Jean Lapointe left behind hundreds of songs, many of which are still hummed today.
Meo Leaning
Before beginning his successful solo career in the early to mid-1970s, Jean Lapointe formed a popular entertainer duo with his sidekick Jérôme Lemay. The two men, who performed in the cabarets of the province, brilliantly mixed humor and song, and Meo Leaning, a funny story of the rise of a boxer, is probably their most emblematic. The ex-Beau Dommage Pierre Bertrand had also brought it back to life 20 years later, and the song had again been a great success.
My Uncle Edmund
My Uncle Edmond is a bit of a comic version of The Seal’s Lament in Alaska. The song, which appears on Jean Lapointe’s first album released in 1976, Cleansed, tells the story of an uncle who brags that he speaks English faster than everyone else, who leaves to make his fortune in Ontario and who, when he returns 20 years later, no longer speaks a word of French. It’s all there: the talent for storytelling as much as the humor from his cabaret period, which he never lost and which he happily brought to the show.
The lament to my brother
It’s one of the most powerful scenes in the history of Quebec cinema: in the film Orders by Michel Brault, released in 1974, Jean Lapointe’s character, Clermont Boudreau, is imprisoned during the October Crisis. Standing behind the bars of his cell, he intones The lament to my brother, a solemn song of freedom that echoes through the prison, as the prisoners listen to it silently. No other rendition of this song has come close to this one, a slightly different version of which appeared on Jean Lapointe’s first solo album two years later.
It’s in the songs
It’s in the songs is the most beautiful tribute there is to this so-called minor art that is song, and also a great deal to those who gave it its letters of nobility in Quebec. ” From Petit bonheur to Tour de l’île/Félix sowed the seeds, it all started/Vigneault grew up with My country/It’s by listening to it that people from here recognized each other, found each other/A heart in the voice of our songwriters. » In a single verse, the past and the present meet, with a clarity that Jean Lapointe has always known how to achieve. It’s in the songs appears on his first album in 1976, but it is a very fruitful period which begins at this time for the singer-songwriter, since he will release no less than seven albums in ten years.
sing your song
Also the title of Jean Lapointe’s third album released in 1978, Sing it your song is perhaps his best known. Ritournelle of a disarming simplicity of which he alone had the secret, it will be one of his greatest successes, crowned Classic of SOCAN in 1995 (25,000 passages on the radio), and inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016. Jean Lapointe wrote it with songwriter Marcel Lefebvre — “ Everyone has their own melody/deep inside “, it is he who had the idea of the chorus, they say, while returning from the chalet with his children. The collaboration between the two men will last 40 years, and they will write more than a hundred songs together. It is the voice of Elisabeth, Jean Lapointe’s daughter, that we hear at the beginning of the song.
If we sang together
“ If we sang together/Words that resemble us/If we sang about life/And these days/If we only sang about love/If we sang together/Words that bring us together/If we sang our dreams/ And given the weather / If we only sang peace Written in 1982, If we sang together, which is also the title of his fifth album, resonates 40 years later as a more relevant hymn to peace than ever. Jean Lapointe plays with words with finesse, but above all we find there all the essence of what he was: an entire love for his art, an infinite affection for people, and an overflowing tenderness for the world, because that he had some to spare. This is no small legacy.