This fifth studio album by Tire le Coyote will be a pandemic album, by force of circumstance and despite the will of its author. “I’ve always hated that name. It’s like anchoring the subject of an album in too limited a space-time, whereas I’m aiming more for timelessness,” says Benoît Pinette.
For the past two years, time has passed differently for the singer-songwriter. “I must say that the pandemic has had an influence on this kind of sense of urgency that I constantly felt,” he explains. Before, as soon as I finished something, I needed to immediately embark on a new project, a new tour, a new album, so I didn’t stop much. »
The stopwatch clicked! » after the tour of his previous album, weeding (2017), at the end of 2019. Downtime. Pandemic. No one moves, everyone questions themselves, Tire le Coyote being no exception.
The circumstances coincided with a lot of other things in Pinette’s life, his migration to the countryside, to the village of Saint-Élie-de-Caxton, where his new accomplice resides, Jeannot Bournival, collaborator of Fred Pellerin – who d ‘other !
Together, they first offered, last spring, a mini-album of charming covers (“ The life of a factore”, “Boom Boom” by Richard Desjardins, “The Jigging Head”, “The Legend of the White Horse », among others) titled other people’s time.
This meeting transformed his working method, he explains. “I’ve always been a lover of creation, I like doing shows, but I’m not a studio beast. Normally, I record my albums very quickly, since I don’t have a home studio, and each time, there’s a part of stress, book a studio, record as much stuff as possible in a short time. This time, I only had to walk a few minutes in the village to get to Jeannot’s studio. We did a lot of very short sessions. We took the time, took a step back from what we were recording. I feel like I liked creating this album, liked this studio bubble, I also feel like I’ve done everything I wanted to try. »
In the middle of the album, or rather at the beginning of the B side of the vinyl, as the musician conceives it, is the example of these studio tests. The short song At the water’s edge, instrumental and atmospheric, the sound of a guitar which reverberates in the circuits, between two layers of synthesizers. “Renew myself? I disregard that, assures Pinette. Musically, I’m not reinventing anything. It’s still folk song, and I’m completely comfortable with it. My goal is to find the balance between pushing his art a little further and remaining faithful to his roots, to his influences” which, he adds, go beyond folk.
“It doesn’t show because I’ve been classified as ‘folk’, but I’m a big fan of synths and analog sounds, a fan of Brian Eno and his vaporous and enveloping sounds”, he says, quoting also the spellbinding Grouper project by American composer Liz Harris. “The first vision I had of this album was the idea of bringing together what is often associated with new-age with my more folk song. » The effect is successful. Subtle, but successful: a concern for sound resolution recognizable in each song, and which serves the particular timbre of Benoît Pinette’s voice very well.
Another remarkable color of the album, the presence of female voices. The disc even begins with the voice of Joséphine Bacon reciting the words of Benoît — all the same, what nerve to ask a poetess to say words that are not hers! “Yet she said yes right away! retorts the musician laughing. Josephine, I have known her for a few years, we stay in touch. I feel lucky to meet a lady like her. I wrote this text thinking of her, imagining her voice, her wisdom, her great evocative power. Frankly, I think it’s more cheeky to start the album like that, with another voice than mine — those around me weren’t sure it was a good idea… But it’s perfect, it makes me think to the latest Fleet Foxes album [le superbe Shore, 2020]. It sets the table, it creates a surprising atmosphere right from the start. »
Then there are these female choirs, an idea inspired by a special concert staged for the Festival d’été de Québec. The voices coat that of Pinette on In the first round of evidence and the pastoral Criss-cross the slow. On the ambient country air We burn to the bonehe offers himself in a duet with the singer-songwriter Katie Moore – it jumps to the ears, these two belong to the same musical family.
The text of this song was co-written with the writer Robert Lalonde, also quoted in the text of Treasurer. “I had read one of his books already, but while writing the songs for this album, I read twelve books by Robert Lalonde”, who himself had quoted Tire le Coyote in his novel Wild (Boreal, 2015). These two were ripe for a drink, which they did last summer. Lalonde’s work was a revelation for Pinette. “You know when you meet an artist and you feel like their work was written for you? This way he has of being next to darkness and something like a brighter vision touches me enormously. He made me understand that this is what I myself try to do in my work. »