Making a good cover album is already one thing. Making a cover album in the Inuit language that has the capacity to shake the listener who doesn’t understand anything about it is something else. Making a record of covers in which each song plunges its performer into areas that are both painful and then luminous is something of a rarity. This is what the singer Elisapie offers with her record Inuktitut.
For several months, the artist born in Salluit had already let slip a handful of titles which set the tone of this astonishing record: she resumed, in Inuktitut in the text, the Unforgiven from Metallica, Wild Horses the Rolling Stones, Time After Time by Cindy Lauper and Heart of Glass from Blondie. Now all of these covers appear on Friday. Added to the lot are other surprises, including the classic Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, the disco bomb Born to Be Alive by Patrick Hernandez and Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd.
Did you say exploded? At first glance, certainly, apart from the fact that all the titles on this disc are radio bombs. It is precisely this, in a certain way, which links them all. These songs were broadcast on the airwaves in Salluit, becoming the musical backdrop to little Elisapie’s life. That of the beautiful moments of dance, but also that of its challenges, of the tragedies which struck his family and his friends, including suicides.
“It started with an ABBA song, I was jogging and I started crying. On ABBA! I wondered what was happening,” says Elisapie. The song — which is not on the record — dug deep into his memories and brought back pain. And sparked a little idea in her home, that, perhaps, of a little “side project” to carry out in times of COVID, ultimately becoming over time a complete record.
“It’s a very instinctive thing, very emotional too, like everything I do. It’s the only way I can make music,” explains Elisapie, for whom Inuktitut is a fourth disc, which appears five years later The Ballad of the Runaway Girl.
Throughout the shopping and listening, Elisapie compiled the songs that still upset her to this day. The sorting was done… by the tear barometer. “When I came back with wet eyes or when I sat on the sofa with my head in my hands,” it was a sign that the song could have a place among the covers. This emotional filter, adds Elisapie, means that the selection is not made up of “songs cool made in version cool “. “Above all, I wanted the Inuit to like it, and for it to resonate for them. That’s what makes it coherent. »
Above all, I wanted the Inuit to like it, and for it to resonate for them. That’s what makes it coherent.
Which gives, for a record anchored in indigenous reality, a rather astonishing and… white selection. “That’s what was playing on the radio, eh, that’s American white people’s music, notes the singer. But what’s beautiful is the fact that the music, for the duration of a song, even if it came from white people, it didn’t give us the impression that we were different from Led Zeppelin or Metallica, it They were our friends. »
Soundscape
Consistency — and one of the great strengths ofInuktitut — is also there in the soundscape created by director and guitarist Joe Grass, with the help of percussionist Robbie Kuster and keyboardist François Lafontaine.
There is a lot of sky, peat and stone, a little traditional drumming (on Hey, That’s no Way to Say Goodbye by Leonard Cohen) and throat singing, guitar of all kinds, undulating synthetic keys, brass too. And the songs, which generally progress more calmly than the originals, are carried by the warm and skin-deep voice of Elisapie, whose timbre bathed in reverberation brings out at moments, including on Wild Horsesechoes of what the Icelanders of Sigur Rós do.
The tears returned to the studio, driven by the emotional charge of performing these songs carrying memories in front of other people, no matter how friends they may be. Joe Grass had the intelligence to remain musically sober, and not to overwhelm the performer with technical considerations. “You have to challenge yourself in the studio, but when you experience something like that, which is so personal, it’s the fun also to feel that you are supported and that you have someone solid who is there for you. Then Joe, for me, that’s really it. »
Inuktitut is also a story of copyright release which took more than a year of work and which required a lot of perseverance. It is also an important translation work on the part of Elisapie, who achieved her goals, according to her, thanks to her experience as an author and performer — “there are songs, like Wish You Were Here, for which I have the impression that we perhaps already heard them in Inuktitut. »
But it is very much a personal story, a story of family and community, a story of peace and scars, wrapped in familiar tunes. “As Inuit, as Indigenous people, in order to survive, we learned to no longer feel our emotions and we buried far, far too much,” says Elisapie. Then I have the impression, with this album, that I have undone everything, the heaviness, the layers. And there I feel so much lighter… and strong too. »