Photo by Marc-Étienne Mongrain

Better Together: Édith Butler & Lisa LeBlanc

Story by Philippe Renaud | Tuesday August 31st, 2021

Almost a half-century separates them, age-wise, but on record, they both sound ageless. In one corner, the legendary Édith Butler, in the other, rising star Lisa LeBlanc. The girl from Paquetville and the girl from Rosaireville take us on Le Tour du grand bois, in a much more rock-oriented context than what we’re used to from Butler. Yet, “those are sounds I know; that’s what I listened to when I was younger,” says Butler, adamantly. “Big guitars like Johnny Cash – that’s not new to me, but maybe it is for the younger generation who aren’t aware of that style? Whatever the case may be, it’s totally my style!”

Edith Butler

Photo: Tony V. Hausser

“It’s been a long time that I’ve been hearing Édith playing with my band, in my mind,” says Lisa LeBlanc about this project, the first she’s taken on as a producer. “I’ve always thought that an album where we re-visit her songs, but with her singing, would be really fun. Édith has written so many good tunes, and I wanted to hear them in that setting,.” And so LeBlanc did, alongside her partners in crime – Maxime Gosselin on drums, Mico Roy on guitars, and her boyfriend Benoît Morier on bass, and various other guitars.

The duo had met in a studio before, when they recorded the McGarrigle sisters’ “Complainte pour Sainte-Catherine” for Butler’s 2013 album Le Retour. But the true spark for this project came while filming the TV show Les Échangistes (hosted by Pénélope McQuade) about three or four years ago. The pair sang one of Butler’s songs, “Ti-Gars,” featured on this project in a pedal-to-the-metal version. “Édith was playing a washboard and she so totally outshone me, it was insane!,” LeBlanc remembers about their appearance on Radio-Canada. “We played the song only once, on that show, but the phone started ringing off the hook,” Butler adds. “Everybody was asking about the album, but there was no album! That’s when we started seriously thinking about it…”

LeBlanc had already planned a sabbatical even before the pandemic hit; this time would be devoted to planning her next album, and exploring another side of her trade: producing. “That’s when I mustered the courage to go to her with that proposition,” says Blanc, who spent a week in Québec’s Eastern Townships where the iconic Acadian Butler now lives. “There’s no denying that Édith is super important for us Acadians,” she adds. “She was one of the first to step out of Acadie playing Acadian music and singing in the Acadian vernacular. She put us on the map, as did Antonine Maillet and Angèle Arsenault. They’re true pioneers, the first to have success in France and Québec. She’s accomplished a lot for us, she paved the way.”

“Lisa came to visit and we spent two weeks together, chatting, eating and taking walks in the woods,” Butler remembers. They also listened to a lot of music. LeBlanc notably played Butler Van Lear Rose, the Jack White-produced 2004 album by the grand dame of country music, Loretta Lynn – which had a major influence on Lisa’s approach for this project: embedding the voice of the great Acadian in a rough-edged jewel box made of folk- and country-tinged rock.

“We poured our hearts, souls, and guts into the album,” says Butler. “The music came naturally; we wanted an album that would ring true. Throughout the recording, Lisa would say to me, ‘I want to bring out the real chick from Paquetville!’ She directed me. I may have a beautiful voice, but if no one gives me directions, that’s all I have: a beautiful voice. Lisa was able to bring out a grain of voice I didn’t know I had in me.”

Together, the two musicians listed the songs that would be featured on this album – original songs as well as adaptations of traditional airs by Butler (“Vishten Avina Vi,” “Le Tour du grand bois,” and “La complainte de Marie Madeleine,” her renowned Marie Caissie adaptation), and a few songs by some of her friends, such as “Ti-Gars” and “Jerrycan” (by Anique Granger).

To top it all off, they also included two covers from the Acadian repertoire. The first one, “Marie Mouri,” is a song penned by David Greely, that Linda Ronstadt also recorded. “Originally, it’s a text that was found on a slave,” says Butler who, very few people know, holds a master’s degree in Ethnography from Université Laval. “I was deeply touched when I heard that story. It’s a beautiful story told from the perspective of a father saying to his young son, ‘You don’t know, you sing and dance, but Marie is dead, and you don’t realize it…’”

The other cover is “Tit Galop pour Mamou,” by Dewey Balfa, a founding member of Frères Balfa, one of the most famous Cajun music groups in Louisiana in the 1960s and ’70s. “I’ve met the Balfa brothers!” says a thrilled Butler. “I participated in this NFB film called Les Acadiens de la dispersion [by Léonard Forest, 1968]. “We went down to Louisiana to meet people, including the Balfa brothers, and we played music together. It’s during the time I spent with them that I heard ‘Tit Galop’ for the first time. That song, to me, is the story of when I met the Balfas.”

