Three and a half albums later, couldn’t we just leave the singing sculptor and focus on the singer singing his own wonderful songs? Asking the question has the opposite effect: we are back to where we started. Instead of starting, even. From the pottery workshop where his companion performs, the Google Meet screen does not show Jean-Robert Drouillard in the middle of the recording studio, Jean-Robert Drouillard fully assuming the identity conferred on him by his nickname Juste Robert. “I just didn’t think about it,” he said simply, shrugging his shoulders. I didn’t argue with the record company about the release not mentioning the sculptor. He lets out a small laugh. “It’s not as if I was overshadowing myself… There aren’t that many people who know Juste Robert, we can’t say that the number of plays on the platforms is so impressive. So telling the same story is perhaps still necessary. »
music landscapes
The story ? Deciding to pick up a guitar at 44, carrying out a well-established career as a sculptor and an improbable career as a singer-songwriter, and seeing yourself haloed with advantageous comparisons by a media cohort in search of late discoveries — come on hop, we present to you the new Richard Desjardins! In his fifties, the acclaimed Juste Robert has not yet become the acclaimed Total Robert: the guy is still surprised to have made it this far. Hence the story loop. “I thought all my life that I would make songs, but never that I would end up on real stages, accompanied by real professional musicians, backed by a real record company. It is still strange to assume, the singer-songwriter, I am more comfortable with the sculptor who sings. »
There has been clear progress, all the same: you can hear it through the ten songs of Your theory on light. The management of the sound design by collaborators, the musical landscapes designed by Benoît “Shampouing” Villeneuve, the harmonies of Émilie Clepper and Ariane Roy, the trumpet and the trombone of Benoît Paradis, the guitar of Claude Fradette, everything contributes to composing a sort of solar system in which the songs orbit, each in its own atmosphere. The metaphor here is inspired by The silence and the slownessa magnificent song where Juste Robert describes what you don’t take the time to see when your nose is glued to your gold.
“There is your wife in
his white shirt,
and the sun, the sun through the window
trace geometric shapes
on the bedroom floor,
light years away”
“It’s not the sculptor who speaks, he explains, it’s the guy who studied literature in his twenties who tries to communicate. When I arrived at Shampouing, I didn’t have the musical language to explain to him what I heard in my head. He created the arrangements from what he decoded, from his own ideas too. The big difference with previous records is that the musicians were able to take the time to transpose into their language what I seek to express in my words. Just Robert smiles, the whole process flashes back in front of his eyes. “It was still done during the pandemic, from a distance. We were relaunching, we scrapped, we started again, Shampouing added tracks, tracks and more tracks, little noises, atmospheres… It lasted a long time. Except for The silence and the slowness, the first one we did: total magic! People talk to me a lot about my song lyrics, but I am amazed by the construction of the music. »
Simplicity, beauty, accuracy
Us too, us too. We are often uplifted by this music (just a little, just enough, everything is right with Juste Robert), the words are carried, the melodies rocked. The fact remains that the perfectly descriptive texts of Juste Robert continue to delight. An example : Upstream. In this song with stanzas in I-tu-he-we-you-they, we have the impression of watching a choral film which would show the scenes of the post-pandemic period: “I made a roof from above the gallery / a shelter to watch the rain […] They took hands in front of the photos / in the great hall at the entrance to the theatre”. The music of the words is still that which we hear most distinctly. “I try as much as I can not to be hermetic. To create beauty, but without embellishing to embellish. Everything needed is already there, in the simplest words. » And Juste Robert to specify that the writing work, for several titles, took place in collegiality with Stéphane Robitaille. “He’s the one who’s been most successful in expressing what I feel when I write”, in the song Under the sound of helicopters. It’s so successful that you’d think you were hearing from Juste Robert: “I have plenty of metaphors / to describe a fascist / but I have very few words to describe the beautiful”.