The piano is very lonely in its too large case. Will we use it or not? On this very gray afternoon of this last day of April, the noble object waits at its own risk. Wilfrid-Pelletier’s immense bay windows are not the prism of any beneficial rays. Failed staging? Maybe not. What if the grayness was arranged with the views guy, eh, Émile Proulx-Cloutier?
Eh ? After all, what does he sing at the beginning of the first of the three acts of My hand in the fire, the great work that brings us here on this Tuesday, the official day of the river interviews? “Don’t leave me alone / I have the fragile sun / And the water that rises there / I’m going to need arms / There are mountains to move / Heads to come out of the sand / Hearts leaning against each other in the cables”: this is the third verse of Need arms. Third of a good hundred verses grouped into three gardens and seventeen bouquets, verses which are as many songs, interspersed with five piano passages. Fortunately there are these passages, which allow you to get through the songs unscathed or to stop and receive them in full flow of terrible and terribly beautiful words. It’s a lot, it would even be too much at once. So act. Three acts.
Beyond melancholy
“At the origin of the creation of the album,” explains Émile Proulx-Cloutier, “there was a desire to rediscover the magma, the volcano, the urge to live. A kind of active momentum. Not necessarily joyful in the words and the subject, but with a background of joie de vivre. Nevertheless. Despite the tragedies, despite the obstacles. In my previous projects, I had the impression that sometimes melancholy won out. This time, I think that I face the world in all its states more than ever, and if melancholy seizes me, I pull myself together and I call for action, and I include myself in the movement. »
In a song as relentless as The horizon, which aligns disillusionment, disaffection and other demobilizations with the firing squad, the rage for life wins. It’s not nothing. In the third verse of this quasi-slam, Émile strikes truth upon truth: “We feel the historical tipping point dawning in the distance / We gorge ourselves on postapocalyptic series / While America dies under America’s knee” . Thirteen verses later, the brave Proulx-Cloutier tries to rally the forces that are still alive: “I can’t wait for us to become again / Finally, great talkers and worse, great doers / I can’t wait for a movement to start / As a gang imperfect people who roll up their sleeves.”
The right questions, the right inspiration
At the mention of these verses of healthy anger, Émile gets up and goes to the piano. Minute demonstration. The notes that draw the pattern of The horizon come in part from a song by Pierre Flynn at the time of October: The new lands. “I needed to get out of there. How do you talk about the state of the planet without being preachy? How do you say that you yourself are part of the problem and not just the one observing? How do you manage to be honest in a hurry and at the same time connected to something emotional? »
The answer was in the music. The inspiration of Pierre Flynn, as a starting point. But also the very gesture of the pianist… liberated. “This is the happy result of the piano-voice solo tour which revived me in the middle of a pandemic. As I played so much, I surprised myself by abandoning myself to the piano like never before: many of the songs from the project which became My hand in the fire were thus pushed into existence. I wrote about music: it had always been the opposite. I even allowed myself to improvise, hence the five instrumental pieces. I am someone who is very structured, very thoughtful, very director: there, it happened directly between emotion, my hands and the piano. »
It was organized afterwards, divided into three thirty-minute acts. The most intense songs — Your blasé look, Burnout, Strong opinions — find in their wake instrumental breaks, time to breathe, or soft tunes, time to rock: Crack heartsgood example, immediately after The horizon “ […] caught on the fly / Some ordinary miracles”. Émile was well aware of the intensity which at times bordered on the unbearable. “I needed relief. To hug and be hugged. Real, non-dramatic hugs. » The tender, tender, tender song that closes Mby hand on fire is titled Your skin : “There’s a hollow in your neck when you tilt your head / Here at the top of the collarbone / It looks so soft, I want to lie there / Before the world turns upside down.”
The most beautiful scene and nothing less
All of this, we guess, will end up on stage. Three acts, three times thirty minutes, that called for a show. Wilfrid is already wriggling, you can feel it. Calls from the foot of the Maison symphonique. “We don’t experience this often, but for such a project, we didn’t procrastinate for long: we decided that this album would have a symphonic incarnation. When you sing “We’ll have to shake walls / Without blowing up bridges” in Push the world, you can’t want less than to replenish your heart in the most beautiful way imaginable. » The intention is not modest. The need is not small. “Sometimes,” he continues, “circumstances can empty your heart beyond measure. But I think we can also manage to connect what makes us human, imperfect but still beautiful. What you feel, the person next to you may feel it too. »
We might as well be numerous, in the most inspiring of places, to remember what it is to be two, twice two, times two, times two, until the place rises. And sing with Émile, his beautiful team of musicians (there are nine of them on the record, especially the brass, there will be nine on stage), the big orchestra and all the rest of us, the last verse of The season of tremors : “Until you become a tree / Become an island / And let beauty flow here”.