Free and sexy: these are the two words that best describe Lou-Adriane Cassidy’s second album, which bears the cheerful and inviting title Lou-Adriane Cassidy says: good evening. After a wiser first album launched almost three years ago, she frees herself from the shackles of song, but also her own.
“I thought I was condemned to a certain style, a certain way of being as an artist and on stage,” says the singer-songwriter from Quebec, who has been immersed in French song all her life.
“I stood up straight on stage, I sang Barbara…”, she says. It was therefore quite natural that she had followed this very “song” path on her (excellent) first album, It’s the end of the world everyday, released when she was only 21 years old.
“I felt like I just knew how to do this. But I realized by accompanying lots of people, talking with other artists, being stimulated, that my playground was bigger than I thought. And I wanted to explore that too. ”
The one who was chorister for Hubert Lenoir on the tour Darlene Above all, she wanted to have fun and not take herself seriously – welcome the funny mise en abyme -, to explore “an animality, almost a violence” that she discovered on stage, to surprise herself. -same.
The result of this quest is also pinched only concentrated: the 10 pop-flavored songs on the album last in just 20 minutes, but you never feel that the singer-songwriter has turned corners. On the contrary.
In my first album, there was a lot of bridge… There, I said: ‟Ah, but that’s no use!” I find it’s always too long, all shapes. Basically, it’s just coming back to the essence of a tune, verse, chorus, thank you. It’s an exercise, but I also feel like it’s consistent.
Lou-Adriane Cassidy
Coherent in form and also in substance: in this second album, Lou-Adriane Cassidy goes straight to the point and tackles sexuality without taboos, more precisely its sexuality, in its brightest corners, but also the darkest.
“The song that Stéphane Lafleur wrote to me, The body in motion, it’s making love, it’s beautiful, it’s pure. But I also wanted to talk about the conflicting relationships, of desire and absence of desire, of the anger that we can experience in front of the expectations of others and towards ourselves. There is never just one way to experience your sexuality, and I think an album is the perfect place to tackle all of that. ”
The singer
For all these reasons, something very free emerges from this album which she co-produced with Simon Pedneault and the much requested Alexandre Martel, with whom she shares her life. If she wrote the lyrics alone, they composed the music together. Working in pairs has above all enabled him to assume more responsibility.
“It gives confidence. We judge ourselves less, we allow ourselves more in humor and winks. It gives more than guts. ”
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
Lou-Adriane Cassidy’s voice is already rich, fair and of great depth, but this freedom was felt even in the way she sang. “It’s as if on my first album, I was afraid to sing for real. She put aside sobriety and let out raw emotion, once again not to “be satisfied” with what she had already done.
“I had the taste to let myself go, to shout, that it exceeds… I wanted more nuances, but in the other direction. Often, we say that to go smaller. Me, it’s the opposite, it was to go to bigger! ”
The subject was suitable, of course, but above all she stopped being “ashamed of being a singer”. “At CEGEP, in music, we did a lot, jokes of a Nunuche singer who doesn’t know where to go. ”
There is no longer any question of wanting to be something other than what it is. Nor to be complexed by his talent.
What you have, you have no choice but to put forward, otherwise you miss out on what you have to give. So this is it. I am a singer, I am a woman, I have a sexuality. And I assume myself in all this complexity.
Lou-Adriane Cassidy
The album comes out on Friday and Lou-Adriane Cassidy hopes people will take the time to listen to it in full. “I think there is a nice curve in it and that it can bring a variety of emotions to life. ”
She is especially eager to resume the shows – her European tour was interrupted at the very start of the pandemic, when she had just arrived in Belgium.
“We did zero shows! There, we should go back in March. I can’t wait to get back on tour, rearrange my songs, including those from the first album, to make something cohesive. ”
And she arrives with this new album claiming a certain immaturity, which is very amusing to her. But above all by never wanting to remain locked in a single definition of herself.
“On the first album, I was like ‘this is what I am’. There, that’s what I am right now and what I wanted to do, and it might be different next time. But it is nonetheless sincere. I put everything I had in there. ”
Alternative pop
Lou-Adriane Cassidy says: good evening
Lou-Adriane Cassidy
Bravo Music
On sale November 5