Marjo-Lovethe program that Télé-Québec devotes to the rocker on March 8, celebrates a work that continues, 35 years after the publication of her first solo album, to act like a wind that can change everything.
Posted at 4:52 p.m.
Updated at 5:50 p.m.
There is inevitably something amusing about the contrast: wearing leather pants (or what looks a lot like them) and a fur jacket (or what looks a lot like them), Marjo walks into the old church (!) in the Estrie village of Saint-Adrien, now converted into a creative center by Pilou (Pierre-Philippe Côté) and his team.
“What did I come here to do here? asks the beautiful 68-year-old bohemian. Answer: what she does best. “Music,” she chuckles during one of the interview segments interspersed between the dozen performances – some electrified, others stripped down – that make up this special, which isn’t airing on the air. occasion of International Women’s Day for nothing.
“I am a singer-songwriter. I always have been, but I never insisted. Now it’s known and it makes me happy, “says the former Raven to the camera before a segment bringing together Stéphanie Boulay, Lou-Adriane Cassidy and Salomé Leclerc, in a superb acoustic rereading of So much that he there will have children, a hymn to the courage that one must arm oneself with in the face of adversity.
During this hour of pure or mellow rock, Marjo takes us where it smells of love, an exhilarating smell that ends up covering all the places – karaoke bars or old places of worship – where her successes resonate. It’s “really a lesson in human freedom, nature, music, love”, observes Guylaine Tanguay about the immortal wild catsbefore singing a nice country variation with his idol.
The thing will have rarely been so obvious as in these calm versions designed as boxes for the texts of the unfairly underestimated singer-songwriter: all the songs of Marjo talk in their own way of love and freedom. Of the love that suffocates if it is not free, and the freedom that is never total if love – the love of life, not necessarily romantic love – does not breathe its light into it.
PHOTO PASCAL RATTHE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Marjo, on stage in Quebec, in September 2019.
All those women in her
Love: the time of two songs, Marjo reconnects for the first time in more than 20 years with her former boyfriend and creative partner, Jean Millaire, whose guitar has always been able to convey the melancholy that the words of his muse try to drive away. This show is worth watching, if only to see Marjo overcome with emotion during their performance of Soft.
If it is touching to spy on this brief moment of grace and intimacy, it is however in general because Marjo has the power to fade away, and to incarnate in a way all women, that her repertoire remains as strong. At the heart of her repertoire, Marjo is both the poet and the model, the fashionista and the punk, the fickle lover and the rejected lover, the one who doubts and the one who goes, the indomitable cheeky and the great sensitive. A sumptuous version of If needs be, which she sings in the rood screen of the church with violin and cello, brings a few tears to her, and to us too. “Marjo represents freedom, emancipation, strength of character”, summarizes Stéphanie Boulay.
“I’m going to live my life as I’ve already dreamed of”, proclaims Lou-Adriane Cassidy in chorus with the veteran in in love, a carpe diem refrain that would be easy to read as a feminist ode. The two fiery women may be separated by almost 45 years, but the young 24-year-old singer knows full well, like all fans of the provocative icon, that it’s never too early, nor too late, to embrace this wind. that makes you want to assert yourself: the wind that Marjo blows wherever she goes.
Marjo-LoveTélé-Québec, Tuesday at 8 p.m.