Margaux Sauvé, “the voice and face of Ghostly Kisses” as she describes herself, has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and trained as a violinist. “The violin has influenced me a lot in my way of singing,” she explains. I always thought that to be a singer, you had to have a strong voice and take up space, that you had to be a super leader. I am rather discreet. I don’t speak loudly, I don’t sing loudly, I even hid behind my violin. But at some point, there was a click in me. I simply said to myself: I can be a singer, but differently. »
We would have guessed it simply by hearing her hushed voice: the singer-songwriter likes to take her time. Seven years after launching their first song in the ocean of the Internet, Ghostly Kisses finally releases a first real album, entitled Heaven, Wait, composed and recorded with Louis-Étienne Santais, his accomplice in life and on stage.
Ten little clouds in the shape of songs make up this sweet debut album. “With Louis-Étienne, we got into the habit of releasing songs one at a time, one mini-album at a time”, four in all between 2017 and the acoustic experience Alone Together, released in January 2021. With his colleagues from Fjord (including Louis-Étienne) and Men I Trust (his singer Emmanuelle Proulx and Margaux have been friends since the age of twelve), Ghostly Kisses has contributed to the new momentum of the scene underground music from Quebec arose in the mid-2010s, with the three projects sharing the same interest in electronic pop songs.
“It’s thanks to them that I realized that making music didn’t necessarily mean signing with a record company, producing CDs and living in Montreal,” explains Margaux. I arrived at a time when I was able to take advantage of an open door on the Web allowing us to distribute our music. And it was possible precisely because I had everything here, in Quebec, to achieve it. “Ghostly Kisses took their time to offer this first album “because at that time, I didn’t feel ready, I couldn’t release more. The EPs allowed me to learn and experience a lot of things, also allowed me to develop a small community around the project” of fans who have long gone beyond the borders of Quebec.
On the other side of the ocean
Besides, Margaux Sauvé still does not explain why the songs of Ghostly Kisses touch so much the sensitive chord of music lovers in the Middle East. “We have a lot of fans in Turkey, Morocco, Egypt,” as shown by YouTube viewing statistics. “We’ve been waiting to play there for a while! A concert in Istanbul had been announced long ago, postponed due to the pandemic; next March 26, she should perform at the Cairo Jazz Club 610, a room with around 800 seats. “It’s the best-selling concert. »
“But why do they like Ghostly Kisses? I have no response. I can’t wait to go, maybe we’ll learn what they like,” she says. In return, Margaux and Louis-Étienne wink at them in the Arabic orchestrations of Blackbirds, one of the ten beautiful songs of Heaven, Wait, released last Friday. Regarding these orchestrations, “with tabla and a lot of glissandos in the strings”, the musician indicates that she was particularly inspired by the work of Loreena McKennitt, “of whom we are very fond, Louis-Étienne and I, since we listened to a lot when we were younger. But seeing in the last few years that our audience was growing there, it just made us more motivated to make those kinds of songs and share them. »
Anyway, you don’t have to be from Cairo to be touched by Ghostly Kisses. This latent melancholy in Margaux’s voice leaves no one indifferent. “Is our music sad? For me, yes. Insofar as I am inspired by emotions and events that I have experienced with difficulty. Moments of transition, important changes in my life. The driving force behind my creation was a form of therapy. I needed to evacuate secrets by writing songs — and it even came out in English because I think saying them in French was too confrontational for me. »
“You know, continues Margaux, I have a baccalaureate in psychology, I consulted myself for a few years to understand what was happening to me. I have a very “psycho” approach to what happens in my life. I attach great importance to communication, to the gesture of talking to someone when things are not going well. I believe that aspect of “helping relationship” appears in my songs, and I hope that the public “connects” with our music on this level. I don’t pretend to help people with my music, but I hope they will come to not feel alone while listening to it. »