Bonjour dear listeners for this special season of the Duolingo French

podcast we are celebrating the arts. We're revisiting some of our favorite

episodes featuring singers, dancers, actors, and other performers in the francophone world.

Today's episode is from June 2020, featuring Arno Basqueur, who made a radical change later in life. He decided to start a new career

impersonating one of France's most beloved male singers, Jacques Brell.

The catch, he had never sung professionally before.

Keep listening to his story,

and be sure to stay until the end

for an update on how far Arno has come. And now, on to the episode. In 2014, Arno Basqueur was the father of two living in Paris with his family.

At 43, he'd already had three careers. He'd been a cop, a private detective, and for the last three years he'd worked as an independent construction worker, an artisan, but he was getting tired of it.

It's a myth difficult.

We're fact it to it.

It's also a military.

Sousvant we're the one of his family.

I want to be the ones of his family. I would have to do this medias,

but I'd have not to go after another.

Arno got a job renovating a cabin in the woods.

He was working on his own, cut off from the rest of the world.

Desperate for some entertainment, he dashed to the tiny village nearby and bought a random CD,

Mercedes.

It was a best of, from one of the most popular francophone singer-songwriters of all time.

A Belgian man who had died in 1978, Jacques Brad.

...