Au Revoir Simone met David Lynch at the Manhattan branch of Barnes & Noble where he read from his book, Catching the Big Fish. Entrusted with providing the musical accompaniment to the Eraserhead director’s New York poetry reading, the band chose the softer songs from 2005’s mini album Verses of Comfort and debut The Bird of Music. Au Revoir Simone played the songs, David read, and then they both afterwards were interviewed. In conversation, he never got into specifics of why exactly he liked the three girls. But he was always really quite sweet to them. “He just said he found it really pretty,” Simone chanteuse Annie Hart says. A vocal fan, Lynch both publicly and repeatedly told audiences along his book tour about the three singers, Heather D’Angelo, Annie Hart and Erika Forster, collectively named after a line in Tim Burton’s 1985 cult Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. The name sounded raspier when he said it though. When he enunciated it for the national presses around America in his Missoula, Montana drawl, inherited from his Department of Agriculture research scientist father, Donald. It would go more like “Oh-Revwahhhhhh see-moan” every time he mentioned them. And he mentioned them often. “Au Revoir Simone are innocent, hip and new,” he told one US newspaper. “He definitely helped us get a higher profile and lots of new fans,” says Annie, who, like her other two bandmates tinkles the ivories as well as warbles, and, for today at least, works as representative for the New York trio. “We’re lucky he took to us,” Annie says. She remembers their first meeting well, in which the “taking to” happened. “He had, and has, a beautiful way of completely changing the energy in the room when he walks in it,” Annie says.  “Everyone just seems to relax a little more.”  The event they were doing was absolutely mobbed with throngs of fans literally grabbing at Annie and friends in order to get into the event. In order to get to Lynch. The band were already nervous about playing for David. Rumour had reached them that they were handpicked by the very man himself. “Crazy” is the word Annie chooses to describe the scene, though she later changes it to “Terrifying.” 

The show he invited them to play months later in Paris was similar. Already acquaintences, Lynch asked Annie and bandmates to provide interlude to an exhibition he was heading. This time he compared the singers to Twin Peaks alumni Julee Cruise, whose eerie dream pop could send chills down the spine of even those with the hardest hearts. After the compliment, the three singers met Julee, who was also in attendence at the Paris exhibition. David expressed how important it was that Annie and the girls met her. Julee later admired the band from the side when Annie broke into the chorus of The Lucky One, a soppy-but-not-too-soppy romantic aside to relationships, the rekindling of love, and the spark between two lovers. “It feels like a long time ago and we were just kids then, so I'm sure I acted totally dorky.  Actually, I act dorky all the time, so nothing's really changed,” Annie says. Her awkwardness could have only been aided by the fact she was a Lynch fan prior to finding out he was an Au Revoir Simone fan in return. Annie wasn't allowed to watch Twin Peaks when she was a kid, but she got into his work when she was studying film in college. “It simultaneously freaked me out and mentally twisted me… but in a good way,” she says. “I loved it.” So they alienated Lynch with their awkwardness? “Oh! We still see him from time to time,” Annie casually adds. “He still tells us how much he enjoys our music.”  

It’s a familiar story for Au Revoir Simone. The keyboard-heavy threesome meet an iconic figure. The figure becomes endeared to them and their dreamy electronic indie pop. Pants-charming ensues, and said figure ends up making a lasting bond. 

A second example: in 2007, Au Revoir Simone toured with Air. “Air were so sweet to us and showed us about all their keyboards and really opened up the idea for us of a seemingly simple band being quite loud and having a strong emotional impact.” Arguably a live band, Air even helped iron out the kinks of Au Revoir Simone’s live act. Originally little more than a collection of nervous, socially awkward girls huddled together in a squashed V, racing to complete a set of mellow pop, the gig-personas and live versions of the girls are now noticeably much more comfortable. “We've certainly gotten more comfortable and confident from playing so much, with people who believe in us and inspire us,” Annie says, once famed for her mousy and meek chronic shyness. “Now for the first time we’d consider things like a lighting designer, and maybe some accordion and vibraphone.” Air helped with this newfound confidence as a live act? “Oh sure! They really believed in us as a band.” 

Another example: fellow Brooklynites We Are Scientists were so enamored with the collective’s glorious Moshi Moshi melodies, singer Keith Murray did everything he could to wangle a guest appearance on the new album, and laboured his record label until they allowed Au Revoir Simone to support them on their UK tour. “They fought hard to get us on that tour,” recalls Annie. Entranced by Annie and co, as the story always goes, Keith even managed to get the girls soundchecks, a luxury they had yet to experience, as well as runners and the perk of room service and hot meals every night after a gig. Completely out of respect and “band love” for Au Revoir Simone. 

