Röyksopp / Melody A.M. / 2001
Eple
wistful, warm, melancholic-but-convivial
The lyrics supplied here do not match the actual song: Röyksopp's "Eple" is a well-known instrumental track from Melody A.M. with no vocals or words at all. The text provided is a French-language piece imagining an afterlife bar populated by dead poets, singers, and artists -- it reads like the lyrics to a French chanson (this text is widely associated with the song "Mon bistrot préféré," often credited to Renaud), not anything by Röyksopp.
mortality artistic camaraderie nostalgia the afterlife as a bohemian gathering place memory versus the living
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses the reader/listener directly, describing a recurring fantasy or vision of an ideal bar in heaven where deceased friends and cultural heroes gather; the voice is intimate and confiding, that of someone who prefers the dead's company to the living's.
What happens
The speaker describes visiting an imagined celestial bistro where he drinks and talks with a long parade of dead French writers, singers, cartoonists, and actors. Over the course of the piece he moves from general description of the setting into a roll call of specific figures and their remembered quirks, before pulling back at the end to admit the fantasy lacks women, to declare that these dead companions feel more alive to him than his living contemporaries, and to close with a wish that death itself deliver him to this same tavern.
How it's built
The song is built as a cumulative list -- a catalogue technique -- moving through named figures in loose clusters (poets, singers, cartoonists, actors), before a short closing turn breaks the enumeration to reflect directly on mortality and companionship.
Section by section
Opening frame
The speaker establishes the premise plainly: a favorite bar exists somewhere in the sky where he is sometimes welcomed, setting a tone that is casual and habitual rather than mystical or frightened.ateral catalogue that follows.The poets and singers gather here first.roll call begins with literary and musical giants.the poets, singers, and playful barroom talk.commcommentary_placeholder
The poets and chansonniers
The speaker moves quickly into naming beloved French singer-poets and writers, sketching each with a small physical or characteristic detail rather than a full biography, which gives the sense of familiar friends rather than distant icons.
The middle catalogue
The list widens to include novelists, comedians, and cartoonists, mixing high literary figures with popular entertainers, which flattens hierarchy -- everyone drinks together regardless of their era or field.effectively suggesting that in memory all cultural heroes become equally present.commentary_end
Musicians and actors
Figures associated with song and film appear, including a pianist performing one of his own compositions, reinforcing the idea that this heaven is defined by ongoing performance and conversation rather than stillness or judgment.
The mention of suicide
A brief acknowledgment that some of these figures took their own lives introduces a darker undertone, reframing the earlier warmth: this is a company partly defined by early or difficult deaths, and the speaker treats that fact with unsentimental acceptance.
Closing turn
The speaker steps outside the fantasy to admit its limitation -- few women appear in it -- and then makes his real claim: these dead companions feel more real to him than the living people around him now..vivants dans ma mémoire.this closing self-awareness gives the piece its emotional weight.quotecommentary_final
Final wish
The last lines address death directly as a personified figure, with the speaker hoping that when death comes for him it will lead him to this same gathering of friends, turning the whole piece into a kind of prayer or wish for a good death.commconclusion.commentary_true_final
Craft
- catalogue / list structure
- The bulk of the piece is an accumulating inventory of real cultural figures, which builds a sense of a crowded, lively afterlife through sheer volume of named company.
- personification
- Death is figured as a scythe-wielding female character who might take the speaker's hand, turning mortality into an intimate, almost companionable event rather than an abstract ending.
- irony
- The dead are described as more vivid and present than living acquaintances, inverting the usual hierarchy of life over death.
- metonymy
- Named figures stand in for entire artistic traditions -- chanson, poetry, cinema, cartooning -- so the bistro becomes a compressed cultural memory rather than a literal place.
Reading it
Read straightforwardly, this is an elegy disguised as a barroom scene: the speaker copes with the deaths of people who shaped his cultural and emotional life by imagining them continuing to live, drink, and talk together, which lets him visit grief without despair. An alternative reading treats the piece as a meditation on cultural inheritance -- the 'bistro' is really the speaker's internalized library and record collection, and drinking with the dead is a metaphor for how thoroughly their work has become part of his inner life, more vivid to him than his actual social world.
Context
I want to flag directly that this text is not the lyric content of Röyksopp's 'Eple.' 'Eple' (Norwegian for 'apple') is an instrumental electronic track from the 2001 album Melody A.M. and contains no vocals or lyrics whatsoever -- it is built from a looping accordion-like sample and a simple melodic hook. The French-language text provided appears to belong to a different song entirely, one built around a roll call of deceased French cultural figures (poets, chansonniers, filmmakers, cartoonists). I have analyzed the text as given, but readers should know it cannot actually be attributed to this Röyksopp track.
Listen for
- the shift in tone between the quirky descriptions of poets and the blunt mention of suicide
- the repeated closing plea, which functions almost like a chorus despite the song's list-like verse structure
- the way named figures span very different eras and disciplines yet are treated as contemporaries
- the brief moment of self-aware humor about the fantasy's lack of women, which humanizes the speaker
- the final address to death itself, which reframes the entire song as a kind of wish or prayer
About Röyksopp
Röyksopp are a Norwegian electronic music duo from Tromsø formed in 1998. The duo consists of childhood friends Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland, who formed Röyksopp during the Bergen Wave.
1998 - present / Norway
Full biography and catalogue