No Promises (Carla Bruni album)

No Promises is the second album by the Italian-French singer-songwriter Carla Bruni. It was recorded during 2006 and released in January 2007. While Bruni's début album, Quelqu'un m'a dit, was sung in French; this album was sung in English.

No Promises
Studio album by Carla Bruni
Released	2007-01-15
Recorded	2006
Genre	Folk, blues, country
Language	English
Label	Naïve
Carla Bruni chronology
Quelqu'un m'a dit (2002) No Promises (2007) Comme si de rien n'était (2008)
Singles from No Promises
"Those Dancing Days Are Gone" Released: December 2006 "If You Were Coming in the Fall" Released: February 2006

All tracks on the album are adapted by Bruni from poems by 19th- and 20th-century authors.

Review

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[1]
The Observer	[2]
PopMatters	(6/10)[3]

• Allmusic said:

"After the runaway success of her charming, folksy first album Quelqu'un M'a Dit, Carla Bruni's sophomore effort takes a more difficult route and sees her setting canonical works by such poets as Yeats and Emily Dickinson to music, often calamitously. W.H. Auden's "At Last the Secret Is Out" offers a case in point. Set to a brisk Jack Johnson-style swinging guitar, the poem becomes stripped of all its meaning: no one word is allowed to stand out, as each line is madly shoehorned into a sensible rhythm, and the wistful, yearning tone of the poem gets lost in the breezy melody of the song. Therein lies the problem. Bruni's blues guitar template is too rigid to allow these words to breathe. The lines "Wrapping that foul body up/In as foul a rag" in Yeats' "Those Dancing Days Are Gone" are delivered almost winsomely, where in fact the word "foul" should be allowed to drag, and to weigh down the rest of the line. Metered verse cannot fit this sort of verse-verse-chorus model. Of course, an album must be judged on its musical merits, and the overall mixture of rhythm and pedal steel guitars, with a touch of harmonica here and there, is a serviceable foil to Bruni's smoky voice. But even here, one would wish for more clarity in the line readings: the breathlessness of her singing means that sentences often fizzle out. Dorothy Parker's stark "Afternoon" is maltreated in this way, as is Emily Dickinson's wonderful poem "I Felt My Life with Both My Hands"—and the absurd jauntiness of both songs is almost unbearable. The one highlight of the set is the doo wop piano-and-guitar jam on Dickinson's "If You Were Coming in the Fall," which lends itself oddly well to Bruni's sauce. But this is an impersonal set of disparate poems set often unimaginatively to incongruous arrangements. It is a brave failure, but a failure nonetheless."

Track listing

#	Title	Lyrics	Music
1.	"Those Dancing Days Are Gone"	W. B. Yeats	Bruni
2.	"Before the World Was Made"	W. B. Yeats	Bruni
3.	"Lady Weeping at the Crossroads"	W. H. Auden	Bruni
4.	"I Felt My Life With Both My Hands"	Emily Dickinson	Bruni
5.	"Promises Like Pie-Crust"	Christina Rossetti	Bruni
6.	"Autumn"	Walter de la Mare	Bruni
7.	"If You Were Coming in the Fall"	Emily Dickinson	Bruni
8.	"I Went to Heaven"	Emily Dickinson	Bruni
9.	"Afternoon"	Dorothy Parker	Bruni
10.	"Ballade at Thirty-Five"	Dorothy Parker	Bruni
11.	"At Last the Secret Is Out"	W. H. Auden	Bruni
12.	"Those Dancing Days Are Gone (alternate version)"*	W. B. Yeats	Bruni

* Featuring Lou Reed. Only available on iTunes and through Opendisc.

Charts

Chart	Peak
Austria Album Chart	11[4]
Belgium Album Chart	2[4]
France Album Chart	1[4]
Germany Album Chart	2[4]
Irish Albums Chart	72[5]
Italian Album Chart	11[6]
Portugal Album Chart	6[4]
Sweden Album Chart	55[4]
Swiss Album Chart	1[4]
UK Album Chart	65[4]

End of year charts

Year	Country	Chart	Rank
2007	Germany	IFPI	#99 [7]

Sales and certifications

Region	Certification	Certified units/sales
Belgium (BEA)[8]	Gold
France	—	120,000[9]
United States	—	6,000[10]
Summaries
Worldwide		380,000[11]
^*sales figures based on certification alone ^^shipments figures based on certification alone

References

1. Allmusic review
2. Hoggard, Liz (21 April 2007). "CD: Carla Bruni, No Promises". the Guardian.
3. "PopMatters review". popmatters.com.
4. "No Promises by Carla Bruni - Music Charts". acharts.us.
5. "GFK Chart-Track". www.charttrack.co.uk. 2019-08-28.
6. "Hit Parade Italia - ALBUM 2007". www.hitparadeitalia.it.
7. "Offizielle Single Top 100 - Musik Charts | MTV Germany". Archived from the original on June 10, 2008. Retrieved June 13, 2014.
8. "Ultratop − Goud en Platina – albums 2007". Ultratop. Hung Medien. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
9. Inc, Nielsen Business Media (2 August 2008). "Billboard". Nielsen Business Media, Inc. p. 35 – via Internet Archive. carla bruni billboard. Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
10. Editorial, Reuters (2008-06-05). "French first lady Carla Bruni to release new album". Reuters.
11. "Streaming Treatment For Bruni's New Set". billboard.com.