early-'30s jazz. The Rolling Stones' "Miss You" is viewed through the Barry White and Love Unlimited production aesthetic, with strings swirling atop the airy, funky disco backbeat, hand percussion, and nylon-string guitar. ABBA's "The Winner Takes It All" is delivered sincerely, but its string-drenched chart is twee and forgettable. The reinvention of "Highway to Hell" as a slippery jazz-inflected blues is anything but, with its swinging horns, electric piano, and bumping bassline. The gorgeous cabaret-tinged reading of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" is imbued with a flawless balance of innocent longing and moody introspection. It's followed -- with a nod and a wink given to her husband Nicolas Sarkozy's difficulties during his time as France's president -- by a too-sweet "Stand by Your Man" that weds Cafe Saravah's nouveau chanson breeziness, upscale honky tonk, and smooth pop. Bruni closes the set with two gorgeous American pop standards: "Please Don't Kiss Me" is modeled directly on Rita Hayworth's version from the 1947 film The Lady from Shanghai. It's juxtaposed with Johnny Mercer's "Moon River," rendered without any of the stylistic artifice of the great pop stylists. Bruni's version is modeled on Audrey Hepburn's singing of it in Breakfast at Tiffany's alone on a windowsill. Though buoyed by an elegant yet economic use of strings, it nonetheless recollects that iconic silver screen moment. The songs on French Touch are idiosyncratic and free of drama. But they are chock-full of tenderness; Bruni delivers them with keen insight into the lyric meanings these melodies convey.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

Considering that Carla Bruni is an Italian tire-manufacturing heiress, a former Paris supermodel, and France's President Nicolas Sarcozy's wife, it's a safe bet that she didn't cut this fine debut album for the money. The feeling of her having nothing to prove imbues these songs with a catlike comfort that goes right from the ears into one's aching muscles and joints, past any language barrier (all the songs are in French) or prejudice against supermodel musical talent. Bruni's singing voice is warm, sultry, and languid with just a touch of a rasp, as if she's just woken from a wonderful nap, and rumor has it she wrote, sang, and played acoustic guitar for all the tracks while barefoot. Louis Bertignac (Telephone) produced this album and plays electric lead guitar, both evoking mellow '70s Eric Clapton (a former lover of Bruni's) and that era's folk-rock, particularly on "Tout le Monde" and the liltingly sweet "La Ciel Dans Une Chambre." Other songs, such as the title track, bounce along with a more traditional cafe oomph, but not enough to disturb the pervading air of delicious jet set languor, which comes refreshingly sans ennui or extraneous production gloss.© Erich Kuersten /TiVo

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After the runaway success of her charming, folksy first album Quelqu'un M'a Dit, Carla Bruni's sophomore effort takes a more difficult route and sees her setting canonical works by such poets as Yeats and Emily Dickinson to music, often calamitously. W.H. Auden's "At Last the Secret Is Out" offers a case in point. Set to a brisk Jack Johnson-style swinging guitar, the poem becomes stripped of all its meaning: no one word is allowed to stand out, as each line is madly shoehorned into a sensible rhythm, and the wistful, yearning tone of the poem gets lost in the breezy melody of the song. Therein lies the problem. Bruni's blues guitar template is too rigid to allow these words to breathe. The lines "Wrapping that foul body up/In as foul a rag" in Yeats' "Those Dancing Days Are Gone" are delivered almost winsomely, where in fact the word "foul" should be allowed to drag, and to weigh down the rest of the line. Metered verse cannot fit this sort of verse-verse-chorus model. Of course, an album must be judged on its musical merits, and the overall mixture of rhythm and pedal steel guitars, with a touch of harmonica here and there, is a serviceable foil to Bruni's smoky voice. But even here, one would wish for more clarity in the line readings: the breathlessness of her singing means that sentences often fizzle out. Dorothy Parker's stark "Afternoon" is maltreated in this way, as is Emily Dickinson's wonderful poem "I Felt My Life with Both My Hands" -- and the absurd jauntiness of both songs is almost unbearable. The one highlight of the set is the doo wop piano-and-guitar jam on Dickinson's "If You Were Coming in the Fall," which lends itself oddly well to Bruni's sauce. But this is an impersonal set of disparate poems set often unimaginatively to incongruous arrangements. It is a brave failure, but a failure nonetheless.© Caspar Salmon /TiVo

