Pop Montreal | Ben Vallee, the young Willie Nelson of the West Island

His first album is one of the unsung gems of Montreal music in recent months. His country, without whiskey or pickup truck, is nothing new, but it really doesn’t belong to the past. Let’s get to know Ben Vallee.

In high school, all of Ben Vallee’s friends would beat their ears to the sound of their favorite metal bands. “And I was listening to bluegrass and country,” he recalls with a laugh. The bassist and drummer who accompany him on stage, his friends Colin Savoie-Levac and Tyler Addey-Jibb, have also retained the look of musicians from the microcosm of hardcore punk.

“The metal and hardcore scene is made up of outsiders, so it was never a problem for them to open their arms to an even more outsider guy, like me, who listened to Merle Haggard,” he observes.

Originally from Dorval, Ben Vallee, 25, fell in love with country music when, as a teenager, the father of one of his friends introduced him to The Highwaymen, the supergroup made up of four giants of American music (and excess): Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. “You can’t really imagine a better introduction,” he says, in the language of Hank Williams.

The kitchen of the song

His ride into the vast and rich world of roots music – country, folk, bluegrass – would quickly transform him into a treasure hunter: first on the third floor of the HMV Megastore, on Sainte-Catherine. Then in this sort of antechamber at the back of the Beatnick record store, where vinyls by Ray Price, Tanya Tucker and so many others were piled up. Then at the Montreal Folk Fest, where the man who would become his producer, Li’l Andy, once complimented him on his cowboy hat.

“I was 15 and for a little guy from the West Island, it was a big deal to have Andy talk to me,” he recalls of the guy he recorded with. Introducing…his first album released last June, a gem of melancholic or galloping songs, sublimated by the bewitching beauty of the crying lap steel and lyrics attentive to the tides of his own inner life.

As a teenager, Ben Vallee worked as a cleaner at a daycare to save up the money to buy his first guitar, a nice Larrivée, and then managed to get his first pedal steel through his kitchen jobs. A graduate of ITHQ, he worked at Joe Beef, then as a pastry chef at Maison Publique and now lends a hand to Marie-Josée Beaudoin and Patrice Demers in their new restaurant, Sabayon.

Along with artists like Woods Andrew, The Silver Sardines and the Nora Kelly Band, Ben Vallee is part of a thriving underground Montreal country scene, the polar opposite of the sometimes amusing but often boring artifice of what is called new country.

He also participated in the recording of another country gem of the last few months, the first album of the band Steel Saddle, in which he plays the pedal steel, an instrument that “sounds like it’s plugged directly into your heart and soul.”

But in his own concerts, Ben delegates responsibility for the lap steel to his teacher in the field, the giant Kim Deschamps, a former member of Blue Rodeo (from 1993 to 2000) and craftsman of one of the greatest Canadian albums of all time, Trinity Sessions (1988) by Cowboy Junkies. “If Kim asked me to pay him the fee he deserves,” Ben jokes, “I wouldn’t have any way of paying him.”

Far from the clichés

A big Willie Nelson fan, Ben Vallee has a tattoo of the Texan bard’s iconic W on one thigh and a very different one on his chest, expressing his allegiance to straight edge, a subculture whose followers don’t consume alcohol or drugs. His album therefore contains no drinking songs, with the exception of Time, Time, Timeinspired by the wine-loving fauna of the Pioneer in Pointe-Claire, where he presented his first concerts.

“But beyond his drinking songs,” he observes, “Willie is first and foremost a storyteller, a philosopher. And his music, the arrangements, have nothing of what you associate with country clichés. It’s essentially a classical guitar and a harmonica. Same thing with Johnny Cash, who was accompanied by a rockabilly trio. What I mean is, listening to their music always makes me want to stay as far away from clichés as possible.”

Country, for Ben Vallee, is therefore not a formula to embrace, but rather a window open onto the truth. “And that’s why going to see a show, especially in a small venue, remains the best way to experience music, because you’re there with other people who don’t know what’s going to happen, in front of musicians who won’t play the same thing as yesterday or tomorrow. You’re in real life.”

September 25, 9:30 p.m., at the Rialto Theater with Big Share, on the occasion of Pop Montreal

Check out the event page

Country

Introducing…

Ben Valley

Independent

Americana

Steel Saddle

Steel Saddle

Independent