In 1960, Françoise Hardy surprised her family—twice. First, she passed her baccalauréat exam with flying colors, a shock, really. Then, for her reward, she chose a guitar over a transistor radio. The radio had seemed the obvious fit: The introverted 16-year-old adored her piped-in tunes, becoming obsessed with chanson singers like Jacques Brel and then the English-language songs broadcast on Radio Luxembourg. Years later, Hardy likened her discovery of British and American pop artists like Paul Anka, Brenda Lee, and Cliff Richard to a coup de foudre (thunderbolt). “I immediately identified with them, because they expressed teenage loneliness and awkwardness over melodies that were much more inspiring than their texts,” she later wrote in her memoir. A guitar was a vehicle for her own self-expression and Hardy quickly began writing her own material, rare for a pop singer at that time.

In 1962, after signing a deal with Disques Vogues, Hardy encouraged her label to promote one of her self-written songs, a wistful number called “Tous les garçons et les filles” (“All the Boys and Girls”). By the time she released her full-length debut a few months later, the song was an unexpected hit in France. The melancholic “Tous les garçons” set Hardy apart from bright-eyed contemporaries like France Gall and Sylvie Vartan. If the other yé-yé girls sang candy-colored love songs, here was Hardy, shyly peering out from behind her long bangs, lamenting the loneliness of her soul: “Et les yeux dans les yeux/Et la main dans la main/Ils s’en vont amoureux/Sans peur du lendemain” (“And eyes in eyes/And hand in hand/They walk in love/Without fear of tomorrow”).

By 1965, “the yéh-yéh girl from Paris” was a star overseas, earning her first and only English-language hit with a song titled “All Over the World.” Though Hardy was a natural homebody, she still found ways to enjoy her celebrity. She delighted in turning heads in avant-garde ensembles by modern fashion designers Paco Rabanne and André Courrèges. She did the movie star thing, appearing in films by Roger Vadim and John Frankenheimer. A cameo appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 new wave film Masculin féminin cemented her spot as a generational icon. But the idea of Françoise Hardy often eclipsed the woman herself. “More than a singer, she’s becoming a universal myth with whom thousands of young girls dream of identifying,” opined the French magazine Special Pop in 1967.

As she matured, Hardy came to resent her early work and considered the arrangements “terrible.” “I listened to that record and I was so dissatisfied,” she once said of “Tous les garçons,” “and I have been dissatisfied very often ever since.” As soon as she had some acclaim under her belt, Hardy convinced Disques Vogue to let her record in London with the pop arranger Charles Blackwell and his orchestra. Hardy’s mid-’60s records reflect this superior production as she dabbled in balladry, baroque pop, and blues, releasing albums sung in Italian and English. She was well-prepared for the emerging singer-songwriter era—she had, after all, been doing both—and collaborated with a variety of fine songwriters, including Serge Gainsbourg.

Hardy’s press tours brought her to many faraway locales, from Tehran to Johannesburg to New York City, where she once perched atop a Formula 1-themed float during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. On her second trip to Brazil, during the pivotal year of 1968, she befriended her assigned hostess and interpreter, a woman named Lena. Like many others, Hardy had been enchanted by Brazilian music and especially bossa nova, a languid, sensual offshoot of samba. Her 1968 album, known as Comment te dire adieu, features a cover of “Sabiá” (as “La Mésange”) by Antonio Carlos Jobim, considered the father of bossa nova. The interest was reciprocated: That same year, the Brazilian tropicália group Os Mutantes included a rendition of “Le premier bonheur du jour,” previously recorded by Hardy, on their debut album.

In October 1970, after traveling to Rio for a third time to sit on the jury of the Festival Internacional da Canção, Hardy decided to make an album inspired by elements of Brazilian music, later calling it “one of my best souvenirs.” Lena had introduced Hardy to another Brazilian woman in Paris, the guitarist, songwriter, and producer known as Tuca. The pair put their own spin on bossa nova on 1971’s Françoise Hardy, unofficially known as La question. Midway through, Hardy references “saudade,” a Portuguese word meant to express melancholic longing. An important theme in bossa nova music with no English equivalent, saudade is a romantic nostalgia for something or someone that will never return, or perhaps never existed. The Portuguese writer Francisco Manuel de Mello described it as “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.” Hardy and Tuca could both relate.

Tuca’s situation was strictly unrequited: She was infatuated with Lea Massari, an Italian actress who was not a lesbian. For her part, Hardy had been engaged in an “impossible love affair” with the singer and songwriter Jacques Dutronc since the late 1960s. In her memoir, The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles, Hardy describes her early labelmate and occasional collaborator as an “uncommonly charismatic” man with a “reflexive need to flee from any form of commitment.” Hardy, who had struggled with her self-worth since childhood, was frustrated by Dutronc’s flighty behavior and flirtations with other women. After innumerable broken dates and lonely nights, it’s no wonder that the credits of La question list one “Pinocchio” as “Catalyseur.”

