Between the best and the worst | Dumas, eternal dreamer

In Between the Best and the Worst, an artist revisits, one song at a time, the peaks and valleys of his work. First candidate: Dumas.

The song you can’t play anymore

J’ai choisi Miss Ecstasy [2001], even if it makes me happy to play it, because people have a relationship with this song that is beyond me. Example: last summer, in Dolbeau, I understood that Miss Ecstasy toured for years in a local bar and it’s been that Miss Ecstasy has an exceptional dimension there. We couldn’t not play it.

But when I play it, I have to repeat myself that I revisit the kid that I was 18 years old. It appears in the text that I graduated from Arts and Letters at CEGEP. I had not yet found myself.

The song you wish you hadn’t recorded

I could have chosen a few The time and the place [2012]but I’m going with it Never a truce. [Il lance la chanson sur son ordinateur et grimace.] It’s terrible what you’re doing to me!

I was in a funny zone when I made that album. It was my return with Carl [Bastien, réalisateur du Cours des jours, 2003]. I thought magic was going to work, but magic can’t work when the tunes aren’t there. We had set a release date, but we should have taken another year. It’s weird, but after 10 years of success, I kind of lost confidence. When I listen to the album again, I hear it. There is a new generation coming up and I was looking for my place. Never a truceit is an attempt The Kinks in French not very successful.

Your weirdest song

One day, we go through Quebec, and in Quebec, I always play CHYZ, the university radio. At some point, something plays and I say to myself: “That’s cool, I think I have that at home on a record. Then there, I turn on: it’s one of my tunes, one of the instrumentals from the EPs! [En 2008 et 2009, Dumas a enregistré quatre EP.] I don’t remember which one it was, maybe 11-40.

The song you love more now than when you created it

Une journée parfaite [2014]. When I wrote it, I wasn’t used to visiting that area, to talking about paternity. Today, with the quarantine, I have a lot less trouble going into intimacy. It’s also the album on which I was beginning to regain my confidence, but I was still looking for myself.

Your finest moment at the Francos

Singing with Bashung in 2005 is hard to beat. The other beautiful memory is my first Spectrum, in 2003, a few months after the release of course of days. During Linoleum, it began to sing spontaneously. It was the first time that I felt that people really knew one of my songs. And that’s when I said to myself: OK, it could be, it could work.

Which artist would you most like to write a song for?

I would like to work with Régine Chassagne, in French.

Your song that you would most like to hear in the mouth of another

I think Somewhere [2009] did not have the success it could have had. The version on the EP [Rouge] is cool, but not great, because we were doing things fast, and in the version of tracks, I removed a melody that I should have kept. I always thought Isabelle Boulay could sing it. [Rires] I never told him.

Your best unknown song

Atlantica [2009]. Francois Plante [son bassiste] keeps telling me i should put on a show just with obscurities.

The song you’re most proud of

Leitmotiv [2023]because it represents the courage it took me to ask Philippe Brault [réalisateur de son plus récent album, Cosmologie] to come and listen to my demos. We didn’t know each other before we met on the mountain, while we were both running, during the pandemic. Well, Philippe says he left me a message on my answering machine at the time of The writer [2001] to offer to play bass with me and that I never called him back. [Rires] For me, it’s the Quebec Rick Rubin.

There is also Chicago [2023]. I sat on the Michel Rivard chair [Dumas loue un local de répétition jadis occupé par Michel Rivard, qui y a abandonné un tabouret sur lequel est inscrit son nom] and she came out of a jet. It hadn’t happened to me for a long time.

The phrase from one of your songs that represents you the most

[Dans L’ailleurs, 2023] “Maybe I’m just a dreamer, who knows? “Because it describes how whimsical I am on a daily basis, but also because dreams still inhabit my life as a creator. I don’t feel like I’ve written my best song yet.

Dumas will be at the Francos on June 15, on the Loto-Québec stage, at 8 p.m.