Is there a new album in production? – Maeva Berniquez
Not yet. I have the one that just came out. [L’écho des perles, en avril 2024]and I have other projects, like Saturday R&Bwhich I host at ICI Musique. I’m also writing a book. That doesn’t leave me much time for an album. It’s coming, but not right away.
Why is singing in French important to you, and do you believe that French is threatened in Quebec? – Martin Joseph Lamontagne
Great question! I’m biased towards French, because it’s the language through which I found my style. At 15, 16, I thought I would make music in English. But I realized, when I arrived in Quebec, that if I wanted to make a career here, it’s not in English that I was going to get there. But it was in a musical genre, R&B, which doesn’t have a long tradition in French, so I had to weave a style that was uniquely my own. I owe my entire career to this language, that’s for sure.
And is French in danger? I don’t think so. For several reasons, the main one being that when we say we are afraid that the language will disappear, it means that we care enough about it to be alert to the dangers that await it.
The accuracy of your comments, your sensitivity towards the candidates of The voice have simply blown me away. What are your current or future activities that will allow young people to learn and develop this humanity? – Martine Joyal
The book I’m writing is right on that. It’s a kind of philosophical essay where I take little anecdotes from my life, and I extrapolate with a dialogue with my late father, who I imagine in heaven and who has solutions to everything, and to whom I say that we’re having a little trouble talking to each other at the moment. In any case, we have the impression that identity divisions have never been so strong. My book is a way of reacting to this state of affairs.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Singer-songwriter Corneille
And then my other contribution is what I try to do in my work of transmission in conferences. I give a lot of conferences on immigration and inclusion throughout Quebec and Canada.
How has your Rwandan experience influenced your artistic journey? – Chantal Allen
There are happy experiences, and unhappy ones. The unhappy one is probably what shaped, and even built, my musical identity: Rwanda, in its tragedy, served as a driving force and inspiration for me. On the lighter side, there is the access I had at a very young age to a whole bunch of sounds, which, without me realizing it, strongly influenced my musicality. What makes my R&B a bit original is that I incorporated all these Afro sounds like Congolese rumba and traditional Rwandan music, but also Afro-Caribbean music, which I listened to with my friends.
How do we improve our resilience in the face of life’s tragedies and come to accept the unacceptable? – Albert Hyppolite
What I’ve found helps me is to think about the connection to loss. Often, it feels like it creates a void, and it’s hard to deal with that because you think you’ll never be able to fill it. I like to think that there’s no void, but rather space for something else afterward. When I made that connection to the things that happened to me, it lightened them up a little bit.
And we must forgive ourselves too, that is very important. As much as I do not take credit for the good things I accomplish, because I am not the origin of anything at all, I do not take credit for the bad things and the failures. We are not the source of our misfortunes, just as we are not the source of our good things. That is my way of seeing life.
Why did you cover your greatest hit, With classwith Aya Nakamura and Trinix? – Tytouan Barck
Exactly, when we say that we are not at the origin of anything at all! It is something that happened all by itself. Aya always interpreted With class in her shows, and she had done it on the radio, too. Trinix, a young DJ duo that exploded during the pandemic, used to take a cappella vocals and remix them. They did a remix of Aya Nakamura singing With classand it created such a buzz on the web, we said to ourselves: why not make a real song about it? It’s the magic of the internet, I have nothing to do with it!