It seems that living on tour non-stop to give concerts drives you crazy. Especially if you’re going solo. “My mind was starting to play tricks on me,” admits Patrick Holland, whose debut album of songs, You’re the Boss, aims to exorcise the “ghost” that followed him to Europe and the United States, where he was invited as a DJ, a more solitary occupation than it seems. “I used to play games for a while, but eventually I got bored, so I just sat around in my hotel room. When I heard noises, I wondered: is it my subconscious, or a ghost? It was funnier to imagine a ghost. »
It’s hard to say if it was the tour or the pandemic that caused this radical transformation in the approach of the musician, who was first known under the stage name Project Pablo, now stored.
Turn a page
From 2014, he distinguished himself with his own interpretation of house and techno, offering a first album the following year (I Want to Believeon the 1080p label), then around twenty singles and mini-albums, the most recent (May 2020) being entitled Simstim, a deliciously hypnotic deep house offering. “I still have a whole album of compositions like that on my hard drive,” Holland admits. But with the pandemic, I felt like now was not the right time to keep releasing this material. »
They’re not about to come out either. Today, the musician is drawn to soft rock songs, inspired by the sound of Todd Rundgren, the great albums of Steely Dan, the experimental postdisco of Arthur Russell. With his own words, his own voice, and companions to travel with him, time passes more quickly, and it scares away ghosts.
“I rather want to delve into this new musical direction to see what I’ll be able to get out of it,” he says to turn the page on house — although he does not refuse an invitation to turn the records, which he will do next Thursday at the System, the new restaurant-club in the Plaza Saint-Hubert opened by the boss of the record company Arbutus. Transformed, Patrick? “Actually, I’ve wanted to do stuff like that for a while,” he says, referring to the album’s more lounge-like, mellow sound. Come to Canada You Will Like It (2018), the first he launched under his Christian name. “I feel that this album is the precursor of what I do today, with the difference that I didn’t sing on it. »
New gestures
The passage to the song was an apprenticeship initiated with the musician friends with whom he collaborated as an accompanist or producer. “Reworking lyrics, building songs with verses and choruses — the structure is obviously different than when you design a house composition — I had done all that before”, and he had assimilated it while accompanying on tour , on bass, his colleagues from the pop-rock group TOPS.
Inevitably, the atmosphere as much as the songs of You’re the Boss will force the comparison with the work of TOPS. “Of course, when I started writing pop songs, I couldn’t escape his influence,” admits Holland, defending himself from wanting to sound like him. Rightly so: there is, in production, a groovea more electronic color, which reminds the listener that before becoming the croon solitary, Patrick Holland was Project Pablo, a brilliant purveyor of rhythms to make people dance.
The pandemic-induced downtime threw him body and soul into this songwriting project. The texts are all inspired by situations experienced in 2018 and 2019, while traveling from one club to another. The music seems happy, but a certain spleen emanates from its interpretations; this loneliness is still alive in the heart of the musician.
“Having lyrics to sing about brings something very different to the act of creating music,” he says. It’s not even about the words being sung, or the message of the song, but about the presence of a voice. The subtlety of the sonority of the voice that must be placed in the mixing, that’s something you can’t really replicate with electronic instruments. In pop as in the house that I did, the composition is still as important as the sound, the realization. »