For her first stint as a producer, LeBlanc had carte blanche for the album’s musical direction. “What I wanted above all was for Édith to be happy,” she says. “This album is an homage, it’s not my album. It’s also a collaboration, but what mattered the most was to bring out Édith’s voice and personality. That’s the beauty of being a producer: staying in the shadows, not taking up too much space, while still carrying a clear vision for the project.”

Photo by Félix Renaud

Sarahmée: Welcome to Her Life

Story by Olivier Boisvert-Magnen | Wednesday September 8th, 2021

On her third album, Poupée russe (Russian Martryosha dolls), Sarahmée follows through on her ideas with lyrics that carry a “more lucid” message.

Over the course of 13 songs, the Québec-based rapper draws a very rich picture of what makes her heart, but also her mind and her gut, tick. Her writing is straightforward and direct, and she bites into her words with just the right amount of aggression, sensitivity, and arrogance commanded by each song.

Her lively, heartfelt delivery is a reflection of the singer-songwriter’s highly organic creative process. “I let go of my phone and went back to the good old pen and paper,” she says proudly. “It’d been a while since I last went back to my good ol’ habits. Writing, I mean actually writing and crossing stuff out, allowed me to take a step back from my lyrics. It allowed me to visualize the music, to be more structured and to express my ideas more clearly. I’m so ADD when I’m on my phone, but when I’m sitting down with a piece of paper, my ideas germinate longer.”

Active of Québec’s rap scene for over a decade now, Sarahmée slams her fist on the table with her third offering. “I’ve had to grow a little harder over time,” she raps on “Quand la route est longue,” clearly signalling that she no longer has any time to waste, career-wise as well as life-wise. “I figured if I don’t take the place I deserve with this album, no one else is going to give it to me. I’m the conductor of my own train,” she says.

And that “place” designates the status she rightly deserves on Québec’s male-dominated rap scene. On “Elle est partie,” a song denouncing the many layers of sexism that surround us, she throws a few punches at local rap figures who have “too much ego to say that a woman is their colleague.”

That type of line is a perfect reflection of the aplomb that permeates Poupée russe. “It’s time to shoot what I have to say now that I have people’s attention,” Sarahmée says adamantly. “No one was expecting Irréversible [her second album released in 2019], whereas now, I could tell there was an audience ready to listen.”

Using her microphone as a megaphone, the rapper dives into hot topics such as systemic racism and police brutality. “As a young woman who’s also black, I’m afraid of the police,”, she raps on the title song before defiantly adding “you’re either an ally or you’re their accomplice,”, a clear call to join the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I’m aware that not everyone is comfortable taking a stance,” she nuances. “I’m not afraid of speaking out, and I’m constantly thinking about all that, but that doesn’t mean I’m not careful about what I do say. I don’t want to be a spokesperson for all social groups. I’m only Sarahmée, and no one elected me to speak on their behalf. In other words, time has also taught me to shut up.”

Hence her decision to express her political views in her music rather than the media, as she did last year. “At some point, I said to myself, ‘I’m not a commentator [who is only invited to comment] on racism!’ I was starting to feel like I didn’t really have any business there.” So, instead of accepting all the invitations that were extended to her, Sarahmée decided to take time for herself. That perspective allowed her to write such brilliant songs, some of which are particularly intimate.

One such example is “Partir plus tôt,” a song that tackles her addiction problem head-on. “It’s an autobiographical song about what happened to me after Irréversible. It was a beautiful year, but also an incredibly difficult year. It was pretty bad towards the end,” she confides. “I had to make a decision: regaining control over my own life. I went into rehab and put in the work that saved me. And that taught me a lot of things. Simple things, such as the fact that you don’t absolutely have to get completely wasted when you go to a party. I’m thankful I made that decision, because my addiction was starting to impact a lot of other stuff, especially my music, my work ethic, my team… It had to stop.”

