Julie Aube | The beauty of the second hand

On Satisfaction, her second solo album generous in warmly outdated references, the Hay Babies Julie Aubé sings the beauty of objects and humans threadbare by time. We made an appointment with him at a second-hand record store.

Dominic Late
The Press

Julie Aubé, like any record collector, keeps a mental list of nuggets on which she hopes to come across when she snoops in the bins. What do we find there? His eyebrows rise. “There are many, many things. »

But for now, the singer would love to get her hands on a copy ofBefore being overwhelmed (1973), Edith Butler’s youth album. A Grail which she will not acquire today, we conclude after having inspected the sections devoted to Quebec and French music, the two poles between which Acadian culture is too often torn.

Born in Memramcook in the early 1990s, Julie Aubé was 10 or 11 years old (“preteen, let’s say”) when her father gave her her first record player as well as a set of handpicked LPs, “du early Rod Stewart, Crime of the Century Supertramp, Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Jim Croce”.

But why did her father believe that his daughter would appreciate such a gift? The scene takes place in the family garage, in the summer weeks following the Aubés’ move to Moncton. Little Julie doesn’t have any friends there yet, but will soon form lasting relationships with four lousy gentlemen named John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Papa Aubé was unknowingly laying the foundations on which his youngest would build her own music, deeply indebted to Fleetwood Mac, The Band, Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan, usual suspects of used record stores — go listen for the first notes of the irresistible Not mucha flight entirely claimed by Julie on the organ of Like a Rolling Stone. “At home, we didn’t listen to the popular music of the time. When I was going to mall, I was like: What’s that, Justin Timberlake? Of course I was not the cool girl in my school. »

love the unloved

Gratitude. This could also have been the title of Satisfaction, second solo album by Julie Aubé, on which the prolific author-composer lists what, from day to day, nourishes her well-being. A list on which appear a number of threadbare objects, but also of humans on whom the years have imprinted their irrevocable and moving patina. She pays homage to them Second hand, ode to the strength of everything that time has nicely cracked.

“Wear, experience, it’s beautiful. There’s nothing that bothers me more than a new pair of super white sneakers,” laughs the one who, when she’s not on tour, fills her hours at home in the woods in Memramcook, making and mending clothes.

Mending, patching up: these are gestures that Julie cherishes literally and figuratively, she who emerges from the pandemic with the hope that we will collectively know how to give each other needles and cotton, to repair our hearts in pieces. She talks about her song Watch yourself as “a love letter to all those who are harder to love”.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years, it’s empathy, patience and love,” she says.

Young veteran of Acadian rock, Julie Aubé, 29, says she was ashamed of her language for a long time. Her poetry of small nothings, jealously rooted in the territory of her daily life, testifies to all the invigorating richness of the different French spoken in the Maritimes.

“At school, they showed me Garou and Céline Dion and they said to me: ‘That’s your culture.’ And I didn’t understand anything they were singing! It created in me a huge linguistic insecurity, I felt stupid. It was as if my way of speaking was invalid. But today, young people aged 16 and 17 have their own artists like the Hôtesses d’Hilaire or the P’tit Belliveau, who look like them. It gives something to be proud of. What to be satisfied.

Rock

Satisfaction

Julie Aube

Simone Records