This is the case for many people who have survived the disease: Lulu Hughes wants to talk about it, but sometimes likes to change the subject. “I’m in shape, top shape,” she says, with her irresistible smile, about her current state of health.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
Its laconicism is less, it will be understood, a way of closing the door to any conversation on this subject – “I will always be there to testify and to listen to others” – than a way of opening another with the publication of Built Near the Water.
Why did she wait so long before recording this fourth album, the first since the covers of Lulu Hughes & The Montreal All City Big Band in 2010 ? The three cancers that have upset his daily life since 2016 – his last recurrence dates from 2020 – alone constitute a more than understandable justification. Ordeals to which was added in 2017 the death of his mother, Anna.
The last few years will therefore have been particularly busy, but Lulu Hughes is not new to adversity.
“I was feeling I didn’t want this no more / to fade away and disappear”, she confides on the very Stonesian title track of Built Near the Waterwhich brings her back to 2010, when she moved to Germany in the name of love, despite the music industry.
“When I left for Germany, I no longer wanted this business, how things were going here. I had an acute disgust,” recalls the one who is one of the most titanic voices in Quebec, which no album had yet managed to capture so well in all its ferocity.
rock with me (2002), taken from her first album, despite having toured extensively on FM waves, Lulu Hughes still tragically corresponds to the archetype, omnipresent in the history of rock, of the woman who amazes everyone on stage, but whose records never generate the same enthusiasm.
She returned home in 2014, without the man, but with the daughter they conceived. “I quickly realized there that without the music, I was going to die out. »
“Primal artistic spirit”
The beautiful irony: it is by abandoning her desire to conform to expectations that Lulu Hughes signs today the proverbial album that most resembles her, a formula certainly worn, although here impossible to circumvent. She is, by her own admission, a much calmer woman since her illness.
“And less controlling,” she adds, sharing a big laugh with the co-director of Built Near the Waterthe hero of the six-string Jean-Sébastien Chouinard, one of the generals of this army of peace (Army of Peace) trained by those who allow him to flourish (including the other co-director, Gautier Marinof).
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Lulu Hughes
Before, I was in the constant want to respond to the demands of the industry, an even heavier pressure for women, who must always be beautiful, never age. I had a lot of esteem success, but I never sold so much, because I was always too much or not enough: too Anglo, too intense, not Franco enough, not pop enough.
Lulu Hughes
“But the disease, she continues, really allowed me to say ‘Fuck this shit’. I’ve made a lot of compromises, in my personal life, but the only place I won’t let go is in my music, because I find it too important to keep my primal artistic spirit intact. »
Monuments
If this is the album that most resembles her, it is also for the simple reason that the 55-year-old singer-songwriter is finally using her lyrics to relieve her heart and mind, while the lyrics of his first two records were in many cases limited to amusing stylistic exercises.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Lulu Hughes and Jean-Sebastien Chouinard
“I’m so surrounded by good musicians that I’ve always been embarrassed to show my stuff,” she explains. I never doubted that I had my place on stage, but in the studio, it’s different. It was Jean-Seb who almost forced me to play my ideas to him. I felt like I was going to the stake, but right away he gave me confidence. »
Two ghosts, inseparable, hover over Built Near the Water : that of Lulu’s mother, to whom two songs are dedicated, and that of Led Zeppelin, still to this day her favorite group.
“When my mother brought Led Zep II at home, it was in 1971, I remember, because my father had just died. She came in, she packed up all the furniture, she put Whole Lotta Love and she said, “Come on, kids, we’re dancing.” We listened to the album over and over for a couple of hours dancing like crazy. ” Small break.
“Led Zeppelin are monuments, but my mother was also a monument. »
The album is offered exclusively on the artist’s website.
Rock
Built Near the Water
Lulu Hughes
Sphere Music