His music
There has always been music at Jeanne Côté. Her mother teaches music, her father runs the Petite-Vallée Song Festival and her sister is also a musician and coach singing… “I was taking piano lessons because my sister was taking them, but that’s not necessarily what excited me the most,” she says. I was writing, in fact. I wanted to write novels. » Arriving at songwriting through writing, she ended up appreciating this art which allows her to remain introverted while expressing herself. She released a CD called Suite for person in January 2023 and won the Francouvertes a few months later.
Extract of The waveby Jeanne Côté
Who inspires him?
In her current job, she aspires to do “a lot with a little”. This is why she likes the minimalist approach, full of good, simple ideas, of the Quebec tandem Bibi Club (made up of Nicolas Basque and Adèle Trottier-Rivard) and the British duo Rozi Plain. She also admires Joni Mitchell and her “absolute mastery” of the texts. “There is something cinematic in the way he tells his stories,” believes Jeanne Côté. She got the full measure of this artist by listening to her album Hejira while having the texts in front of him, as the singer-songwriter Émilie Proulx had suggested to him. The experience was remarkable. “Joni Mitchell really became a monument to me in that moment. »
A song she wishes she had written
Cafe Robinson by Marie-Jo Thério. “I find that this tune contains a novel in terms of emotional density and possible meanings,” she explains. The piece lasts seven minutes, but tells a story “that could last an hour”. That Jeanne Côté would choose a romantic song makes sense, since she wanted to write novels. Let her choose Cafe Robinson is just as logical for an admirer of Joni Mitchell: this piece by Marie-Jo Thério inevitably evokes The Last Time I Saw Richardlast song of the album Blue, one of the Canadian artist’s masterpieces.
Extract of The Robinson Cafeby Marie-Jo Thério
Its summer
Her summer is already quite busy with concerts in eastern Quebec and the workshops she will lead in Petite-Vallée. Jeanne Côté took advantage of the momentum her victory at the Francouvertes gave her: her next record is already finished, she now hopes to find a record company to market it. This album will be different from Suite for person, but the arrangements will remain minimalist, she assures. “I have the impression that the text takes its place more and that the meanings are more open when we leave space in the songs. »
At Pub Brasseur de Montréal on June 14, at 5 p.m., as part of the Francos
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