Gisèle and Nicole had left Drummondville that morning promising each other one thing. “If we meet Richard Séguin, we say a rosary on the way back,” they confide to the main interested party, amused. Rosary, they must have said. Story of an afternoon with the singer.
The most famous citizen of Saint-Venant-de-Paquette saw the two ladies first and immediately went to meet them, not at all with the attitude of the artist who comes to pick his flowers, but rather as a proud man. of his village. Gisèle and Nicole just can’t believe it. A few words exchanged in front of the church and now their day is done.
We had the impression – the photographer Dominick, the sound technician Bastien and I – that we were going to Saint-Venant-de-Paquette, the small Estrie village that Richard Séguin has made his quiet haunt (and landmark) since 1973 , to record an interview. We had no idea that we would spend the whole afternoon with him.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
Richard Séguin in the church of Saint-Venant-de-Paquette
“There is a pagan sacredness that dwells in me”, he answers a question about his spiritual life – an appropriate question since our interview took place in the sacristy of the church of Saint-Venant, today a Art Gallery. And this “pagan sacredness” will be embodied that afternoon not only in exceptional attention to others, but also in a certain sense of ritual.
Far from the city
No question of settling down for the interview without having at least gotten to know each other a little. Richard welcomes us, hand outstretched, as soon as we get out of the car and immediately invites us to have a coffee at the Tree House, where he introduces us to everyone. This is where we will return once the interview is over, to warm up over tea, the church being chilly.
It’s at the Tree House that we’ll talk, without a microphone or recorder, about Jack Kerouac, the group The War on Drugs (which I introduce him to) and Dylan, more precisely about his song Murder Most Foul, a nearly 17-minute trip through the history of the United States, which he listens to on repeat in his engraving studio. “His voice becomes for me like a mantra. »
Richard Séguin, a child from the east of Montreal, sang a lot of urbanity in the 1980s and 1990s, but has always, paradoxically, written it from the temples that are these vast Appalachian territories.
Not a single song from his repertoire – “except five or six”, he concedes – has been written anywhere other than Saint-Venant, since Two hundred nights an hour, the Fiori-Séguin album that almost brought together not only Serge and Richard, but also Michel Rivard. This is one of the big “what if?” in the history of Quebec music.
“By being far from the city, sometimes you get closer to it, you have a better perspective of what can be experienced in the city, explains our host. When I arrive here, I find myself in front of my sheet and I see a bunch of people I met during the tour. »
“They live inside of us”
Like Bruce Springsteen (to whom he has already lent a guitar), Richard Séguin has often witnessed the daily life of the proletarian, but neither has he ever had “real jobs “, in addition to a brief job as a janitor. “I feel like I gave voice to a generation that didn’t have it,” he says, referring to The refinery (1988), inspired by the factory life that broke his father.
Richard Séguin had already written on several occasions about his father, but had never carried out the same exercise for his mother, before the magnificent Close to the aspenstaken from his most recent album, Links places. As if to raise a beacon in the middle of our exchanges, the songwriter quotes a writer dear to his heart to describe his relationship with his parents who are gone.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
Richard Seguin
“The poet Mélanie Noël said: ‘They live inside us.’ And it’s a fact: our parents live inside of us. They may be gone, but they’re still there. And I find that as you get older, you notice it even more. I feel closer to them, even with the passage of time. »
“I have voluntary hope”, summarizes Richard Séguin, about his refusal to give up, despite all the reasons to let himself be swallowed up by cynicism. Like his mother, a devout Catholic, Richard Séguin is a man of faith, but who, rather than believing in the communion of saints, believes in the sincerity of a look and in this gentle resistance that it is possible to oppose to accelerating everything.
Deep in the Appalachians, Richard Séguin continues to want to believe in it, simply to believe in it, as he proclaimed in 1995 on Instinctively. We didn’t say the Rosary on the way back to Montreal, but we had his songs with us.
Richard Séguin will be at the Théâtre Maisonneuve on Saturday at 8 p.m. for the Francos.
Three quotes from our interview
About his friendship with the Innu people
Richard Séguin and Florent Vollant became friends more than 30 years ago, when the ex-Kashtin became his neighbor in Outremont. It was Richard who introduced his friend to Montreal – he tells our microphone about a particularly memorable show by Neil Young and Crazy Horse that they attended at the Forum. Florent then invited him to Mani-Utenam, to walk in the woods. They are this summer the smugglers of the 40e Petite-Vallée song festival. “We think, Florent and I, that music has the power to bring communities together. If we have something to say, it’s that through music, we can create deep bonds, great bonds of brotherhood. »
About what he says no to
“Go on television when you are asked to do something other than sing. It’s strange, but there is little place for the song in the media, on television, even on the radio. It’s as if it didn’t matter, it’s been trivialized, it’s getting smaller all the time. Even our songs, on television, they will find that it is too long. Three minutes is a long time, just give me your chorus, it’ll be okay! »
About Helene Dalair
Several women have played a major role in Richard Séguin’s career: his sister Marie-Claire, the writer Louky Bersianik, the poet Hélène Dorion and Hélène Dalair, his conductor for nearly a decade. “To see all the drive she could have, it spoke to a whole generation of women who felt they could take on the role of leader. »