After love’s mourning on sad the samemourning “really full of business” with Gravines. This second disc by Gab Bouchard, written “in the darkness of two winters”, does what it announces: it scratches, it even scratches. And at the same time, somewhere between the lines and the chords, it allows hope.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
Listening to Gravines, we guess that something very dark has happened in recent years in the life of the singer-songwriter. The suicide of a loved one, most likely. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, but the tunes are so clear that I tell myself that I’m going to let the world make up their own mind,” he told us in an interview.
With a direct gaze, Gab Bouchard indulges in a certain candor throughout the discussion. He does not try to avoid our questions, sometimes even loses the thread of his ideas by wanting to detail his answers. But he prefers not to expand too much when it comes to what inspired the song. It’s coolwhich speaks of the mourning of a loved one.
Seated opposite us on the floor of a brasserie in the Hochelaga district, the musician nevertheless confides that he wrote the song “before something happened”. “It was like a premonition,” he says.
He notes how omnipresent death is, both on this track and on the rest of the record. If the pace is fast on several songs, the themes are very dark. On Water hole“much inspired by the lake and my old buddies”, it’s youth and drugs, the desire to live, stuck to that of abandoning oneself to the party sometimes. Remedy discusses heartbreak and ways to freeze the pain (read here: alcohol and drugs). In Gravines, Bouchard talks to someone, hopes that life doesn’t make her suffer too much anymore.
hope in music
Writing these songs was an outlet for Gab Bouchard.
more than the first [album] again, which had also helped me to externalize stuff. With that one, I made peace with a lot of personal stuff. I have gone around the question. It’s an album of mourning, but also of questioning, of addiction to many things.
Gab Bouchard
The pain of living is tangible throughout the album. His own, that of those he loves, that of those who will recognize themselves by listening to him. Gab Bouchard notes all the same with a little hindsight that hope is never far away. “There are other things to do than die”, we hear on Your shift is not over. “There are other things to do than to mourn love / There are other things to do than to mourn the days when everything was going well,” he adds in the chorus. The album ends on Even thoughwhich promises that inner peace will come one day.
And then there’s the music, which “gives a break to the lyrics”. “This album is two winters of creation and production. It’s dark and it’s heavy, it’s not really a summer album. But at the same time, the music comes to help. I like music that grooves. I like when it’s fun to play tunes. »
The instrumental album
On the instrumental side, moreover, Gab Bouchard’s offer has taken the lead. “I wanted the music to match the lyrics. I wanted the tunes to be good even without the words. Funny, there weren’t any for quite a while, I never finished my words. The joke was that it was going to be good, my instrumental album, ”says the one who admits to being an expert in procrastination.
The work on the arrangements was “pushed as far as we could go”. The strings take up space, give breadth. But not as much as the piano, which is everywhere. “I’ve always wanted more piano, but I’m not really able to play it, explains Gab Bouchard. But there, Matthew [Quenneville] arrived. This time, rather than working on his songs in preproduction alone, the singer called on his keyboardist friend, who had joined his band for the tour of the first album. “I kept asking him to come into the studio; finally, we said to ourselves that we were going to do all the tunes together, he says. He has really good ideas, but also all the musical knowledge that I don’t have. What I sing, he can do again. Me, it takes time. »
The duo listened to a lot of music for inspiration, from John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band album to Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino from Arctic Monkeys. Months of hard work later, Gravines finally sees the light of day. Gab Bouchard was nervous to present it for a while, for fear that “the world won’t like it because it’s too different from the first one”.
He now says pride has replaced fear. ” I like it. As soon as I tell myself that, I can’t wait to see what the world will think of it. »
Pop rock
Gravines
Gab Bouchard
Bravo Music