Daniel Lavoie: the official website

Daniel Lavoie allegro moderato

"Châtelaine", March 1988
René Homier-Roy

Shy, sad, anguished, unsettled? Not in the least! On the contrary, a calm and happy man.

He does not correspond to his image, the image the media have been spreading around since he fell on their little planet. Daniel Lavoie, they keep saying, is so shy public exposure gives him spots, he is as knotted as a rope used for practice by a mob of boyscouts, as passive as women before feminism and, above all, so much less interesting than his songs. They do not add that he is paranoiac or schizophrenic but it is a miracle they didn’t make him so.

There are between the Lavoie they show us and the real one, several existential differences. He is obviously well aware of it and I get the impression it amuses him.

The real Daniel is clear minded, says what he has to say looking you straight in the eyes,he is humourous, spontaneous and seems as unaffected as are people who have nothing to hide or to prouve. He is nice, polite, good-mannered (as far as I’m concerned, those are qualities) he knows how to listen as well as to answer, and when he speaks passionately about something he sometimes blushes, out of enthusiasm, not shame! In fact, the only similarities with his official image are physical: tall, thick hair touched with grey, beautiful sparkling eyes and a bright smile. And, crowning it all, an easy manner and real warmth.

Looking at him, listening to him, you get a muted yet sharp impression that this man is more at ease with himself than most of his contemporaries, and that he is - is it possible nowadays to risk the word? - happy.

The media - they do not always lie - have highlighted the recent developments in Daniel Lavoie’s career: the triumph in France, on record, then on stage for his song Ils s’aiment, the string of rewards and various trophies, the great succes here, as in Europe, of his recent shows especially with Je voudrais voir New-York, to him, at the time, to be the heights of injustice. Once, having come unexpectedly into some money, he bought, just for himself, a big bag of ‘cherries from France’ which he ate to the very last one. This manifestation of independance didn’t leave him with a hankering for luxury or delusions of grandeur, may be with a taste for ‘cherries from France’, certainly not with a predilection for France, and even less for Quebec.

In fact, as a child, Daniel Lavoie felt that being a French speaker was a real curse. Other kids were beating him for speaking a language he hadn’t even chosen. It cannot be easy, aged ten, fifteen, when you don’t want to be noticed, when you want to fit in with your peers, to be verbally abused because of something as stupid as your parents’ language. Nor can it inspire any passionate longing

one of last year’s biggest hits. His past is more vague, maybe because our collective memory is selective and goes for the end product, the success story rather than for the long struggle which comes before it.

Yet, Daniel Lavoie’s success on the Francophone scene might never have happened, or could have happened in another language. French, for him, is neither a fight nor a banner. In France, he is never introduced as being from Quebec but as a ‘Manitoban living in Quebec’. There is a difference.

Daniel Lavoie had a happy childhood, a French speaker in distant Manitoba, in Dunrea to be precise. His family was neither rich nor poor. In his little village nobody was very rich or really poor, everyone had enough to eat, nobody was truly needy.

In the Lavoie’s family everything has to be shared. Always. It was the rule. This elementary form of justice seemed

for the country it comes from, or the desire to emigrate there. How can you explain then, that Daniel Lavoie is now living in Quebec. Why did he settle there some fifteen years ago? Why did he stay?

By chance. With some musician friends, he’d formed a band and their sacred mission was to take over the Beattles. They put on a few little shows in church halls and similar venues.Then, one day, luck seemed to call: they were asked to perform at a music festival in the biggest commercial centre in the area.

They were over the moon, only to be bitterly disappointed: it was an ethnic festival, and the potential Beattles were simply representing the French-speaking minority, a minority like any other. It was a blow for that particular ethnic band.

Shortly after, Réjean Rancourt (who is still his manager and associate) asked the band to come to Montreal where, he promised, fame and money were eagerly awaiting the young Manitobans. He could have suggested California, England, Arkansas, Russia even, to the same effect: those guys wanted to get away, it didn’t matter where.

