The spouse of folk singer-songwriter Myriam Gendron designs the simple and elegant covers for her albums. On Mayday, his third, expected on May 10, we see his face for the first time with clarity, “even if I hide a little” with his left hand. Two years after the critical and international success of the magnificent My Delirium. Songs of Love, Lost & Found, the musician no longer blends into the background: for the first time in her career, she knows she is expected. “Yes… and I live it more or less well,” she lets slip before telling us about the delicate gestation of this new masterpiece telling the story of love, hope and fate.
July 2023. Tornado alert threatening southern Quebec. The angry black sky, the sirens on the radio waves. At this time, Myriam Gendron discusses the subject of the lullaby at the invitation of Lomax Digital Archive, attached to the Association for Cultural Equity founded by the famous American ethnomusicologist.
“And in my text, I wrote a little about that, the elements that were unleashed, everything that was happening around me at that time,” says the musician who, a few days before the meteorological threat, suffered a flooding in his basement. “All the things I had collected from my mother were stored there. Photo albums of us babies, all wet, a mess. I was writing a text on the importance of lullabies to reassure children when they are afraid. »
The following days, this feeling of the end of the world remained with her: “I was still sad about it all. We live in a difficult world where it’s hard to reassure our children, hard to lull them when everything is going wrong – globally, because of the environment, politics, but personally too. I lived for a year tough, during which I often had great difficulty telling my children: “Everything is fine.” So I started writing this song, simply titled Lullabyplaced at the conclusion of Mayday.
The album had already been written for several weeks, but this Lullaby is the perfect finale. The electric guitars that we hear there contrast with the minimalist folk tones of the acoustics that carry the nine previous songs. After the last verse, a saxophone solo emerges, played by the young New York free-jazz virtuoso, Zoh Amba.
“It’s certain that when the saxophone arrives, it takes you by surprise,” recognizes Myriam. Everyone will jump when they hear it. But I told myself that what was missing from the song was the tornado, it was Zoh. So that we feel the violence of the world in which we try to put our children to sleep. Zoh understood it immediately: there is violence, anger, brutality, but she manages to resolve everything by making the ending harmonious, like a reconciliation. To tell ourselves that there can be beauty and hope in the violence of the world. Mayday, that’s what it’s like for me: managing to hang on to this thread. »
A new story
Ten years ago, Myriam Gendron published, on a small label independent from Oregon (Mama Bird Recording Co.), a debut album that went “beep!” » on the radar of traditional folk fans. On Not So Deep as a Wellshe set to music the texts of the writer and poet Dorothy Parker (1893-1967).
“I had no expectations then,” remembers Myriam. When it came out, I was seven months pregnant, so I didn’t play many concerts. Then I had a second child. Seven years after the first album, My Delirium seemed, but still, I had no expectations. I thought it would please those who liked the first… Except that it became bigger than that. Suddenly something changed. ” What ? We listened to her. This voice of poignant candor, this guitar playing which seems so simple, yet so studied, inspired by that of one of his great influences, the American Marisa Anderson, composer, improviser, recognized for her style described as ‘American primitive guitar.
Anderson plays on three of the ten songs on Mayday. “I am truly blessed! Marisa, I’ve been following her since I discovered her album Mercury [2013], which had a big impact on me. His work on musical tradition was a major influence on My Delirium : if you take a song like Poor Girl Blueson which I mix A wandering Canadian And Poor Boys Blues [un des plus vieux blues recensés] to tell a new story, that’s what she does, and I find it wonderful. »
Here and elsewhere, My Delirium, an album where French and English agree on traditional tunes reborn in the modernity of his vision of unvarnished folk, attracted rave reviews. “I didn’t expect it,” admits the musician. Me, I had a full-time job, two young children, but I received lots of offers to go and give concerts. It’s hard for me to say: no, so I accepted a little too much. »
“I’m someone who puts a lot of pressure on myself in life, in general. I have a troubled relationship with expectations, those that I put on myself or that the environment imposes on me, I never really know where it comes from. » It’s not that Myriam regrets this new recognition, it’s just that it was added to the other pressures of life, in general. In the fall of 2022, she announced to her bosses that she was giving up her job as a bookseller. The tour of My Delirium ended before the holidays: “Arriving in January, I felt total emptiness. No showsno job, alone at home for the first time in a long time. What am I going to do with all this? » It was the beginning the beginning of Mayday.
The beautiful Françoise
In June 2023, Myriam Gendron gave a recital at the Sala Rossa. In the first part, the furious Zoh Amba, accompanied by the splendid drummer Chris Corsano, who collaborates on a song by My Delirium (and it’s the Australian Jim White, collaborator of Kurt Vile, PJ Harvey and Cat Power who shines on the new album). During her singing turn, Myriam invited Zoh and Chris to accompany her on two songs from her previous album.
Then she presented a song that would end up on Mayday : The beautiful Françoise. The only traditional tune on the album otherwise nourished by original texts and music. Not the version known to have been recorded by Anne Sylvestre and Garolou, no, a different version, rediscovered by Michel Faubert, who put it on Cursed memory (2013), album created with Dominique Lanoie and André Marchand.
“When I heard it, I said to myself: “Oh! What is this ?” This type of traditional song, this chorus like that of a sea shanty, these images of water, the river, the seaside! It’s coming to get me. It was The beautiful Françoise, but not the same one we know, with a completely different melody and narrative. I was obsessed, I wrote to Michel: “Where does this version come from?” He told me that he had collected it in the 1980s from an Acadian singer and that he had performed it as is on the album. Then Michel said to me: “Do with it what you want. »
Myriam explained to the audience at the Sala Rossa that she tried to understand why Françoise touched her so much, until she understood that it was her own mother, Sylvie. Suffering from cancer, Sylvie followed her treatments until her health suddenly deteriorated in early May 2022; she died a few weeks later, in the delirious heart of the tour My Deliriumof the job full time and children.
Myriam sang to us The beautiful Françoise, simply accompanied by his guitar; tears ran down the cheeks of each spectator. “I kept some elements of the story that Michel sings,” she explains. Roughly speaking, in it, a woman is sentenced to death for having killed her father. Before her execution, she asks for a drink; her tormentor brings her a pint of water, which she finally refuses, not wanting to be served by her tormentor, who begins to cry. I am not my mother’s executioner, but I am the last person, with my sisters and her great friend, to have taken care of her before her death. She depended on me. I transformed the story to tell this. »
Mayday tells of love, hope and fate, but first of all, “it’s an album where I express myself both as a daughter, since I talk about my grief, and as a mother. I don’t really have any big words to offer you on the notion of transmission, but I’ve thought a lot about it. [L’album évoque] the doubts, the questions that inhabited me. What I keep from my mother, what my children will keep from me. How my mother continues to live inside me. »