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The title of Carla Bruni's 2008 album, Comme Si de Rien N'Etait (As If Nothing Had Happened), is a good joke. After all, since her last album Bruni fell into a whirlwind romance with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and ended up marrying him and becoming the "First Lady" of France. That's a pretty big "something," and indeed it isn't often that the romance of a singer and a president is chronicled on record as it is here -- though you need to be fluent in French to catch the details, since only her cover of '50s pop classic "You Belong to Me" (which is a witty nod to a semi-scandalous trip the couple took to Egypt and other exotic locales before they were wed) is in English. You don't need to know exactly what's going on lyrically, because the intimate-sounding arrangements on the ballads and the light and breezy sound of the more uptempo tunes clue you in that there is romance in the air. Along with the nice arrangements, the best thing about the album is Bruni's intimate and sultry singing. She can purr like a Gainsbourg girl, strut sassily, or croon quite tenderly -- sometimes all within the same song. Most of the time she sounds like you always hoped a '60s French bombshell would sound but never quite did (think Bardot or Birkin). Not surprisingly, Bruni appears totally in control throughout the album, which could be down to her having written almost all of the songs herself, or could be down to her new position in the world. Whatever the reason, it makes for quite an improvement over her previous album, No Promises, and fulfills the promise of her charming debut, Quelqu'un M'a Dit. It is probably the best album released by a "First Lady," but beyond that, it's a pleasant, sometimes compelling album by a singer/songwriter with some stories to tell and a lovely way of telling them.© Tim Sendra /TiVo

Little French Songs is Carla Bruni's first album since 2008's Comme Si de Rien N'Etait, and her first outing as France's former first lady. Reception in the English-speaking press on the European side of the Atlantic has been middling at best, while in France the album has been greeted with more enthusiasm. The truth may lie somewhere in between for most, but for those with at least a working knowledge of the French chanson tradition, both in its formal sense and through its various revolutionary phases, they will find that most of this fits squarely inside it (though that knowledge is not necessary to enjoy the album). One can hear Bruni's love of artists from Georges Brassens and Charles Trénet to Pierre Barouh and Serge Gainsbourg in these simple yet elegant tunes. She wrote most of the album herself. Its economic production is driven by a nylon-string guitar in the forefront, adorned by some sparse brass here, a minimal harmonium or Wurlitzer there, a drum or percussion elsewhere. On "Mon Raymond," she celebrates her husband Nicolas Sarkozy while utterly -- and comedically -- humanizing him. By contrast, she wryly skewers his successor French President François Hollande ("Le Pingouin") as boring and without personality -- indulging in sass befitting Brigitte Fontaine. Her breezy yet moving adaptation of Trénet's nugget "Dolce Francia" contains a spoken word introduction with Taofik Farah's guitar and Ballake Sissoko's kora atop a breezy violincello and shakers. She makes this classic her own. "Prière," a co-write between Bruni and Julien Clerc, channels Brassens' inspiration in her own idiosyncratic way. One can hear Barouh and Gainsbourg in the Caribbean-cum-samba rhythmic twist in "Chez Keith et Anita." It's a clever song about finding peace and quiet at the home of Keith Richards and former girlfriend Anita Pallenberg circa 1970 -- Marianne Faithful is apparently also there, smelling of vanilla. Sissoko also appears on the lithe, beautiful "Liberté" near the set's end. This is not a political song -- at least not in the usual sense. Here, as chanson meets the bohemian cafe, freedom is tender, bittersweet, and regarded through the gaze of memory. Little French Songs is exactly what it says it is. Bruni's songwriting is deceptive in its limpid simplicity, full of reverie, wit, and the directness of her breathy voice, which is well traveled but contains delight at its heart.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

