Sometimes, François Lafontaine dreams of a song. A song that doesn’t exist yet. To wit: the song “Le rêve” (“The Dream”), a piece of bravery from the group Klaus’ first album. “I got to the studio and told the guys, ‘I dreamt a song!” says the trio’s keyboardist, referring to his bandmates Joe Grass (guitars, a ubiquitous session musician who plays with Marie-Pierre Arthur, Patrick Watson, and many others) and drummer Samuel Joly (also a ubiquitous session player, also with Marie-Pierre Arthur, Fred Fortin, and many jazz artists).

Throughout its eight minutes and five seconds, “Le rêve” is evocative, not only of the type of adventure one only lives in the mind while sleeping, but also that which, while wide awake, musicians give themselves when they truly let loose. After a syncopated jazz-rap intro, a heady rock riff (made heavier thanks to guest musician Fred Fortin’s bass) lays the initial muffled atmosphere to waste, until that powerful bulldozer is itself swallowed whole, toward the end, by the chiming melody of a krautrock-inspired rhythmic pattern.

“As in a dream, at first, you can’t quite make out the elements, you don’t know exactly where you’re at, then it turns into a nightmare, and the third movement is the deliverance. You come out of the dream,” says Lafontaine, a member of Karkwa and Galaxie, who has played on so many albums by other Québec artists to even attempt to list exhaustively.

Recognized and admired by music lovers everywhere in the province – even though their names aren’t spelled in big letters on the marquee of the venues they play – Grass, Joly, and Lafontaine could easily be described as super-session musicians. That’s not only because they play a lot, and often, but mainly because their contributions to other people’s music are instantly recognizable. When one sees them onstage at the beginning of a show, one knows that the evening surely won’t be dull.

But despite the collegiality of their collaborations with the songwriters who ask them for their contributions, the genesis of Klaus was the answer to a desire, shared by the three friends, to open up the hatches, unafraid of the flood.

“When you’re playing someone else’s song, your job is to bring a certain balance,” says Joe Grass. “You take their idea as far as you can, but you can’t allow yourself to steal the show. In this case, we threw balance out the window, it was more like…” The guitarist moves in hands on each side of his face as if to mime the rapid pace of a car on the highway.

In (other) words: “It means that whenever one of us had a new idea, no one else said no, ever. We’d find the balance later.” François Lafontaine’s smile suddenly makes him look like an eight-year-old. “Isn’t it great to be able to always say yes?”

So what comes out of a series of “Yeses”? A band that doesn’t fit any particular label, and whose members’ only wish is to give themselves over to the pure joy of music created with friends, not caring a bit if their explorations take them down the road of afrobeat, prog, or dance-rock.

Fun, fun, fun; the word is like a mantra for Lafontaine who almost can’t believe he signed a record deal with these two other guys. Watch him push back when one tries to label him a virtuoso. “Hell no, I’m not a virtuoso! Sam, is, though!” he insists with as much disbelief as if we’d tried to call him an astronaut. “I have infinite admiration for these guys, and I think it’s mutual. We love what we hear when we watch our buddies play.” The fact that the three compadres also sing together on the majority of the verses is another powerful metaphor of the mindset during their recording sessions.

The tours for each of their respective projects had been over for a little while. François, Joe and Samuel were having pints at the pub – as we all do. The vague ambition of a solo synths album vanished from Lafontaine’s mind the moment his friends suggested birthing Klaus. The project turned out to be, in a sense, the antidote to the fatigue that creeps up in the minds of musicians on the road.

‘Did you ever not feel like playing?’ Lafontaine asks his friend Joe Grass, before re-formulating (in a much clearer way) one of our questions.

‘It’s a funny conundrum,” he says. “When you’ve been on the road for eight months, you remember you like playing, you want to feel it every night. But at some point, it’s like a muscle that you over-use, and it becomes numb. There’s an emotional disconnect that happens between your mind and your body when you’re tired. When I was in my twenties and I would get to that point, it was an instant existential crisis! Nowadays, all I tell myself is: Get some sleep and drink less beer.”

Or create a new band!