For the first time in twenty years of interviews, I cancelled one because I cried beforehand.
Of course, it wasn’t the first time I cried on my way to work. It’s happened to all of us: tiredness, a breakup, a fight with your child, bad news on the radio… At that time, you cry a little, and OK gowhat do we get — like a napkin from McDo dragging around in his cart — to wipe his eyes and the day goes on. With no more mascara and a heavy heart, or a lighter one, because we at least cried a little.
— But there, squealhoney, what do I do? I’ve been booked
twenty minutes with Stéphane just before the concert started.
— You tell him you need
drop this. No big deal. It will be
still here in a week.
I don’t know how else to say it, but that’s exactly it: the songs on Avec pas d’casque’s new album being so big, they had to be dropped.
There may always have been humor in their music…
• Too bad you’re taken,
I kiss better than I speak
• My back is not a chair, why are you sitting on it?
• The line of your g-string lost in your behind
We don’t joke with Stéphane Lafleur’s words.
Seat belts fastened
on the 112 east
It happened last Saturday, when my boyfriend and I were going to Lac-Mégantic. The mileage was worth it, because that evening, under the stars, Avec pas d’casque was performing on stage, in the middle of the mountains at the Parc de la Croix lumineuse.
We suspected that the guys in the group would present some songs from the sixth album, Cardinalwhich will be launched on September 13th. Or at least, we hoped so. And the label had sent me the songs in digital format, so that I could draw inspiration from them, at my request, for my interview questions.
But what questions?
we pose on a song
when we feel that,
in the silence of her listening, she tells us everything?
Or that when something is smoky, one can oneself
choose what’s behind
the veil?
These are the questions I was asking myself in my head, halfway through listening to the album and almost arriving in Lac-Mégantic.
The lover had gotten out of the car to get a selfie in front of the Scotstown sign, send it to Fabien Cloutier, and be told that he had to go buy his cousin’s charcuterie. CoolI had a moment to try to come up with intelligent questions.
Near the car, a notice posted on a door: Hunters! Transform the result of your hunt into excellent charcuterie with La Charcuterie Scotstown. Information available from the butcher.
I don’t know if it helped me, but it certainly brought me back to basics.
Cardinal, in the shadows
The first thing I said at the start of the journey was: “These guys don’t come out single After single. We don’t have the real album in our hands here, but we have to listen to the songs in order.”
Our tears were already visiting us with Chew your boots — first extract released at the beginning of August —, rolling quite a bit from our home.
Carried by the piano and organ of Mathieu Charbonneau, I have the flash of the last time I met Stéphane Lafleur, sitting in the row just in front of me, at the Wilfrid-Pelletier hall, for Bob Dylan. Way back, because concerts have become expensive.
Anywaywhat difference would it make to see Dylan up close? Or for him to talk to us, for that matter. It is his poetry, and, for some time now, the piano and the organ that have replaced the guitar, that cross cities and mountains.
Take good care of yourself / And go where your eyes look
So who is Stéphane addressing in Chew your boots ? A love that he lets go? I realize how much I don’t care. How much it is the most beautiful thing you can say to someone you loved, or still love, or even don’t know. From now on, I just want to tell everyone to take care of him, and go where his eyes are looking.
But it is at Let’s Flambésecond title, that we start crying like calves.
— Do you keep crying like me because you find it so beautiful, or because it hurts you?
— Both, my driver answers me.
Accepting the mystery
I go up to the cross to meet Stéphane and tell him that, finally, we’re just going to make a game with vinyls that are lying around in my trunk. That for the audio interview part, I was too full. And that I also wanted the other guys to be there. With more time.
“No problem. Anyway, I’ll be honest, I find it much more interesting to know the interpretations of the people who listen to us than to talk about my own version.”
The day before, I was trying to explain Avec pas d’casque to my English-speaking colleagues at SiriusXM: “ First they are called “Whitout a Helmet” and it is really how you need to listen to them. »
Write without headphones, create without headphones, cry without headphones. And above all: accept the mystery.
Sometimes you see things
in the sky
Which are not planes / Which are not things that we know
We must accept the mystery
When he passes
That was the beginning of track 3. We hadn’t even reached Bromont, and it gave me the impression, almost twenty years after the beginning, of rediscovering, as if it were the first time, this humble group, low profile and galactic from our home.