Quebec was the least attractive of all potential destinations, because - but who knows it?- there is a form of emperialism in Quebec which Francophones from elsewhere hate.«Frankly, we found people in Quebec as much of a pain in the arse as they, themselves, find some French people. They always had an answer for everything, they made fun of our accent; according to them, Quebec was the only place where interesting things happened. So, we didn’t exactly feel like settling among them».

That’ s easy to understand. Yet, he came with his band and the same thing happened all over again. Small shows, smaller fees and feeling like fishes out of the water to crown it all. The others gave up one by one and went back home. The move wasn’t successful for Daniel Lavoie either; having run out of money, he went back home but could not stand it for more than a month, not so much because he missed the attractions of the big city but because he couldn’d stand the emptiness of his tiny village. He came back to Montreal, for better or worse.

The worse paid off to some extent: for years he worked in piano-bars to keep body and soul together, with some rare touches of luxury thrown in. It’s ironical that he then had to learn to sing the great classics of Quebec’s repertoire he did not know, from Felix Leclerc to Jean-Pierre Ferland, because customers were clamouring for them. As soon as he had enough money, he would give up, then start again when he was skint. Surprisingly, he quite liked the job: customers were pleasant and he liked music anyway. The only real problem was alcohol; «In a piano-bar everybody buys you drink, either you accept and end up drunk everynight or you don’t and you get bored stiff»

Through all those ups and downs, he kept writing songs which hardly anyone knew, and recording songs hardly ever played on radio. But he kept working, days in, days out, like an athlete who has to train everyday to stay in shape. Is it difficult to stick to such a routine? He looks at me surprised: «Not at all, I like music, I like composing. It’s marvellous to be condamned to to something you love doing».

The other day I went through everything he’s done, for pleasure, but also to see if the media (again) were right to state that his voice and his soul have changed over the last ten years. Wrong again: in J’ai quitté mon île, the best song on his first record, there is more nostalgia (it was fashionable then) than in Je voudrais voir New-York, where you feel more energy (it’s fashionable now); but the voice is the same, warm, soft when it needs to be but powerful too, and as soulful now as it was yesterday. Yes, it is true that he has changed, he admits it as something both desirable and necessary.

« At the age of 32 I started to realise that I wasn’t going anywhere. I was surviving, just. My parents worried about me, I was fed up being broke. But I belong to the ‘peace and love’ generation, the generation brought up on granola, ecology, healthy food for a healthy body, the generation who fought against ambition, and refused calculative moves and career plans. Those things were deemed ugly and dirty, things to avoid at all costs. Little by little, I realised that in the real world, you had to work at being successful and that it had nothing to do with purity of mind. I understood the need to compromise with things such as marketing or advertising which I had despised up to then. I decided that I wasn’t going to grow old without having done everything to achieve what I really wanted. From then on, it became clear that music is not only an art but also an industry. I became more of an industrialist. Above all, I learnt to use situations, opportunities and also people to my own end».

That is probably the most spectacular change, undertanding the process and the rules of the game opens your eyes and enables you to see through other people’s moves.

Without fussing, he makes choices, gets rid of what annoys or upsets him, ignores what he does not like, and through sheer cunning or instinct, plays at being shy if and when it helps him out of a sticky situation. His rumoured shyness, just like the Titanic’s treasures, might be the stuff of legend, but at the end of the day it serves a purpose.

His latest album, recorded in London, has been on radio a lot. I ask, half-heartedly as I already know his reaction, whether or not he is happy with it. Of course not; he isn’t unhappy with it but slightly disappointed. He realised early on that the sound, the overall tone of the album wasn’t exactly what he had asked his British producer to achieve. But market laws leave no room for errors or for soul searching : « American singers can afford to listen to their recordings for weeks, and at the end of it, if they don’t like it, they can bin the whole thing and start again. In my case, once the 150 000 $ limit had been reached, that was it, there was no going back. You have to make do with what you have». He is not complaining, simply underlining the financial differences.

