The Air section of my record shelves has grown quite considerably over the last couple of years. To be fair, that’s not hard as there wasn’t really one at all until 2024, when I added the first three albums. Since then they’ve been joined by singles and, helped considerably by the recent run of reissues, more of the studio albums. The just-announced reissue of Love2 was immediately pre-ordered, with any luck we’ll get a repress of their last – Le voyage dans la lune – soon enough and I can complete the set.
Moon Safari alone, though, now accounts for four records in the collection. There’s the original album, the Live & Demos release from Record Store Day a couple of years back, this year’s RSD’s Moon Safari Live and Vegyn’s Blue Moon Safari remix/reimagining. I know; quite the deep-dive on Moon Safari.
There’s undoubtedly something about Air that appeals to the Francophile in me, but that alone doesn’t explain why I keep coming back to them or why that section of the shelves keeps expanding. Mostly it’s because Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel are just bloody brilliant musicians and because, even after all this time, I’ve never been entirely able to place their music anywhere. There’s so much in there that feels familiar, music that recalls different styles and different eras without ever really belonging to any of them. There are analogue synths, film soundtracks, electronica, easy listening and bits of the sixties and seventies floating around, but somehow the result has always seemed to stand slightly outside of time. Moon Safari is 28 years old now but it doesn’t really sound like an album from 1998 in the way that so many records I love from that year immediately do.
It’s also pretty much unimpeachable as far as I’m concerned. There are albums where, however much I love them, I’ll acknowledge the weaker track or the one that hasn’t aged particularly well. I’m not sure I could find one here. Perhaps because it felt ageless at the time and free of era-specific affectations that usually age an album. Even among all of that, though, All I Need has long been something more than simply my favourite track on Moon Safari. It’s one of my favourite songs full stop. Hence it’s inclusion in this series – which is slowly (thanks to my intermittent commitment to it) on its way to becoming a playlist of my favourite songs.
A large part of that is the almost instant calm it brings with it. There’s something about those opening seconds, the bass line and then Beth Hirsch’s voice coming in, that seems to physically slow everything down. Wherever I happen to be when I hear it, in my head the song feels like I’m standing on a beach on a summer evening. The heat of the day has gone but it’s still warm, everything has quietened down and I’m watching the tide breathe in and out, able to drift along with it for a few minutes without particularly caring about anything else.
Hirsch herself seems such an integral part of the song that it’s difficult to imagine All I Need without her. Though, you can get a strong impression of it from the track ‘Les professionnels’ on Premiers Symptômes, their first ep, that clearly contains the basis of that song.
Her involvement with Air, however, came about in a suitably casual, lassez-faire way. An American singer living in Paris at the time, she met Godin and Dunckel there (they were also living in Montmarte at the time) and ended up writing the lyrics and vocal melody after they gave her the music to work with. She would ultimately appear twice on Moon Safari, she’s also on You Make It Easy, and Godin later described her addition to Air’s sound as making them something akin to “space-age Carpenters”.
That’s actually a pretty decent description of All I Need. For all the electronics and Air’s particular brand of French retro-futurism, there’s something wonderfully old-fashioned about the song underneath it all. Hirsch’s vocal is intimate and un-showy while the music around her is doing far more than it initially appears to be doing, and there’s a slight melancholy running through everything that stops all that warmth ever becoming overly sweet.
Perhaps that’s also part of why it’s never dated for me. I can put on plenty of music from the late nineties and immediately be transported back to a particular period of my life. Sometimes that’s exactly why I’m putting it on in the first place. All I Need doesn’t do that, though. Despite having known it for years, I don’t associate it particularly strongly with being younger or with 1998 or even with when I first heard Moon Safari. It somehow still feels entirely present.
As the number of Air records occupying the shelves continues to increase, there are obviously plenty of other songs of theirs I love. I could probably make a fairly convincing case for several of them being among their best, and I’m sure I’ll eventually mumble about one or two of those as well elsewhere here. All I Need, though, remains the one I return to most often. There’s something about being able to disappear into that warmth, watch that imaginary tide for four-and-a-half minutes and allow everything else to slow down with it that I’ll never tire of.
