MONTREAL — Powered by TikTok, the song Je te laisseai des mots by Quebecer Patrick Watson has become the first French-language song to surpass 1 billion listens on Spotify, the streaming platform announced Tuesday.
“It’s a dizzying number,” Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Watson posted on Facebook on Wednesday. “It’s a huge number, almost impossible to comprehend.”
“I grew up in Montreal and am extremely proud that a French song has crossed the language barrier,” continued Patrick Watson. The Quebec artist thus ranks ahead of other French-speaking artists with global influence, such as the Belgian Stromae or the Franco-Malian Aya Nakamura.
Patrick Watson, represented by the Montreal independent label Secret City Records, composed this song almost 15 years ago, for the film Mothers and Daughters with Catherine Deneuve released in 2009.
The piano-vocal song saw renewed interest in 2019 on YouTube in a video pairing the melody with archival footage.
The melancholic anthem was then used to accompany scenes of everyday life in tens of thousands of videos on TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic, with users adding melodrama to snippets of their everyday lives.
Celebrities like Justin Bieber also helped make the song popular among a wide audience.
“The modern pop song is now the soundtrack to people’s home movies,” Watson told the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail in 2022, speaking of its viral popularity.
“The modern hit is the song that makes your daily life more interesting and romantic” on social networks, he added.
Je te laisserai des mots was the most-streamed French-language song worldwide on Spotify over the past 12 months, the platform announced in September, surpassing tracks like Stromae’s Alors on danse.
Patrick Watson’s music has been featured in the popular American TV series Grey’s Anatomy and The Walking Dead, and he and his eponymous band won the prestigious Canadian Polaris Music Prize in 2007.
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