What would the summer holidays be without summer hits, those songs that loop on the radio, that we sing at the top of our lungs and that make us dance until the end of the night? The duty takes you on a musical and temporal journey to (re)discover these hits that marked our holidays.
Can a banal phrase from everyday life become one of Quebec’s biggest hits? Of course yes, you will answer the gang all in denim dressed in Bleu Jeans Bleu. As proof: their now famous hoodieearworms celebrating the comfort of softness, whose success was as resounding as it was unexpected in the summer of 2019, when the time was more for the Hawaiian shirt.
“We were in Hampton Beach, my girlfriend and me. It was chilly,” recalls singer Mathieu Lafontaine (alias Claude Cobra), in an interview with The duty. “I lent him a cotton swaddle. I saw her face when she put it on, then I said, “Hey! Are you okay in your cotton t-shirt?” The sentence sounded so good in his ears that the artist already imagined himself singing it on stage.
“You know, it’s not a message of unity or hope”, it’s just a question of “sound”, he points out. And this is the case for all the other songs of the group. Examples ? I ate too many french fries, Do you love one?, Epilate my back, I spoil you all dressed. “Every time something is said that sounds fun, the discussion always ends with an “Ah! We should make a tune with that!”
The expressions of daily life, launched in a restaurant, on the corner of the street or in a party are for him fleeting inspirations to be captured in flight before making songs. “Afterwards, the big job is how I give myself a path that holds together to get to say this sentence in a tune”, he specifies.
The timing
But if the recipe is always more or less the same, how to explain the success in particular of hoodie ? “People quickly adopted it because it’s not complicated as lyrics. And they already say it all the time: “Hey, are you doing frette?”, analysis, a bit sociologist, Mathieu Lafontaine. “You can also sing the chorus even if you sing like a rattle because there is no note, you just say it and it works. »
the timing may also have something to do with it. “Did you drop the license exactly when the world needed it?” A spring of shit where he was still fretting. If we had taken it out on a nice warm spring, would it have worked? he wonders.
And then, with more than 15 million views on YouTube, it’s hard not to make a direct link with the music video and its famous choreography. “It’s because the Internet buzz arrived that everyone decided to play the song on the radio”, notes Mathieu Lafontaine, recounting that many children started dancing in front of their screen to reproduce the dance steps. of the group. hoodie has also made its way into the schools of Quebec to become the song of the end-of-year show, or even the object of exercise in French lessons.
Sudden success
Certain thing, hoodie put Bleu Jeans Bleu on the map. Thanks to this song, many fans discovered the quartet and their kits in jeans, believing that the album Perfecto — released in 2019 — was their debut. But no. It was their third, after Gold Haute Couture in 2013, and frankly wow in 2016. “People didn’t listen to this song because it was Bleu Jeans Bleu, but Bleu Jeans Bleu became what it is largely thanks to this song”, insists the singer .
We would have had to wait Cotton Hoodie so that the rolled Rs of Claude Cobra and the notorious kitsch look of his band can truly anchor themselves in the Quebec musical landscape.
Did they expect such a big success? “It was clear to us that it was a special tune on the album, a special bug. I saw the potential for earworms, he says. I think we were aware that it could be all or nothing. But the “everything” we imagined was maybe 10% of what we really experienced. »
He is referring here to the Gala de l’ADISQ 2019, during which Bleu Jeans bleu was crowned group of the year.
When it was time to go on stage to collect their prize, their peers in the room sang hoodie in unison. “It’s like that year everyone said, ‘Okay, take it, it’s yours.’ […] It was as if our milieu was saying: “You are in the gang”. »
A strong and particularly gratifying moment for the group, which had to launch its albums independently, for lack of a record company ready to produce them.
Another unforgettable moment made possible thanks to hoodie : sing with none other than the great Celine Dion on the Bell Center stage. “Céline had just done her showto sing his classics […] and she started singing our song. The Bell Center started singing with her. I said to myself at that moment: “Everyone here knows the tune?! But let’s see that it’s big the same! It can’t be! […] And we joined him on stage. It was a very strong three minutes. It just exploded, it was epic! »
Observers will have noticed: three years have passed between the releases of each of the group’s albums. Coincidence or modus operandi ? Mathieu Lafontaine leaves the question open, with a small smile. Time will tell us.
One thing is certain, the band can’t wait to get back on stage and tries not to put too much pressure on themselves for the release of the next opus. hoodie is and will remain inimitable, an already timeless young classic that will certainly find its place in the Saint-Jean festivities of the near future.
There is therefore no question of trying to replicate such a success. “The rest of us just want to keep making music. The best we can do, that’s what we’re gonna get out of. »
To your earworms!
We would like to know your favorite summer success, the one that marked you forever, and the reasons that made it your “best”. We’ll compile your answers into a list of the most popular hits and publish some of the testimonials that support those choices. Write to us at [email protected].