It is no secret that Marie-Mai wasn’t Simple Plan’s first choice when it came to the final decision about which female singer would be featured on the French version of Simple Plan’s song ‘Jet Lag’. While the English version had Natasha Bedingfield, Simple Plan also wanted to release a French version of the song for the French-speaking countries, such as Canada or France and needed the perfect voice for the part.
Canadian singer Coeur de Pirate (real name Béatrice Martin), who co-wrote the song with Chuck Comeau and Pierre Bouvier was actually the band’s first choice. But why exactly did the version with her not make it to the official French single and Simple Plan went with Marie-Mai instead? Coeur de Pirate explained it in a recent interview for the Dutch website Artiesten Nieuws [thanks Susan for the translation]:
“[Simple Plan] wanted to release the single around the time my own album ‘Blonde’ was supposed to come out and it wasn’t exactly planned like that originally. After a small discussion, I finally said ‘ok whatever’ and then someone else got chosen.
This is not the first time an artist worked on a song with Simple Plan, but his version wasn’t eventually used as a single. On the same album – Get Your Heart On! – fans can find the version of Summer Paradise that features Canadian-Somali rapper K’Naan. When it came to the time when Summer Paradise was supposed to be released (ahead of summer 2012), K’Naan’s record company realized it would collide with the release of K’Naan’s own new single, which led to Simple Plan having to re-record the song with a different artist. That artist being Sean Paul. Ironically for K’Naan – Sean Paul’s version of the song became of one Simple Plan’s greatest hits to date. A version of the song that isn’t even featured in the official tracklist of the fourth album.
Of course, over time, similarly to Summer Paradise, we also got to hear plenty of versions of Jet Lag, as Simple Plan like to perform this song with whichever female artist is around when they are performing [read more about all the female singers who were featured on Jet Lag over the years in this section]. Coeur de Pirate got to perform the song live with Simple Plan at the Simple Plan Foundation benefit event in 2013 [watch it here] and the recorded version of Jet Lag feat. Coeaur de Pirate also already made its way on the Internet. So in case you haven’t heard it yet, check it out below:
