Between the best and the worst | The self-deprecation of a cowboy without ego

In Between the Best and the Worst, an artist revisits, one song or moment at a time, the peaks and valleys of his work. “I have no ego,” immediately announces the main songwriter of Cowboys Fringants, Jean-François Pauzé, whose group is nominated three times on Sunday evening at the ADISQ Gala.

The song you are most proud of

America cries, because I was very happy after 25 years of career to touch people in such an exceptional way, to understand the times in which we live, without going into denunciation. Initially, I wanted to do a song with our character JP Labrosse. A little later, in 2015, we almost released a version on October, but she wasn’t ready. I completely changed the melody. Writing, for me, is something difficult. I work, I work.

C’est aussi une fierté qu’une chanson-fleuve ait tourné à la radio. J’étais de ceux qui proposaient de la raccourcir et tout le monde me disait : « Non, touche à rien. » Je pense qu’ils avaient raison.

Ta pire chanson

En attendant [2004], a kind of slightly cheesy rock with a bit of reggae in the middle. The text was intended to be a denunciation of the liberals of the time, I used the slogan We are ready. To tell you how badly it has aged: it talks about state re-engineering. We had a Cowboys chat room at the time and there were people who criticized me afterwards Union break [2002] to criticize, without providing solutions. I made it my mission to find solutions through songs and it was terrible.

The Felix who made you the most happy

To win the Félix for Song of the Year 15 years apart for Shooting Stars [2005] And America cries [2020], it was cool. It confirms to you that you are not a has-been, that you can still be relevant. We were also proud to have won in the Singer-Singer-Songwriter Show category in 2003, because the show, for us, is important.

And, no, I have never been nominated for Author or Composer of the Year. Every year, it’s the same running gag within the group, they call me Bredouille Pauzé. But I take that with a grain of salt. We can not have everything.

Your most memorable encounter at an after-party

At one point, Kevin Parent came to see us. He was pretty hot, we’d never spoken to him and he definitely wanted to do some wrist shooting with Karl. Karl had him down in a second.

Your weirdest song

I often come back to the album The nights of Repentigny [2021], which is a bunch of bullshit and rubbish. There’s a song about it, Little Tommy, which is about a psychopath in the making who harms small animals while he has a day job at a hardware store. This one is really weird, especially since my son who was 6 years old came to sing on it.

The Cowboys Fringants song preferred by singers

As I’m not very well known, I’ve often gone to film myself in a bar next to a singer who is playing Hector’s Shack and who recognizes me fuck all. But at the end of the week, I went to a bar and there was a singer of about 19 years old who came to see me and asked me: Monsieur Pauzé, would you mind if I played a Cowboys song? The singers call me sir.

Your song that moves you the most

Winter is coming gives me a shiver every time, because I really didn’t have a penny at the time, the bills were really piling up. I wrote it with a sense of urgency. With this album [Break syndical, 2002], it made or broke. When we played it with the OSM, I couldn’t help but have tears in my eyes at the end.

Karl Tremblay’s best vocal performance

Karl is an underrated performer. We were in the studio recently with Gus van Go [réalisateur attitré des Cowboys depuis 2015] and he told us that Karl is one of the five best singers he has worked with. Any song you put in his mouth won’t be lame. On the first songs of the show with the OSM, when he is alone in the orchestra, he sings in criss. The people in the orchestra had told him so.

The best Cowboys Fringants song that you didn’t write

I really like Royal pub, written by Karl. The text is well structured, well put together, there are two or three sentences of which I am jealous, like “There are always deep inside her/drawers that don’t close properly/which, every day, remind her/that we are quite alone on the way.” Karl is not a big producer of songs, but the ones he has released are always beautiful.

The funniest monologue during Awikatchikaën

[Karl, sur scène, a longtemps eu l’habitude d’improviser un monologue au milieu d’Awikatchikaën.] Somewhere in 2002 or 2003, on tour in Abitibi, Karl improvised a monologue where he spoke of the villages of Rapide-Danseur and Rapide-Sept, of a spirit which haunted these villages. I remember he started dancing really fast. Jerome [Dupras, bassiste] and I was on our knees because we were laughing so hard. It was of the caliber of Louis-José Houde or Mike Ward.

But in another register, there is also the time at the Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu Hot Air Balloon Festival where Karl climbed onto a dozen stacked chairs before falling into a monitor. Or the one at Chez Maurice in Saint-Lazare where he launched himself into the public from the second. Or the time he took a friend of ours who looks like Wilfred LeBouthillier and made him bend in the crowd. Everyone had caught our friend, no one had caught Karl.

Your worst show

It was in Kelowna, British Columbia, about ten years ago. We were between tours, but we agreed just to have the opportunity to spend time together. Karl had drunk a few too many Canadians on the plane. Marie-Annick, who was pregnant, was in tabarnac. When we got there, we realized that we had crossed Canada to give a show in a café in front of a hundred people who didn’t really know us.

Just during 8 seconds, Karl was wrong at least eight times, but Jérôme and I were wrong in every song. When we got off stage, Marie-Annick called us incompetent, not responsible. We ended it at the hotel casino, where one beer turned into several. We left at 6 a.m. the next day and Jérôme missed his flight.

Today, everyone laughs about it.

Your best show

There is a show at the end of our series at the Bell Center in 2021, on a Saturday evening, where we said to ourselves as we left the stage that it was our best show ever. The audience was completely in tune, we had been solid, we had given two or three more encores.

The last Quebec Summer Festival was certainly something special, but I wouldn’t put it among the best, because I would have preferred that there were 25,000 fewer people and that my boyfriend is in good shape.

The phrase taken from one of your songs that best represents you

The chorus ofOctober : “And October has just flown by/another year where I didn’t take the time/to see autumn slowly leaf out.” Every year, I tell myself that I’m going to go to the chalet more often and I don’t go, I don’t take the time to stop. But do we really want to stop? Do we want to spend our lives drinking tea and looking at the forest or is it not better to enjoy everything else?