After seven records and nearly 30 years of career, Paule-Andrée Cassidy, especially recognized for her talent as a performer, delivers a first album entirely made up of her own songs. Accustomed to traveling, she who traveled with her music to the stages of Russia and Argentina found, in this first attempt at writing, detours hitherto unexplored.
“As a performer, I have the freedom to sing whatever I want. It’s rich, she explains, because I can take songs that I identify with, that I love and that resonate with me. This time, I wanted to try something different, without dressing up either. The challenge was to find this zone where I felt like I was discovering myself. »
By following the paths of writing, Paule-Andrée Cassidy, winner in 2002 of a Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles-Cros for her album Sunrise, reached destinations that she herself did not suspect. “There were plenty of surprises along the way. I am surprised by the somewhat contemplative side of what I wrote. As a performer, that’s perhaps less what I would have headed towards and paradoxically, it’s not because it comes from me that it doesn’t require other qualities as a performer to develop. »
The gestation of the nine compositions began in 2015, during a writing workshop with “Monsieur Vigneault”, the poet who gave his anthem to Quebec. It was there, with an accomplice she had first met while performing the first part of her European tour in the 2000s, that Paule-Andrée Cassidy sowed the first scraps of her songs.
“There are several thoughts that emerged during this workshop and that I am very aware of having applied in certain songs,” she explains. He talked to us a lot about writing with one-syllable words. Me, I spontaneously tended to write a certain logorrhea: quite long verses, octosyllables… The words, the sounds, I find it beautiful when it splashes, when it flies, when it abounds, but for the song, often, economics has a very great evocative force. »
The exercise of sobriety advocated by Gilles Vigneault gave birth to the song One nothing at a timewhere each word, very short, flaps like flags in the wind.
“One step at a time / The nose in your neck / One gesture at a time / Is better than the pain / One nothing at a time / Laughter leads us / Play and joy / That’s all. »
Paule-Andrée Cassidy dipped her pen in the Saint Lawrence to give birth to her Ocean Ball. The water that rocks, that drowns, that crushes, that shapes countries and landscapes irrigates the author’s words from start to finish throughout the nine songs.
“When I was writing, that was a bit what I observed: how the territory and our surroundings pass through us,” analyzes the artist. The result is metaphors where the presence of the river, its tides and its swirls illustrate human intimacy.
Naive, for example, depicts a stormy relationship. “How can I tell you through the insults / That I resist wear and tear / I saw the black tide of your lies that ran along the shore / Always the black tide in which you immerse yourself, you call me naive. »
Writing on endorphin
At the ocean ball is a slowly maturing work. The nine songs, some sown in 2015, most collected during a creative residency in Paris in 2018, reach our musical shores eight years after its infancy, in 2023.
In the City of Lights, Paule-Andrée Cassidy applied the endorphin regime. Every morning before taking up her pen, she imposed a new writing constraint on herself before consuming “her kind of drug” – running – in the streets of Paris.
“There is something rhythmic and it frees the head,” explains the artist. I call it endorphin writing. »
This gestation has today resulted in nine songs refined with the demands of a lover of words and their poetry. Paule-Andrée Cassidy’s pen refuses shortcuts and imposes a demanding classicism: her rhymes follow one another, intersect and embrace each other, often rich, in fragmented metrical structures, but carefully regulated.
“I wanted that: for me, it has value,” she said. At the same time, despite the rigor of the form, I have the impression that I was able to move away from the classic French octosyllable and offer shorter or odd verses. That was also the challenge: respecting a rigor in form, without disguising myself to join the world of the young collaborators who surrounded me. »
Several comrades punctuated this ocean ball. The music bears the signature of 12 different people, including Ariane Roy, Philippe B, Vincent Gagnon — the accomplice of the shows Whispered songs —, Alex Burger, Marianne Trudel, Antoine Aspirine and Chloé Lacasse, among others. Paule-Andrée Cassidy’s daughter, Lou-Adriane, contributed to the album; his son-in-law, Alexandre Martel, alias Anatole, also carried out the project.
These varied collaborations result in an album with resolutely modern musical textures which give pride of place to piano and guitars. Be careful, however, to summarize At the ocean ball to a family affair. “It didn’t happen around the dinner table, between turkey and dessert, when everyone took out instruments and started to compose,” warns Paule-Andrée Cassidy. That’s not quite the dynamic at home. »
For the one who trained at the Conservatory of Dramatic Art of Quebec, the stage remains the realm of predilection. The singer will present her Ball at Coup de coeur francophone on November 9, in Montreal, before crossing the ocean for an eight-show tour in Europe.