In the offices of Rosemarie Records, Monday lunchtime, it’s bustling. Video shooting ahead of Caravane’s next album. Among other activities: here, we accumulate. Rosemarie is at the same time, let us quote the statement, “an artist management company, a record company, a show production company and a publishing house”. Why did the meeting with San James, a few days before the release of his first real album, take place there, rather than in one or the other essential café of most interviews?
It goes without saying when we met Marilyse Senécal, already San James, but also director of communications at Ad Litteram. Or when she worked on her own brand, La Société oblique. “We’re going to settle down here, we’ll be fine. It’s almost soundproof,” she says, pointing to a very central office. This is its natural habitat, we understand: a headquarters for the management of creations and creators. Abundant and alive.
“It’s my place, even though I’m there now as an artist. I know the ropes of the job, I’m not intimidated by paperwork, contracts, all that. And I learned to delegate. I have already been my own press relations officer, but here, it is Marie-Pier Létourneau who takes very good care of me. » Pride in the tone.
She is nevertheless the producer ofEpiloguethis album whose title signals “the end of something, but also the possibility of a beginning”. Epilogueshe continues, “it is the end of this Marilysis which approaches and looks at itself only through the gaze and reflection of others, and it is the new starting point of a Marilysis which does not more necessarily associates its value with what is reflected back to it.
Opening the trunk
At the heart ofEpiloguein a song not called Safe for nothing, she reveals herself without shouting it from the rooftops: “There is in me / an open book and a safe / Speak in a low voice / so that it does not slip out […] Deep inside me / the fragile child and the difficult being […] the immense choice / between the river and the blaze”. A very big secret is exposed to the open air, and the singer becomes emboldened little by little, giving the keys to this safe which has been closed for so long, and all the other songs on the album – Reminds you, I don’t live at home, The fear of emptiness, A hundred thousand angers — breathe together.
No doubt she had to take this “oblique” path, serving artists before herself, leading in parallel under the Anglo pseudonym of San James a somewhat hidden, even elusive, English-speaking career, releasing excellent microalbums. on digital platforms (No One Changes Overnight in 2016, Bridges in 2018), showing very careful, but dark and intense clips. Seen, but not revealed. Perfect and out of reach. “It goes back a long time. I realized very early on that to be loved, you had to be good. I was at the top of my class, I made music professionally at a very young age, it was a lot of pressure,” she says.
This daughter of a popular singer, growing up in full light, on stage alongside Ginette Reno just before adolescence, immersed in music, singing in tune, loving to play harmonies, everything seemed to lead her in a straight line towards a career as a performer. or chorister, everything except the “anxious, depressive tendency” Marilyse, who was looking for a way out.
She studied… management. And continued the music “at an arm’s length”. As San James. An English name, songs in English, music with intense atmospheres where the voice, with a singular timbre, an astonishing, unusual register, most often curls up in the mix. “San James remains vague as a name. We don’t know if it’s a man, a woman, a place, a group. It allowed me to be there without being there too much. » The following release, of the same name, in 2020, offered for the first time a French-speaking San James, remarkable from the outset, mastering a demanding song poetry, capable of going into the soul groove while perfectly enunciating each syllable. It remained to materialize this promise into a complete album. It’s done.
The palpable reward
Epilogue reinforces these observations with great confidence: everything that San James knows how to do serves him wonderfully, all the Marilyses flourish – the lyricist, the melodist, the co-director and co-arranger (well supported by his two Simons, Lachance and Pedneault). The captivating and sensual atmospheres of his Anglo discs, ideally integrated, allow the most beautiful balance imaginable between form and content, play on phonemes and the right words. “It’s my whole life that I dare to put forward, my whole self that I describe, while continuing my musical journey, and I think that it would not have been possible before today. It’s possible to become completely yourself at 33. »
The proof is there. On the desk. A splendid CD, even more splendid in the 33 rpm version. We can touch it. If everything that previously floated on the great digital cloud was undeniably valid, we receive these beautiful objects as marks of existence, engraved for eternity. As San James sings in The bridges, the title that closes the album: “And even if my legs / tremble under the weight / of memories and kilometers / I will cross the bridges / between peace and me”. After which a large choir rises, like the applause of voices instead of hands.
Existence is also about making yourself heard.