Podcast Just Between You and Me | Lisa LeBlanc just wants to have fun

In Just between you and me, the journalist Dominic Tardif speaks with his guests as if they were only among themselves, without a microphone. Anecdotes, reflections, confidences: these long meetings are so many opportunities to take time off from the news and to imagine that we have plenty of time.

Love is work. All kinds of love. Lisa LeBlanc would tell you that protecting the pleasure that unites her with the music has taken some effort. The singer tells how the joy that the scene gives her has already almost died out under the weight of too many obligations and anxiety.

What does Lisa LeBlanc aspire to? To something both simple and not so simple to achieve. “Me, I just want to have fun,” she says during this interview punctuated by her irresistible laugh, which would be enough to restore good humor to the most irrecoverable of grumps. “We’re lucky, we play music, we don’t want it to feel like a job. »

But when she made the decision to take a sabbatical year in 2019, the most famous native of Rosaireville quietly felt that the ecstatic joy in which the stage immersed her was deserting her. Wear, fatigue, anxiety, overloaded agenda. At 32, Lisa has already accumulated more than a dozen years of career, three albums and an EP, a number of prizes as well as two burnouts.

“My worst nightmare has always been to be jaded, she drops. I’ve seen them, blasé people, in droves, and that’s not what inspires me. It’s not fun to be around the jaded world. I find it really sad, especially in music. »

Village festivals… and Normandy

Especially in music, because her guitar has always been for her like a passport to a world where nothing is too heavy. It’s a pure childish smile that suddenly takes hold of her face when she remembers the Sundays at her grandmother’s house when, after mass, her father’s 15 brothers and sisters, and their children, met to eat. and sing.

In the biographical film that will one day be made from the life of Lisa LeBlanc, one of the first scenes will set the scene at a village party. Every Wednesday summer evening, in Rosaireville, anyone who wanted to took the microphone for a little number.

At the age of 13 or 14, the teenager asked her high school janitor, Normand Arsenault, to accompany her on the six-string for a few songs. Normand then offered to give her lessons, “because if you accompanied yourself, you would be that much more independent,” she recalls. “And from the first lesson, I got really obsessed and just did that. Every free minute I had in my day, I played the guitar. »

It’s Normand, still a weekend singer to this day, that Lisa thinks of when the “sickness” that stalks all professional musicians threatens to swallow her up. “I think back to the love he has for music. I go back to that, playing for fun, playing Beatles songs in a school bag. It just reminds me that that’s why I’m doing this. »

To avoid said nausea, Lisa will have had to learn to answer no more often and to ask her team not to squeeze her lemon too much. Medication, “it changed my life! wow! “, she confides, a subject that she agrees to address because she would have liked, younger, that her idols speak so freely about mental health.

Lisa will never forget the ten-hour drive from Montreal to her native village, “the worst drive of my entire life”, at the end of which she slept for “six days straight “. The end of the roller? She knows him a little too intimately.

If she had been living with seasonal depression since adolescence, it was during the pandemic that she finally admitted that her condition would not improve only by doing more exercise and that she “needed antidepressants pronto ! “.

Time wasted

She gradually regained a taste for music thanks to the modern pharmacopoeia, but also thanks to the online bingo evenings organized by her lover during the pandemic, for which she began to write, without pressure, refrains. voluntarily nouns, who make up a new Lisa LeBlanc album. chic discohis euphoric album released in March 2022, soon emerged.

In 2014, the musician launched an EP entitled Highways, Heartaches and Time Well Wasted. And even if she is the author of this title, Lisa must repeat to herself how much the creator in her gains by offering herself a little of this judiciously lost time, how much the hours to wander that she allowed herself during his first trips to the United States often resulted in something magical.

“I’m not really practice what you preach “, specifies the interpreter of Why do today, as if to emphasize that nothing is ever completely settled. “I really struggle not to feel guilty when I’m not super productive, but I try to remind myself that I have to relax, that I have to enjoy life. »