Jesse Cook - Once

Much has been written of my teenage summers in Arles, and the influence that France’s Camargue region and Gipsy music has had on my development as a musician. But I have never spoken of my earlier years in a different, lesser-known part of France: the Aveyron. I haven’t been avoiding the subject, it’s just never come up, probably because there was no music connection in the Aveyron to discuss during interviews. In many ways, the Aveyron was France for me, or my France, the France of my earliest memories, and my childhood dreams. Though I was born in Paris, for the first few years of my life my family lived in the south of France, in an old stone house with no running water. It was like growing up in the middle ages. In fact, many of the buildings were built as far back as the 13th century. Our house had stone walls, 3 feet thick, and giant fireplaces, stone sinks, and bread ovens from when our house had been the village bakery in some long forgotten past. And even after my family mov