Here is one who, over the albums, does things more and more in his own way, without dependence on musical expectations towards him, also ignoring heavy marketing trends. Singer and guitarist Jimmy Hunt is sinking into freedom, as proven by the two almost Siamese records that he released on Friday, with little or no warning.
So here it dawns Kingdom And Big beak, astonishing entities each in their own way, but which share four texts – give or take a few lines. The first album, notably created with Steeven Chouinard (Le Couleur), is cold, slow and dreamy. The second, composed with the versatile Pierre Guy Blanchard, is more rock, but bouncy, borderline erratic, deconstructed, alive.
All this appears with the sole promotion of slightly blurry videos published very recently on its social networks, otherwise almost unused. ” There is a lot of singles now which come out before the albums, the promotion lasts for months, sighs Jimmy Hunt, contacted by telephone. I’m not a big fan of this. I still have a perhaps nostalgic relationship with album releases, [j’aimais] when you discovered the album the day the album came out. »
There are a lot of singles now that come out before the albums, the promotion lasts for months. I’m not a big fan of this. I still have a perhaps nostalgic relationship with album releases, [j’aimais] when you discovered the album the day the album came out.
Marketing may seem anecdotal, but it often reveals the ambitions and desires that artists have — and the pirouettes they are willing to do to get there. In this area, Jimmy Hunt is more of the minimalist type, therefore, and doesn’t really like having to do things because that’s how we usually do them.
“I always make the music I want to make, but maybe the music I want to make is not always… I don’t make the ideal choice to sell or have mass success or things like that. I lean a little to the left, all the same, in my artistic tastes,” he admits.
Throughout his discography, Jimmy Hunt’s needle of roughness has oscillated with the times. Initially quite raw at the start, he offered a fairly catchy rock song with his group Chocolat, then filled the audience with his first eponymous solo record made up of more classic songs. It is at Love sicknesswhich is celebrating its tenth anniversary, that the floodgates of freedom have opened, explains Hunt, with broken records from Chocolat and a return to his own account with The silence in 2020 — also released without warning.
Get out of the box
On his two new records, Jimmy Hunt succeeds in creating stimulating pieces, but he frees himself from many of the preconceptions of music as we generally understand it. Big beakfor example, is populated with excerpts from discussions or reactions captured during studio sessions with the versatile musician Pierre Guy Blanchard, and the concept of chorus and verse is nicely handled.
“I often give this example, but what we call Egyptian art, these two-dimensional images, lasted for centuries and centuries. It’s interesting, there were variations, but not many, they were codes. Then, in music, even in contemporary music, pop is also that, there are quite rigid codes, with precisely the chorus, then the structure, there is a beginning, an end, then all that . And I find that these are interesting areas in which to take liberties. And the goal is always to draw attention to a message, but in an original way as much as possible. So I like more and more to take a step outside of these forms rather than conforming to them to seek success or seek approval. »
Jimmy Hunt says it himself on Thank you for your book, during an improvised segment at the end of the piece: “Did you say the phrase twenty-five times or one? I’m trying to imagine, in the universe of possibilities, how to mark this out in the slightest? »
Basically, you can get lost in a world of freedom. “We wanted to leave that sentence there,” explains Jimmy Hunt. Because that exactly sums up the questions I often had during the process, because we weren’t really looking at where we were going. Pierre Guy, he is more radical than me. He’s the kind of guy who would leave everything he records as is. He’s more experimental core than me. I was super open to all that, but I was trying to find like a zone where we stop. »
The six pieces of the shutter Kingdom, they are more framed, minimalist. It is in the icy and dated textures of digital keyboards that these titles take on their meaning. With the very short lyrics, the album is “more spiritual,” suggests Hunt. “ Kingdom is very controlled, very precise towards a kind of elevation, or quest for something. »
We risk a wink with him by evoking the old sketch by François Pérusse on new age music and its musician who fell asleep on his keyboard. Hunt laughs (fiou). “Well yes, that’s it, it’s music that doesn’t move!” Sometimes the musicians wanted us to add a little more, then I kept saying no, no, no, it’s perfect. Faque is music the same. »
His creative freedom, however, has a financial cost for Jimmy Hunt, especially since he is no longer fond of putting on shows, a “time-consuming exercise that takes a lot of energy”. He receives royalties from the hundred songs in his repertoire, but above all, he has adopted a modest lifestyle in Maria in Gaspésie.
“I have a country house that I am renovating myself. I make my firewood with the wood that is on my land, I can fish in the Baie des Chaleurs. There, I am taking my course to hunt with a crossbow, partridge for example. You know, it’s a way of life, it’s not like living in the city with a big mortgage. I made this choice, to live more simply, and I can make the art I want. This is why I also think that in my albums, more and more I am going to take artistic liberties. That was my goal. » And we wish him a strong increase in happiness.