Rachel Leblanc traveled a lot during the pandemic. Much traveled in the luminous lands of the memories of his childhood. The meadowVanille’s sublime second album, is the logbook of her enchanting wanderings.
Memory of an evening in January 2021. At the door, a young woman hiding under a thick hat, who had come to drop off at the author of these lines the copy he had obtained of Sun ’96, his first album. “It was an incredible stormy day,” recalled Rachel Leblanc recently, as she prepared to relive such an exercise and deliver her own (but gloved) hand, her second long game.
I had braved the wind and the snow to carry my records! I would arrive all wrapped up and people would say things to me like: ‟Ah, it’s you, Vanille! You’re smaller than I thought. It was really fun, and a bit weird, to be able to see people.
Rachel LeBlanc
This rare moment of shared humanity will have ironically embodied, despite the weather, something like a clearing in the daily life of Rachel Leblanc, 26 years old. The former film student dazzled music lovers in early 2021 with her debut album, a bewitching slice of garage rock in French – imagine Françoise Hardy singing for the Troggs – which had risen to be one of the most fabulous surprises in the world. ‘year.
PHOTO CATHERINE LEFEBVRE, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Rachel Leblanc, aka Vanilla
A otherwise dark year for everyone, for reasons you needn’t beat your ears to, including Rachel, confined to her Montreal basement, with an acoustic guitar, rather than the electric from which hitherto there emerged his songs of joyful or upset love. Solution: escape into the rural memories of her childhood and those forests in which she had fun catching frogs, when her parents offered her the joy of leaving their Laval for the weekend.
Immersing myself in these memories has been one of the most beautiful ways I have found to chase away anxiety. Talking about nature, about grandiose spaces, poles apart from where I was, was like creating a haven of peace inside me. I wanted an album that would comfort me.
Rachel LeBlanc
live more freely
“I feel millennia of existence under the rock / And in my heart it’s a party”, sings Rachel Leblanc in her irresistible clear voice in Beyond the mountainsone of the most pastoral pieces of The meadowin which the listener is greeted by chirping birds.
“It’s one of the most important sentences, because it’s an album on which I’m very aware of what came before, and what will come after, in the universe”, explains the author and composer with an erudite ear, who works behind the counter of Vacarme, a reference record store in Plaza Saint-Hubert, in Montreal. British folk from the late 1960s (Vashti Bunyan, Duncan Browne, Bridget St John), with its many borrowings from the Middle Ages, as well as a book of Gothic illuminations were important references for her.
Rachel confides in passing, with a big smile, to have been inspired by another kind of journey, that which certain types of mushrooms allow. “During one of these little experiments that I did, I remember literally feeling the millennia of existence under the rock where I was. »
Scary feeling? “No, she exclaims, on the contrary! It takes the heaviness out of every decision you make in life. Knowing that you are only a point in the universe allows you to live more freely. »
To love yourself
Rich with an abundance of tambourines, flute lines and triangle jingles, The meadow could sound like the album of a return to childhood, which is only true insofar as Rachel Leblanc does not reconnect with any form of naivety, but with this kind of sweet and fierce gravity , specific to young age.
While Sun ’96 had the opposite gender as magnetic pole, The meadow intertwines love of nature and self-love in pretty metaphors, a happy consequence for Vanille of the deep work of self-knowledge and self-acceptance that songwriting allows her, she says.
She also co-signed the production with the highly sought-after Alexandre Martel (Lou-Adriane Cassidy, Thierry Larose, Alex Burger), who seems to have fully embraced his role as an ally; the distinctive marks of his sound, often imbued with the influence of 1970s Los Angeles, are absent here.
“Heaven is now / my only lover”, announces Rachel in the very solemn The Rosea declaration of independence camouflaged under an oath of allegiance to the beauty of the world.
“I used to talk a lot, a lot, a lot about love,” she admits with a laugh. “I talked a lot about heartache, actually, and I wanted something else. There, there are no more guys. The thing is, I’m no longer ashamed to say that one of the things that makes me happiest in life is the time I spend alone. »
psychedelic folk
The meadow
Vanilla
Well well well