Ultimate Cowboys Fringants album | A moving “Thank you! »

On Royal Pub, launched as a surprise Wednesday at midnight, Karl Tremblay bids farewell to his friends. Here are our first impressions, hot and cold, of the final Cowboys Fringants album.

It’s in the third room that it happens. First punch to the solar plexus. It is first the voice of Karl Tremblay that we hear, then that of his lover, Marie-Annick Lépine, who here plays Loulou Lapierre, this very ordinary barmaid and little mother on whom, in the songs of Cowboys Fringants , all the joyous ordeals still occur, but who, in this one, simply can’t take it anymore.

“Assure me then that I will no longer suffer,” she implores Siriso, the owner of the bar which gives its title to the album (and to the musical of the same name). “Do you know that, fate? », he replies in the voice of Karl Tremblay, a man who will have known like few other people what this word really means.

And it continues. It continues to twist your heart: “At least make me believe that I can get through this,” Loulou/Marie-Annick begs him. And Siriso/Karl reminds him that “hope alone cannot fix anything”. Phew.

Then the chorus bursts out and as in so many great Cowboys Fringants songs, you will find yourself singing the less jovial phrases with a smile. “Come on, we have to get out of denial, some people are not made for life,” chants Karl Tremblay, who, until his cancer diagnosis in the summer of 2022, seemed well on his way to savoring it to the dregs .

Four new songs

On the program for this final album, announced Wednesday evening on social networks a few hours before its release at midnight: thirteen pieces, including four interludes, as well as the five new songs revealed in November 2023 in the musical Royal Pubof which this disc is however not at all the strict soundtrack.

Among those : The end of the showa running time of 7 minutes and 16 seconds, somewhere between Big Bazaar by Michel Fugain and Hotel California of the Eagles, in which the character of Johnny Flash, an old rocker who has not spared himself, boasts of having had a “life much cooler than yours”, even if his “worn body demands his mercy.”

But the difference here is that it is not the actor Martin Giroux who intones these verses, as in the show, but our friend Karl who, when recording his voice track, perhaps already knew that he himself had given his last show: “Close the follow and the lights, no I don’t need to be lit anymore, I’m going out through the back door, so that the world swallows me up ‘universe’.

Among the four truly unreleased, never heard anywhere: It’s three o’clock, we’re closing! a drinking song in the purest tradition of the most famous group from Repentigny, and Life and death of Gina Pinarda tribute to this stripper who has come a long way since her first appearance in The somersault in 1998.

But the most moving song of Royal Pub belongs not to the main songwriter of Cowboys Fringants, Jean-François Pauzé, but to his multi-instrumentalist, Marie-Annick Lépine, who speaks directly to his two daughters.

“You will see, my dears, that life is often unfair, often unjust, especially for those who leave before having white hair,” she tells them to a background of heartbreaking country music in The White hairs, while inviting them, once they reach their age, to cherish the wrinkles that will appear on their faces. “Because once the future no longer gives you hope, you learn the hard way that growing old is an opportunity.”

That she managed to write and compose such a song of pure wisdom, less than five months after the death of the man of her life, is both inconceivable and revealing of the buoy that music has always been for the Cowboy clan.

The final word

However, it is Karl Tremblay who will, as it should, have the final word in Thank you well!a duet with Marie-Annick cataloging all the experiences, glorious or calamitous, that their improbable career will have allowed them to live.

Few artists have the chance to choose the words and images they will use before bowing out, as was the case with David Bowie with Blackstar (2016), by Leonard Cohen with You Want It Darker (2016) or Warren Zevon with The Wind (2003). But that is indeed what it is Royal Pub : a luminous goodbye, conceived with the awareness that it would be a goodbye, imbued with this gratitude which will have allowed the Cowboys Fringants, since their beginnings, to win over so many Quebecers to the cause of necessary madness.

“For this bizarre epic based on friendships, which will resist life, and I hope death too, thank you well,” says Karl Tremblay, and allow us to believe that it is no coincidence that the last Cowboys Fringants album ends with a road song. This is undoubtedly to say that this road continues in our hearts and in yours, in that of the “millions of human beings” whose path the singer has crossed.

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