“I could have made yet another record… but that didn’t satisfy me. ”
When Gilles Vigneault is asked if he is happy with this new album, which comes 60 years after his first recording and 7 years after his previous album of original songs, his face lights up.
” I am very happy. And a little surprised to be happy. Glad we managed to do something else. And at 93, this might be my last, eh? So I have all the permissions. I can’t do anything, but I don’t have to do it again Dance in Saint-Dilon Where Jack Monoloy. They are already written. ”
The interview started almost 20 minutes ago, it stops for a moment. “If I keep quiet, you could ask me your questions!” But it’s one if… ”
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
The poet is as talkative and talkative as usual: during the photo shoot, he hardly holds the pose for more than 20 seconds without speaking, and tells us an anecdote with… Tino Rossi! But that will be his only flashback during the hour and a half that we spent in his workshop in Saint-Placide, where he also has his home, very close to Oka. Gilles Vigneault is here and now, and wants to talk about this album anchored in the present, turned towards the future, beautiful as poetry, vast as the cosmos, open as his thought.
He recounts the first songs written two years ago before he even knew there would be an album. He explains the theme of the elements – water, fire, earth, air – which gradually imposed itself, to which it grafted light “because of its influence on all life on earth”, and language “which is an interior element, but constitutive of human nature”. He also talks about his quest for the perfect title, the one that best represents the whole.
“We procrastinated, we often changed our minds. There is a song called Like a love song and I thought that could be the title, like a love song that I would write for the planet. And that made sense, especially since there is only one love song on the album while there are more in a normal album. So it’s an abnormal album. ”
“Abnormal” insofar as he decided to deal primarily with a subject, ecology, while wondering if “it could interest people”. And also “abnormal” musically, so much so that the album was almost called Elsewhere, the word Gilles Vigneault said to Jim Corcoran when he asked him to make the album. “Take me somewhere else,” he told her, which has become their leitmotif.
I said to myself, with the songs that I propose to Jim, I am building a boat, a structure. And when you build a boat, it’s to go somewhere else.
Gilles Vigneault
He didn’t know he would lead it down a more contemporary path, with very little piano, closer to sung or even narrated poetry, and not at all in the classic verse-chorus-verse song structure that he did. mastery to perfection.
“This is the main elsewhere in which I was taken”, explains Gilles Vigneault, who bent to the exercise sometimes with doubts, who found Jim Corcoran “very clever”, and who fully assumes the result. .
“The world doesn’t listen to records the same way they used to. Records don’t sell and play on commercial radio the same, either. We put it all together and we say to ourselves: we have the right to do something else, let’s go… Freedom! ”
Youth
If there is another title that the album could have carried, it is The watchman, which is also the title of a song. Félix Leclerc spoke of himself in Around the island by naming this “grandfather with the blue eyes who stands guard”. But it is Gilles Vigneault, with his still lively blue eyes, who is watching here.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
He looks at the horizon by evoking the fear of the other who is the “real name of danger”. He observes the nature around him and reminds us of the links that bind us viscerally to the universe. He plays with words and magnifies language, his “sweet country”. ” It is at your place that I know best / offer my fire and my place / And say to everyone: I love you. ”
And he’s listening to what’s going on about climate change, and he’s worried. “The sea rises … and time flies …”, sings Gilles Vigneault in Mr. air.
Yes, he admits, Like a love song is the album of an ecoanxious. But who refuses abatement, because he also sees “children” who unite ” on end of the world tunes / talking about the future “. Vigneault has always loved and believed in young people, this is not going to change today.
The young people who went to demonstrate and sing for the good of their future and immediate planet, they are already alerted on this subject. And some will become alert scientists, experts, researchers and finders. A man my age who gets discouraged when he sees how things are going, he is wrong. He can look at the reasons for encouragement, and they rarely come from people his age. It’s the young people who grow.
Gilles Vigneault
Our responsibility is to leave them a “tidy and liveable” home. But Gilles Vigneault is optimistic and lucid.
“It’s not the conspirators who are going to save the planet. It is not fear that will save the planet. It is the knowledge of oneself, of space, of what surrounds us. The sun is expected to go out in half a dozen billion years. We still have time to think things over and do something. ”
Plant your tree
At the start of the pandemic, Gilles Vigneault hoped that humanity would learn from its mistakes. Eighteen months later, he noted above all that we now know a lot … about the pandemic. That it is “possible, dangerous, and that we do not laugh with that”.
We know more about vaccines perhaps, which are a way of continuing to live with less fear, in short. A way to continue life, travel, harming those around us as little as possible.
Gilles Vigneault
We are at the end of the interview. His assistant Suzanne Baucaire, who makes sure that the poet does not get too tired, gently announces to us that it is over. He exclaims. “Ah, but I’m sure he still has some questions!” We’ll see if I have any answers left now. ”
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
We take the opportunity to make him talk for a few moments about the act of writing, “which is the most precious”. “Afterwards, the moment to sing is extremely intoxicating…. Especially if I was singing! “He gets carried away about monosyllabic words, recites a line from Racine,” The day is not purer than the bottom of my heart “,” an absolutely admirable sentence and of remarkable simplicity “.
What does he want for this new album? “I don’t expect much. To all that it can give, or not give. Perhaps one day, this album will be useful to a child who will have made a tool of it, but it is not me who will discover it. I made something available, like material. Wood. Iron. Aluminum. ”
Of the material that it provides to “who will want to use it”. Like planting a tree, he adds, recounting the time he recovered 70 black walnut plants, “whips” that he planted on his land and which, 40 years later, have become giants who give “very large nuts”. He sings the song of Brassens… “Near my tree I lived happily, I should never have moved away from my tree. ”
“If we write I planted an oak, we must remember this when we plant black walnut trees. When we plant songs too. “Ah that’s it. You have to plant songs like you plant black walnut trees or balsam fir. Moreover, it is discussed in Mr. air. ”
It’s true, and it’s one of the most beautiful stanzas on the album. ” The trees are my watchmen / Plant a few billion / On the outskirts of big cities / Before it’s too late. ”
The watchman is watching. We cannot say that he did not warn us.
Song
Like a love song
Gilles Vigneault
Tandem