In spite of all this, he has chosen to control his French career from Quebec. Last year he flew an amazing number of times between Montreal and Paris – to work on his album, to perform live, to appear on TV and to promote his songs. In show-business, you’re supposed to settle, at least for a while, in the country where you want to develop a successful market, as did Diane Dufresne, Gilles Vigneault, Fabienne Thibeault and Diane Tell; as did Jean Lapointe too, more recently. How can you explain, then, Daniel Lavoie’s decision to spend a good deal of his time in a plane rather than in France?

He looks at me, puzzled that I haven’t got it yet. The painful relocation from Manitoba to Quebec, the cultural shock, the new habits to develop, the friendships to forge: he’s had to go through all that once before and it was difficult. Going to live in Paris would mean a new exile and having to master a new environment and a new routine.

« I love France though, I like the good food and I get on well with the people. I even manage to get my own ways in TV studios».

He achieves that by not behaving like a star with the redoutable French technicians, before recording a TV show, he goes and speak to the sound engineer, introduces himself, explains what he is trying to achieve and gets it. «In France, singers have quite an entourage, they never have any contact with the technicians, whereas I speak with them and, as they love their jobs as much as I love mine, generally it works out well».

« But I could never settle over there. It took me so long to feel at ease here in Quebec. At first I didn’t feel confortable in the city so I went to live in the country, it was fine for three years, then I got bored to death, I moved back closer and closer to the city and finally settled down close to the town centre. I’ve been feeling happy ever since.

So, after much reticence, he’s adopted Quebec for good, so much so that he does not want to leave it, ever. Even if he became a superstar or won 20 million on the loto, he wouldn’t move.

« For me, it’s the most beautiful, the most civilised, the most pleasant country in the world».

This determination not to disturb his newly acquired roots is part of what he calls his ‘priorities’– a word which would have horrified him in his ‘love and peace‘ days. Those prorities also extend to his work and his family (he has a thirteen-year old son).

As a pledge to his new philosophy of being open to success, he has no rigid time-table or any fixed plans. When he has to take to the road, touring or promoting his albums, he does it with good grace. If one of his songs turns out to be successful, he does everything to promote it further.

He keeps the rest of his time to himself. He does not go out much, (« I always feel as if people’s eyes were cameras filming me all the time»), he goes through bouts of film watching, does his own shopping, finds cooking pleasurable, and reads interesting things that people who think of him as superficial do not even know (Kundera’s L’Art du roman dazzled him, and one of his favourite writers is Robertson Davies, a Canadian author who, regretably, is hardly known in Quebec).

He looks after his son, who shares his time between him and his mother. It’s a strange swing of the pendulum: Daniel Lavoie, who suffered in his youth from having to share everything, has got a son who has two of everything. Yet he isn’t a spoiled child: « When I was young, I fancied a lot of things, beside ‘cherries from France’, things my parents could not afford to give me. They did, in fact, give me more that way, by not giving me everything immediately. It’s well known that a good part of the pleasure is in the longing. Nowadays children are given things before even asking for them. Not my son. It annoys him a bit now but I hope he will understand later on and that he will be quite happy about « the deprivation suffered at the hands of his old father».

As for the money he earns, Daniel Lavoie invests it in his career and in the careers of artists he, and his associate, look after (such as Marie Philippe). So his lyfestyle is rather low-key. In fact, without being terrified by old-age, you can see that the notion of the loss of power which comes with it worries him. You get the feeling you are listening to a free-lance labourer wondering what kind of jobs he’ll be able to get in his mid-fifties. It’s true there is no trade-union for artists and that successful 55 year-old singers are the exception to a cruel rule.

But rather than suffering from this cautious approach to life, he seems, on the contrary, to thrive on it. Extravagances might be out of question but his daily life is rich and pleasant enough for him not to miss them. In showbusiness, where fear and paranoia rule, where knives are flying low and ideas even lower, Daniel Lavoie has found his own nest, far above the fray, he can thus look down on it, laugh at it and learn from it. Such a recipe might not work for everybody, but it certainly contributes to his own obvious happiness.