Between the best and the worst | Karkwa, light as an eternal new spring

In Between the Best and the Worst, an artist revisits the peaks and valleys of his work. Despite a lavish summer tour, including a carte blanche tonight on the Plains of Abraham at the Festival d’été de Québec, Louis-Jean Cormier and François Lafontaine of Karkwa have agreed to retrace the glass paths of a discography in which songs of light surpass those that taste of raw fish.

The song you are most proud of

François: One of the moments in the studio that left the biggest impression on me came at the very end of the recording of Glass paths [paru en 2010]. We had made progress on several songs, but I still had a few things up my sleeve. And that’s what we built on. 28 days.

Louis-Jean: His working title was David Bowie.

François: My mother had been diagnosed with cancer, and Louis-Jean, he has like antennas. He hears sentences here and there, and then it comes out in song lyrics. The first time he showed me the text, I didn’t understand the title. But it was simple. 28 daysit was the duration of a treatment cycle.

Louis-Jean: I would go with Me-Light [aussi sur Les chemins de verre]. François was playing the piano one morning and it didn’t take long for us to understand that it was going to be cool. At La Frette [vieux château transformé en studio, à une heure de Paris]we had the challenge of starting work on a song in the morning and, that same evening, after having drunk, of listening to the finished song. And with this one, we met the challenge. We still gave ourselves the right to come back to certain elements afterwards, but if I’m not mistaken, the vocal track that ended up on the album is the one I recorded at the end of the day, a little tipsy.

And that’s the beauty of music: suddenly you have a new patent in front of you that didn’t exist a few hours before.

The song you wish you could fix

Louis-Jean: It’s ironic, because it’s one of my favorite songs, but in Me-Lightthere is something that bothers me. It must have been fatigue, but I sing “the emotion of a draft”, when it should have been “the impression of a draft”. It annoys me.

The song you wish you hadn’t recorded

François: There are plenty of them, man ! But I would tell you that it is in line to be on The Established Boarding School [premier album du groupe paru en 2003].

Louis-Jean: I get bad cramps when I listen In plasterwith the reggae bit and phrases like “I would like to see the ass of my province feeler number one”. I have a stomach ache.

Often, a band’s first album is a bunch of stuff and as much as it can be extraordinary, it can also be extraordinary crap. For us, it was more crap, especially since we had been dragging around certain tunes or certain ideas since we were 16, 17 years old.

At that time, we had 10,000 influences. We had this desire to play funk, rap, reggae, rock. We listened Remain in Light Talking Heads and all of a sudden we got a song like that, like that. We learned to manage our influences better.

François: From the Tremors stop [deuxième album, en 2005]all these influences are still there, but in a more refined, digested way. If you take a song like The scaffold [sur Dans la seconde, en 2023]there is a New Orleans side, D^r John, but less first degree than if we had recorded this 20 years ago.

Louis-Jean: And there are still songs from his youth that are successful. The Coup d’EtatI wrote a first version in secondary 4 or 5 with Michel Gagnon [membre de la première incarnation de Karkwa]in a group called Abysse.

Your best festival memory

François: In the summer of 2009, the Festival d’été de Québec invited us to do a show on the Plains with Malajube and Pierre Lapointe. And it was complicated, because it was in the middle of a tour in Europe. We were really tired, burned out, we had come back just for that show and left right after, but that’s the kind of state that often leads to good performances. You’re going to draw on the last drops of energy you have left. We had played well.

Your worst festival memory

Louis-Jean: It’s a crazy story, but I don’t care, I have no ego. We were at the Francofolies de Spa, there were 10, 15 minutes left before the show and I realize that I forgot my capo [un accessoire pour sa guitare]. I’m heading to my hotel room and once I’m there, I think to myself: “Let’s not take any chances, let’s go to the bathroom” and while I’m sitting, I hear Frank playing the first song of the show.

François: And then, you couldn’t do it, man ! You were coming fuckin’ not !

Louis-Jean: You’ve never seen a guy run as fast as me. But Frank still had to loop the intro for seven, eight minutes.

The song that moves you the most

François: A few weeks ago, in Saint-Casimir, there was a little girl of 6 or 7 years old who sang at the top of her lungs. Me-Lightfrom start to finish. At one point, I turned to Martin [Lamontagne, bassiste] and he had already turned around himself, because he had tears in his eyes. It’s at times like that that you say to yourself: I never thought that music would make me experience this.

Your most rock star moment

Louis-Jean: I remember playing in Trafalgar Square in London for the 1^er July [en 2011] and to see actor Mike Myers appear on stage, pushed by the Canadian ambassador. Austin Powers had come to say between two Karkwa songs how proud he was to be Canadian.

François: I remember when we played The fridge [de Georges Langford] in front of Joni Mitchell and Herbie Hancock [en 2007, lors de la cérémonie du Panthéon des auteurs et compositeurs canadiens].

Louis-Jean: That day, I took the elevator with James Taylor, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell and Michael Bublé. And Michael Bublé was whining about the hotel rooms, while for us, they were probably the most beautiful rooms we had ever seen in our entire lives.

The best album contributed to by a Karkwa member outside of Karkwa

François: We have a lot of choice! Recently, the person who is in charge of declaring the songs on which I play announced to me that I am officially at more than 1000 songs.

Louis-Jean: Julien Sagot [percussionniste et multi-instrumentiste] has a way of designing his sound, on his solo albums, which is really hot, very eccentric, very cinematic.

François: The albums of 12 men patched up [réalisés par Cormier en 2008 et en 2014]there was a bit of Karkwa’s sound in there. The day we spent in the studio with Plume Latraverse was one of the best days of music in my life. I laughed, I cried, I experienced a lot.

Louis-Jean: He said, addressing me: “Luigi, give us this, this song, with Robbie [Kuster, batteur] on the scrappers! » The scrappers were the brushes on the snare drum.

The best solo by François Lafontaine

Louis-Jean: Frank’s great quality, and it can become a problem in the studio, is that he is incapable of playing the same thing twice. And that’s what makes each of his solos enjoyable. He finds new disgusting things all the time.

The phrase from one of your songs that best represents you

Louis-Jean: I could quote you several lines from Me-Light. “There were roads/There were holes that we chewed through/But it’s less and less heavy/It’s an obligatory passage/A long corridor to dig/Between me and light-me.”

We felt a sense of liberation at that moment, because everything we had been working on for so many years was becoming easier and easier, and more and more fun.

Carte blanche to Karkwa, at the Quebec Summer Festival, this Tuesday at 10 p.m.

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