On the forlorn title track, Hardy is distraught by the distance between herself and an unapproachable lover; attempting to understand him is like “chasing the wind.” And yet something, perhaps the meaning of love itself, implores her to continue to try: “Tu es ma question sans réponse, mon cri muet et mon silence” (“You are my question without an answer, my mute cry and my silence”). Nearly a decade earlier, on “Tous les garçons et les filles,” Hardy wondered when she would experience the bliss of feeling loved. The woman who made La question knows the when and the how, but not the why.

Tuca, who composed 10 out of 12 songs, insisted that the pair prepare to record by rehearsing together daily for a month. To Hardy, long accustomed to learning songs independent of the composer, this was an entirely new way of working. As a result, she arrived at the studio so well-rehearsed that each song required only two or three takes. Accompanied by Tuca, on nylon-string guitar, and a double bassist, usually Guy Pedersen but sometimes Francis Moze, Hardy recorded her vocals live, discovering rich new textures and tones 11 albums into her career.

After these initial sessions, Hardy and Tuca took a vacation to Corsica to chew on the idea of adding strings. The answer was “oui,” and back in the city, Tuca played various themes for Hardy. Those selections were later fine-tuned by arranger Raymond Donnez and performed by the Orchestre de Paris. “Viens”—“Come”—Hardy implores on the album’s grandiose opening number. Viens! Leap into love, for pain is the worst that can happen and that I have endured before! Viens! Let us love the way we breathe, the way we dream, without thought, without hesitation! Viens! Let us love as if we no longer fear the truth!

The orchestral parts carefully embellish the album’s spare sound. On the unadorned “Même sous la pluie” (“Even in the Rain”), Hardy’s promises to wait for her lover around the clock and in all weather intertwine perfectly with Tuca’s rapid fingerpicking. “Même sous la pluie,” like several other songs written by people other than Hardy, imagines her devotion in somewhat simplistic, passive terms. She is similarly undone on the folksy “Si mi caballero” (“Yes My Cowboy”), claiming that it would be enough to be a speck of dust, a blade of grass, “sur tes lèvres sèches, d’être goutte d’eau” (“On your dry lips, to be a drop of water”).

The songs Hardy wrote herself are much more passionate. On “Doigts” (“Fingers”), the sole song for which Hardy wrote both the lyrics and music, she reminisces about a lover’s empty touch before dissolving into tender murmurs. She abandons words all together on “Chanson d’O” (“Song of O”). Atop a barely-there bass, Hardy rolls the syllables around in her mouth as if she were tying a cherry stem into a knot. The amorous song is likely a reference to the 1954 French erotic novel Histoire d’O, which rendered sadomasochistic encounters in poetic, tightly controlled prose. Hardy wasn’t exactly swinging it up in the ’60s, but she could undoubtedly relate to emotional submission. “If I was a masochist, I could not help but be attracted to men somewhat capable of sadism,” she later reasoned in her memoir.

And so, time and again, Hardy finds herself shipwrecked by the storm of love. On the standout “Mer” (“Sea”), love is so heavy a burden that she imagines surrendering herself to the ocean. “Je voudrais que la mer/Me reprenne pour renaître/Ailleurs que dans ma tête/Ailleurs que sur la terre” (“I would like the sea/To take me back to be reborn/Anywhere but in my head/Anywhere but on earth),” she sings, delighting in the purring curls of the language. The final song, “Rêve” (“Dream”), adapted from “A Transa” by the Brazilian singer Taiguara, is the closest thing to a moment of resolution: “Tu me merveilles comme un rêve qui s’est enfin réalisé/Et tu me fais mal comme un rêve dont il va falloir m’éveiller” (“You marvel me like a dream that has finally come true/And you hurt me like a dream from which I will have to wake up”).

But what does it mean to wake up from a dream, to face tough decisions and ugly truths head on? That’s a question Hardy never solves, perhaps because there is no sufficient answer. “It is impossible to fight our unconscious mind,” she wrote in her memoir. “With the precision of the most sophisticated radar, it stubbornly guides us toward that one individual whose flaws sufficiently complement our own, in order to actualize the problem that imprisons us until, by means of setbacks and suffering, we end up seeing it clearly enough to attempt to free ourselves from it.” Hardy’s relationship with Dutronc lasted, in one form or another, until the end of her life. She would call La question the record she was most proud of.