With its vibrant and dramatic strings, “Partir plus tôt” is in stark contrast with the rest of the album’s musical direction. Alongside her loyal allies Tom Lapointe and Diego Montenero, the two producers at the core of her team, Sarahmée put together an album with a fiery trap and Afropop vibe, while in a creative retreat in a cabin in November of  2020.

“This time around, I didn’t feel like writing 50,000 songs to select just a dozen. I hate that!” she says, referring to the heavier process that drove Irréversible. “The guys put a ton of energy in the productions, so I had a big challenge in front of me. My lyrics had to live up to that!”

She clearly nailed that mission thanks, to clearer-than-ever ideas, and a freer-than-ever mind.

 

Photo by par Véronique Duplain

Lendemain de veille: The party is on!

Story by Claude Côté | Tuesday August 24th, 2021

Le party est pogné – which means “The party is on,” and is the name of Lendemain de veille’s sophomore album – shot to the top of Francophone sales chart as soon as it was released.

Lendemain de veille“I took two screen shots to make sure it was true,” says Marc-André Rioux during our Zoom interview. On his baseball cap is the inscription “J’ai soif” (“I’m thirsty”). Behind him were the corn fields of St-Louis-de-Gonzague, near Beauharnois (Québec), where all five members of the band are from.

“There’s something highly simple that defines us: never forgetting where we’re from,” says Rioux. “As a matter of fact, it’s the subject of [our song] “Notre histoire.” It’s about remembering that we were conceived in a hay wagon not far from here. We’re not about to pretend we’re someone else.” There was The Fab Four, now here come The Farm Five!

Lendemain de veille has tallied more than three million cumulative plays on the usual digital platforms, and have been playing on the Énergie radio network and CKOI in Montréal. They have no less than three different songs in rotation on commercial radio, thanks to their finely crafted country-rock.

“We know our music was never conceived for radio, but then we look at our followers on Facebook and realize our audience is much broader than we expected,” says Rioux. “We play agricultural rock and we love instruments like the banjo, the fiddle, lap steel, mandolin, accordion – we listen to a lot of La Bottine souriante – so we never know from one song to the next where we might end up.”

Which is to say, there’s a marked difference between the more roots roots of the first album, 1 000 bouteilles, and their second one, firmly rooted in the country genre. Songs such as “On était saoul,” “Bière au ciel,” “Une bonne bouteille de vin,” and many others, would’ve been entirely at home at Deux Pierrots, the now-defunct Old Montréal live music bar where the band played for a decade. “That’s how long it took us to write our own songs. We’ve always existed to play live and party with people,” says Rioux.

Le party est pogné was recorded during the pandemic. As with many a production during this protracted period, each member recorded their bit separately, and the recorded tracks were then assembled.

This time around, the guys categorically refused to tame down, and consciously avoided overly complicated arrangements. “Un tour à maison,” “Gars de campagne,” “Notre histoire,” and “Mémère Tremblay” show that Rioux et al. know how to write a bunch of like-minded songs, with light-hearted verses and bubbly choruses. “Cowboy,” a honky-tonk-tinged roadhouse blues, was even selected as the official song of the 2020 Festival Western de St-Tite.

“The large country family is composed of people who don’t judge each other. They drink cold beer from a can and listen to good music,” Rioux says. “The rodeo at Grandes Estrades is like a mini-Bell Centre during a Habs game. People scream like you wouldn’t believe. We played there for six straight years, thanks to Bob Bissonnette, who’d recommended us highly.” What better way to sell beer like crazy?

That also means that you might have heard their “Medley Cayouche,” a set of the New Brunswick singer’s best songs, as the title makes clear. “We went to visit him to give him a case of Alpine beer, his favourite brand, a tray of shots, and copies of our albums, and he got there just after us on his Harley-Davidson. What a sight, with the wind splitting his beard right in the middle. He’s quite an imposing man, but thankfully he liked us. We spent the afternoon with him and he played some unreleased songs for us. When we stepped inside his home, we could literally see his song titles. When he sings that he has a portrait of his dad on the living room wall, he means it!”

With this unexpected success, it’s now a given that this second will open up new horizons for Lendemain de veille, and the band has already been nominated twice at the 2020 Country Gala. “The raison d’être of Lendemain de veille has always been to play festive and uniting music,” says Rioux, “so there was no way a global pandemic was going to prevent us from being as festive as ever!”