"La Mer" (English: "The Sea") is a song written by French composer, lyricist, singer and showman Charles Trenet. The song was first recorded by the French singer Roland Gerbeau in 1945. It was not until 1946 that Trenet recorded his own version. When it was released in 1946, it became an unexpected hit, and has remained a chanson classic and jazz standard ever since.

Trenet said that he had written a first version of the song's lyrics as poem at the age of 16, many years before he came up with a tune for it. The tune came to him while traveling by train in 1943 between Montpellier and Perpignan as he was gazing out of the window at the Étang de Thau, a lagoon in the south of France. He jotted it down on piece of paper and in the afternoon he worked out the details with his pianist Léo Chauliac. That evening they performed it in front of an audience but without having much of an impact.

The song was not recorded before the end of World War II. It was first offered to Suzy Solidor, who, however, declined it. After that the job fell to Roland Gerbeau, who recorded it together with Jo Bouillon's orchestra at the end of 1945. The orchestration and chorus were provided by Albert Lasry. Trenet himself recorded his song for the first time in 1946.

Over the years the song turned out to be rather popular throughout the world and developed into a chanson classic and jazz standard with a large number of prominent artists recording their own versions. Besides the original in French the song was also recorded in several other languages with the English version "Beyond the Sea" being particularly popular and becoming the signature song for the American singer Bobby Darin. In 1966 there were already over 100 different recordings of La Mer and it was considered to be France's best selling song together with Edith Piaf's "La Vie en rose". By the time of Trenet's death in 2001 there were supposedly more than 4000 different recordings of it with over 70 million copies sold in total.

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