– Has it ever happened to you, you, suddenly and over a long period, not being able to listen to music?
I’m at my friend Melissa Maya’s, who occupies this section one weekend out of four with her tributes to life’s little delights. We’re about to devour a mac’n cheese prepared with my Halloween pumpkin and its watermelon salad. No records were placed on the turntable; silence hovers and it’s not our style.
Since my dad left in June, I can’t listen to music anymore. Every time I try, it’s like getting an electric shock. The voltage is too high for what I can absorb. There’s too much melancholy, too much intensity in the songs I like.
Maya lives a toune and a half from my house. I spent ten minutes trying to find something to slip into my ears before leaving. dream better, by Daniel Bélanger, seems to me that it would do me good. I go out into the alley and from the first guitar bars, I freeze. The voice rises: “Leaving yourself is too difficult / Leaving you is too difficult”. OK no stop! I stop everything. We’ll get back together.
– Yes, it happened to me after my separation, for several months. But it’s back, keep hope!
I remember that at the Jean-Michel Blais concert last summer during the International Jazz Festival, I who almost never cry, I bawled my life, a fountain. It was too much beauty and sometimes beauty hurts. Phew, I wasn’t ready.
Since the big departure of my pops, the only genre I want, from time to time but not too often, is soul. In the “Recently Listened to Records” section of my online platform, Aaron Frazer is indelible, there is a bit of Alabama Shakes and Al Green, a hint of Michael Kiwanuka, Horsepower For the Streets by Jonathan Jeremiah is making its mark. Curtis Mayfield and Leon Bridges are unfortunately too good-humored and enthusiastic for me, but Dusty Springfield and Otis Redding find themselves on the record player once in a while. Shimmering soul, a genre my dad hardly listened to, is my safe space musical, but in very small doses.
In addition to being a great reader, this man was quite a music lover. When I was little, we tripped together on the madness of Raôul Duguay, on the apple singer especially. Once, he took me to see a Gilles Vigneault concert and in the end, I got over my embarrassment and went to ask him to autograph my tape. In the 1980s, we fell in love with Marjo (I recently discovered that I know her entire catalog by heart; her songs have never left my memory). I remember very well the first time we heard Jean Leloup: it was on the show Nice and warmwe were immediately intrigued by the character and my father came back the next day with the tape of Liar. Later, he introduced me to the blues with the Stephen Barry Band at the Medley in Saint-Denis. Remembering my fascination as a child in front of his vinyl Do you want to by ABBA — which I recently bought used at a record store, for the kick to look at the cover. I think he preferred the Rolling Stones to the Beatles. From Félix Leclerc to Joe Bocan, he listened to almost everything. And it’s as if when he left me, my father had taken away all the music, leaving me alone with the silence and the soul.
I miss walking around the city in the fall listening to music. I’m leaving Maya’s, it’s still early, it’s Monday after all. Outside it’s May in November — hey, that makes me think, I haven’t even listened to Bélanger’s new album, Mercury in May. I go back to dream better and tune sing again. Bells, a little groovy base, a woman’s voice that undulates like seaweed at the bottom of the river, the bittersweet dosage seems acceptable to me. “I dream of silence / And of peace in all my being”. A path. I found a way to get back there. I know we’ll have to move slowly, but I’m already smiling.