As a singer and songwriter, Carla Bruni usually follows the labyrinthine tracks in French music established by artists such as Georges Brassens, Jane Birkin, and Pierre Barouh. Therefore, cutting a collection of standards from rock, pop, and jazz might seem out of character. The songs on French Touch are those Bruni sang and played on the guitar between the ages of nine and 29. The album was initiated by Grammy-winning producer, arranger (and then-head of Verve Records) David Foster. He was knocked out by a Bruni performance in Los Angeles and offered to produce an album. She is accompanied by her regular band and a slew of studio aces including drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist Dean Parks, and harmonica ace Mickey Raphael -- who appears on a lovely, Caribbean-inspired version of "Crazy" that also features its composer, Willie Nelson in duet.While these readings are intimate, they are imbued without nostalgia or artifice. Foster arranges these songs according to Bruni's particular needs as a singer: her breathy contralto, though always intimate and tender, is surprisingly expressive in the English language. She opens with a moody yet sparse read of Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" as a poignant ballad with Cyril Barbessol's ghostly piano, minimal percussion, strings, and nylon-string and slide guitars. Bruni follows with reading of the Clash's "Jimmy Jazz," complete with fingerpops and Fats Waller-esque piano, muted trumpet, and clarinet derived from early-'30s jazz. The Rolling Stones' "Miss You" is viewed through the Barry White and Love Unlimited production aesthetic, with strings swirling atop the airy, funky disco backbeat, hand percussion, and nylon-string guitar. ABBA's "The Winner Takes It All" is delivered sincerely, but its string-drenched chart is twee and forgettable. The reinvention of "Highway to Hell" as a slippery jazz-inflected blues is anything but, with its swinging horns, electric piano, and bumping bassline. The gorgeous cabaret-tinged reading of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" is imbued with a flawless balance of innocent longing and moody introspection. It's followed -- with a nod and a wink given to her husband Nicolas Sarkozy's difficulties during his time as France's president -- by a too-sweet "Stand by Your Man" that weds Cafe Saravah's nouveau chanson breeziness, upscale honky tonk, and smooth pop. Bruni closes the set with two gorgeous American pop standards: "Please Don't Kiss Me" is modeled directly on Rita Hayworth's version from the 1947 film The Lady from Shanghai. It's juxtaposed with Johnny Mercer's "Moon River," rendered without any of the stylistic artifice of the great pop stylists. Bruni's version is modeled on Audrey Hepburn's singing of it in Breakfast at Tiffany's alone on a windowsill. Though buoyed by an elegant yet economic use of strings, it nonetheless recollects that iconic silver screen moment. The songs on French Touch are idiosyncratic and free of drama. But they are chock-full of tenderness; Bruni delivers them with keen insight into the lyric meanings these melodies convey.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

Little French Songs is Carla Bruni's first album since 2008's Comme Si de Rien N'Etait, and her first outing as France's former first lady. Reception in the English-speaking press on the European side of the Atlantic has been middling at best, while in France the album has been greeted with more enthusiasm. The truth may lie somewhere in between for most, but for those with at least a working knowledge of the French chanson tradition, both in its formal sense and through its various revolutionary phases, they will find that most of this fits squarely inside it (though that knowledge is not necessary to enjoy the album). One can hear Bruni's love of artists from Georges Brassens and Charles Trénet to Pierre Barouh and Serge Gainsbourg in these simple yet elegant tunes. She wrote most of the album herself. Its economic production is driven by a nylon-string guitar in the forefront, adorned by some sparse brass here, a minimal harmonium or Wurlitzer there, a drum or percussion elsewhere. On "Mon Raymond," she celebrates her husband Nicolas Sarkozy while utterly -- and comedically -- humanizing him. By contrast, she wryly skewers his successor French President François Hollande ("Le Pingouin") as boring and without personality -- indulging in sass befitting Brigitte Fontaine. Her breezy yet moving adaptation of Trénet's nugget "Dolce Francia" contains a spoken word introduction with Taofik Farah's guitar and Ballake Sissoko's kora atop a breezy violincello and shakers. She makes this classic her own. "Prière," a co-write between Bruni and Julien Clerc, channels Brassens' inspiration in her own idiosyncratic way. One can hear Barouh and Gainsbourg in the Caribbean-cum-samba rhythmic twist in "Chez Keith et Anita." It's a clever song about finding peace and quiet at the home of Keith Richards and former girlfriend Anita Pallenberg circa 1970 -- Marianne Faithful is apparently also there, smelling of vanilla. Sissoko also appears on the lithe, beautiful "Liberté" near the set's end. This is not a political song -- at least not in the usual sense. Here, as chanson meets the bohemian cafe, freedom is tender, bittersweet, and regarded through the gaze of memory. Little French Songs is exactly what it says it is. Bruni's songwriting is deceptive in its limpid simplicity, full of reverie, wit, and the directness of her breathy voice, which is well traveled but contains delight at its heart.© Thom Jurek /TiVo