In fact, the only time any member of Au Revoir Simone has had any bad experience with meeting a celebrity was a disappointing face-to-face with Bremerton, Washington native and indie darling Ben Gibbard, of Death Cab for Cutie, The Postal Service, and All-Time Quarterback fame. “But I wasn’t disappointed in Ben,” Annie says. “I was only disappointed in myself.” Gibbard came to one of Au Revoir Simone’s shows in Seattle. And, Annie assures, it happened to be one of the worst shows they’d ever had: bad sound on stage, being really sick right before the gig, having a heckler in the audience.  Afterwards Gibbard was in a circle of people congratulating Annie for the good show and she got so nervous she couldn't even look at him. “I'm thoroughly a believer that all people, famous or not, are the same, so it's not like me to be star struck, but I was certainly embarrassed to have played a crap show in front of someone I really respect,” Annie laments. So he was the only bigwig not to succumb to the usual pants charming ritual: meet Au Revoir Simone. Become endeared to them and their dreamy electronic indie pop. End up making a lasting bond? “He was really complimentary and said he was a fan and that he liked the music,” Annie says. Despite any naysaying, it sounds like the charm of Au Revoir Simone striking again to us. Business as usual. 

It’s easy to see why the bands cohorts and industry messers fall so effortlessly in love with Au Revoir Simone. Their music, with it’s innocent, Child-like naivity set to an inoffensive plinky-plonk of vintage keyboards and mellowed synths is the sort of dreamy ambient soundscape that lulls you into a soft romantic-tinged trance. Warm, melodic, hopeful, optimistic, the gaggle of crooining women, with hearts on their sleeves and pretty much every other appendage, manage to take the seemingly strung-out, twee and generally overmarketted love song and kneed it into something pure-sounding. Something superfluously sweet, but never saccharine. Never tangy. Never tart. What could have dissolved into a sickly cliche in high register becomes something much more palatable and relatable, broken down with crackly sing-a-long melodies crooned in the most beautiful sense of the word. And there’s the live drums, like on the band’s swansong The Bird of Music, and the wooden Casio case as a kick drum and cymbal on live sets and recordings. It is Surprisingly honest, despite the overbearing perkiness that, Annie ensures, is a reflection of the personalities involved, not a manifesto to cheer up the masses. You’ll never fall prey to Lily Allen or Kate Nash kitchen sink drama territory with Au Revoir Simone, “ I’ll have a piece of toast then tell you you’re shit, then Emmerdale comes on and we order a Chinese.” Instead you’re treated to wonderments, meanderings and poetic prose in which there always seems to be something hopeful and uplifting, even in the sad songs. It’s traditional love songs about traditional love. And, against all odds, in an era of head-in-the-oven angst, it surprisingly resonates. “Our music?” Asks Annie “We just like keyboards.” Well, at the hands of these three, the benefits are obvious, though the most important factor is merely that they make beautiful sounds. And the fact that the girls didn't know a few of the basic things, like, say, one person should probably cover the bass frequencies with her keyboard in at least most of a song, works only as a quirk. An endearing quality. And as for the frequented complaint that their music can be quite quiet and slight? “I think our new record is required listening at loud volume, at least once. How’s that for louder music!” 

New album Still Night, Still Light, looks set to improve on an already winning formula. Aside from having absorbed a lot more music along the way since recording Bird of Music, Annie and chums strove to record the album in a different process and make it sound more alive than their previous efforts. So they used a lot of amplifiers and effects boxes that they hadn't before, really opening up the soundscape. Just listen to first song Another Likely Story, an all-girls club celebration of the keyboard,  

suitably quiet and ambient – almost air-like, a full band replicated with a simple set of keyboards. At one point always containing a lush, sweeping sound. These are soundscapes rather than music tracks – dreamy episodes you imagine hearing in a desolate wasteland of white. The rest of the album too – Shadows, All or Nothing, The Last One – at times equally fun, enchanting and unarguably soul-bearing in its honesty. Powered by vintage keyboards, these are songs for lovers with credibility. It sounds as though these words have never before been sung, as though these words about love were created for Au Revoir Simone alone. Only they have sung them. Only they know the meanings to them. Only they have ever loved. As Lynch said, all those months ago, “They just sound really pretty.” 

Still Night, Still Light is available now via the Brooklyn trio’s own label, Our Secret Record Company.