Beyoncé will never have the chance of Vincent Vallières. What luck ? That of soaking up the daily life of the towns and villages where his most recent tour stopped, a long solo itinerary from which he reports Bitumen and windhis first book.
“It’s like in Volkswagen blues that you read on the way / except that the rest of us are chasing nothing”, sang Vincent Vallières 20 years ago now in OK let’s goone of his most galvanizing songs to listen to with the windows down.
But this time, the one he recounts in Bitumen and wind, Vallières was indeed running after something. Not after his brother, as in Jacques Poulin’s cult novel, but after something more evanescent, but also essential. Hope: this is the last word of the book and it is undoubtedly the most important.
His most recent album was titled All beauty is not lost and the musician was clearly seeking to confirm, in reality, the conviction contained in this title. Confirming it in the landscape, in the look of the waitress at a café and in these long hours spent with himself, behind the wheel of his car, on the roads that stretch across this vast province, towards Chicoutimi, Matane, Natashquan, Victoriaville or Hull.
Built from the notebooks he published online during his most recent solo tour, this magnificent first book maps the Quebec territory, one show and one encounter at a time. “It’s precious, what I experienced, it’s a great chance that I have,” observes Vallières in an interview.
Beyoncé will never have the chance to go sit in a cafe, two eggs, bacon, quiet, and chat with the guy who tells you about his business, his life, his city.
Vincent Vallières
Links places
Here is a book about territory and movement, therefore, but also about time, as is the case with so many of Vincent Vallières’ refrains. On the time that burns the faces of people and cities where it returns once a year run of milk, for almost 25 years now.
And about the time that gives birth to new faces: in Sudbury, the host Éric Robitaille presents to the songwriter the two children he conceived with a girl who caught his eye during one of his first shows in northern Ontario.
“Each place is inseparable from the encounters that inhabited it,” writes Vallières who, between these pages, is at once a diarist, a philosopher and a bit of a humorist. “One magnifies the other, they become forever indivisible in my memory. »
All thanks to the music, which we both say to each other, suddenly moved. Full transparency: your journalist’s name appears somewhere in Bitumen and windthrough a list of “cultural chroniclers who live for muse “.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Vincent Vallières built Bitumen and wind from the notebooks he published online during his most recent solo tour.
Music is not trivial; we must never forget it. My daughters’ love for Taylor Swift is not a joke, it’s serious, it’s contagious.
Vincent Vallières
As he gets deeper into the roads, it is also within himself that the 45-year-old guy descends, the numerous detours of the road becoming the mirror of his own doubts and questions. If Serge Bouchard had been a folk singer, this is most likely the book he would have written.
” At the time of Everyone in their own space [2003], the objective was to turn the place upside down, to be with my friends, in friendship and the noise of guitars, he remembers. I went to bed thinking about the people who sang the songs during the show. I was not yet thinking about the repercussions of the end of the big industries in the city where I play. I wasn’t there yet in my journey and my ego. »
“But it feels so good to see the world from someone else’s point of view,” he adds. We all know more or less what is happening with the foundry in Rouyn-Noranda, for example, but when you are in the Notre-Dame district and you see the young mother pushing her baby, you understand things differently. »
Visiting Mani-utenam, among the Innu, one of the most comical and moving chapters, the white man born in Sherbrooke wonders how it is possible to do the job that is his and come across so few representatives of the First Peoples. “And the answer is that our universes are still compartmentalized. It’s painful to say it, but it’s the reality. »
Will it be okay, will it be okay?
The Vallières children are now grown up. During this tour he thus reconnected with the luxury of not having to rush back home, of listening to a lot of music in his tank and of ruminating on these stories, funny or serious, collected all over Quebec and French Canada at these people who, like him, stubbornly believe that the best is not dead.
He watches, moved, as they transform abandoned factories into microbreweries and churches into performance halls. So much so that we end up believing, too, that things will be okay, it will be okay – perhaps – despite inflation, polarization and an ecological apocalypse that seems well closer than before.
Vincent Vallières returns home with, in his guitar cases, a little of what he needs to allay his worries about the future, “but the answer that the road offers is in the new questions that it asks us allows us to formulate, he says, and in the capacity we find there to listen to the other in their responses.
Bitumen and wind
Inkwell Memory
255 pages