With the discretion that we know him, Daniel Lavoie has published three books since 2011. After two collections of poetic essays, the singer-songwriter launched in June Humanisms, a collection of fables where music plays a leading role. In fact, for each text, the artist with eclectic musical tastes offers to listen to pieces of jazz, classical and contemporary music. Something to shake up your algorithms!
Better still, Lavoie invites the reader to read his fables by whispering, imitating Philippe Noiret, shouting, singing and even slamming. Has the pope of rap become the lord of slam? “I did them all for a long time, a lot and often out loud, so that I could really feel”the flow”, as they say, “says Daniel Lavoie, joined in Bologna by video call before he goes to New York for the presentation of the show Notre Dame of Paris at Lincoln Center. “I won’t hide that I put a lot, a lot, a lot of time on each of these little pages. I work on it a bit like a goldsmith, in detail. »
I wrote sporadically, bit by bit. But there, I really imposed on myself the discipline to write every day, no matter the bullshit. I caught myself in my trap, I became an “addict”. I still write every day.
The literary adventure of the man who will be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame on September 24 began in 1999, a year after the creation of Notre Dame of Paris. At the time, he noticed that he missed writing with a pen. He then began to write one or two pages a day.
“I wrote sporadically, bit by bit. But there, I really imposed on myself the discipline to write every day, no matter the bullshit. I got caught in my trap, I became a addict. I still write every day. When I can’t do that, I miss something in my day. It’s better than drugs, let’s say! »
Then one day, while preparing an intimate tour, he allows his director to scrounge some texts from his notebooks so that he can read them between songs. Spectators demanding his texts, Daniel Lavoie, who had never dreamed of publishing, approached Éditions des Plaines, established in his native Manitoba. Released in 2011 Finutility. Four years later, at the publisher’s request, he launched Particularities. Before the pandemic, the singer once again says “OK” to his editor and sets out to write Humanisms.
The poet has fun
In twenty years, Daniel Lavoie has darkened some 600 pages to keep only about 10%, transcribing into his computer only what he finds relevant. In Montreal, Paris and Bologna, boxes of notebooks are piling up. Does he keep them for posterity? “If my children can make money with it one day, good for them, but personally, my little ego, which will be in the ground or burned, will give a damn. He already doesn’t give a damn! he said, laughing.
Doesn’t this so-called I don’t care betray the artist’s humility? “Self-mockery knows me well; I’ve always fucked my face, so I’m very hard on myself. Of course, I’m having fun and I don’t take it for serious literature, but I do it very seriously all the same. »
If he affirms that what he writes is not poetry, one finds it in profusion in the images which he suggests and in his way of creating a musicality; in Finutility and Particularities, he shows a weakness for alliteration. If the first two collections were in free verse, Humanisms comes in a series of poems of five quatrains.
“There is more work, more constraints, recognizes the avid reader and listener to conferences on the Internet. When I started this book, I focused on rigorous form. I said to myself that I was going to do texts that I could put to music and that I was going to try to do ten texts on the same music just to see what it would give. I quickly realized that was nonsense. I had fun keeping this form to make 40 songs with these fables; I didn’t keep them because I didn’t find them very happy as songs. But there are two that have worked really well. »
In fact, Diane Dufresne sang The fable of the star in his last concert and Claude Gauthier asked him The fable of mothers for his next album.
tender misanthrope
In these fables where he describes the state of the world, takes us on a journey through time, from the Big Bang to the Middle Ages via Antiquity, we meet Daniel Lavoie, a tad insolent, a bit drooling, showing tenderness towards humanity with a good dose of sometimes black humor.
“It is a choice that is amoral, apolitical, atheistic. This is where I am. I try to tell things as I think they are. I think it’s hard to contradict myself in what is written there. There are things you can disagree with, but it’s very difficult to find an argument to say, “No, you’re not right.” I think I’m pretty much right everywhere, but at the same time, I don’t affirm anything, I avoid affirmation, truth. It’s something I don’t know. »
We also detect in Humanisms a certain misanthropy, a weariness of our world frozen in a doldrums of banality. Without being pessimistic or nihilistic, the author insists on speaking of the purpose of the world, of ours. And yet, he also celebrates the beauty of life, of human beings.
“Isn’t that life? Can someone tell me that there is something else? I’m still waiting for the scientific experiment that will prove to me the existence of God. We are indeed in a banality that I had already discovered in rolling ball : “All that happens / Somewhere in space / On a ball rolling in infinity.” I understood that when I was 28, 29. I worked on the theme a bit. Yes, there is the misanthrope: humans annoy me a lot. I don’t like the world, but humanity softens me. I find that we don’t take the trouble to think a lot, that we are light, and that annoys me. But what do you want to do? »