Paupières translates to "eyelids". While seemingly simple, it's a word that carries a lot of poetic weight and isn't as common in everyday song lyrics as more direct emotional terms.
In the song, Pomme sings, "Si la tristesse me défie, Sous mes paupières fait son lit" (If sadness defies me, Makes its bed beneath my eyelids). This imagery is incredibly evocative, personifying sadness as something that settles in the most intimate and vulnerable part of her being, just behind her eyes. It's a beautiful and slightly melancholic image that makes the word memorable.
"Comme tu dis" is Pomme's quiet pep talk to herself. She admits how fragile her confidence feels: no friends to lean on, tears mixed with laughter, sadness settling in under her eyelids like it has found a permanent home.
Against all that, she holds onto one thing: someone else believes in her. The chorus repeats it like a mantra, "I'll try to believe in myself, like you say you believe in me." She isn't there yet. She's still practicing. But borrowing someone else's faith is enough to start.
By the end, she has learned the words by heart, even as her fears stay close. It's a song about how trusting yourself can begin with trusting that someone else already does.
Pomme is the stage name of Claire Pommet, a singer and songwriter born in 1996 near Lyon, France. She began solfège lessons at six and sang in a children's choir before turning to guitar, drawing early on chanson artists like Michel Polnareff that her father played around the house. She played her first Paris show at La Boule Noire in 2017, the same year she released her debut album, À peu près, which reached the French charts.
Her second album, Les failles, came out in 2019 and gave her a French top ten album. She has won two Victoires de la Musique, in 2020 and 2021, and followed with the albums Consolation, En cavale, and Saisons. In 2024 she recorded music with Stromae for Netflix's animated series Arcane. She married Quebecois singer Safia Nolin in 2022, after the two first met and dated back in 2016.