He’s got it right

Chansons d'aujourd'hui, a magazine
June 1990 - By Félix Légaré

After a long quest, Daniel Lavoie seems to have found his true musical path. In ‘Long Courrier’, one of his best albums, the singer reveals himself: both stronger and more vulnerable.

I met him between two takes, back stage at the Quatre Saisons, quite laid-back in his dressing-room, at a recording of Top Jeunesse, a programme where a whole bunch of noisy pupils have been high-jacked and then settled on a platform. They’ve been trained to applaud, dance and shouts at the appropriate moments by the kind of group leader you get in holiday camps.

In the midst of this teenage whirlpool, Daniel is having a lot of fun. For the syncro recording of his lightest song, Pape du rap, he runs around and dances, unhindered by his forty one years and makes the most of his legendary awkwardness...

It’s the Lavoie we get on side A of ‘Long Courrier’, full of self-mockery. Five rythmic tunes, seemingly light but with an after-taste of bitter irony.

In ‘Ride sur ride’ he sings his rage at the idea of growing old, stating that eternal youth is only granted to Hollywood icons such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, forever immune to wrinkles.

Later on in the song he exploits other ridiculous sides.

« The idea came from my son, who once told me I could never do rap. I tried to show him I could, but rap does not work in French, so we turned it into a parody.»

In a different tone, in the title song, he sings images from his youth, the eternal dream of flying like Icarus, of fleeing from boredom into a different universe…. And of falling. A dizzying image, falling off like a plaster from a wound. «That song takes its inspiration as much from St-Exupéry’s 'Vol de nuit' as from the leap in the dark every artist takes when a new record is released. It’s what I felt at the time with ‘Tension, attention’… I found it hard that what had taken two years of my life could be demolished by critics in ten minutes…»

Return to his roots

Hard indeed, but he does admit that the album had a certain superficiality,

« My songs sometimes lacked a certain depth, it was due mostly to the fact I was trying to produce records in both languages. The result was less clear on both sides. This time too I have produced a record in English but the two have nothing in common. In ‘Long Courrier’ the songs are typically French, with the exception of ‘Pape du rap’.»

‘Long courrier’ consists of introspective and heart-felt songs. The composer seems closer to his true self than ever, you’ll discover through it the teenager of long ago, leaving his Manitoban roots. Roots found in ‘Jours de plaine’ written before all the other songs, written for a film by Maurice-André Aubin called ‘Entre l’effort et l’oubli’. It is a documentary on the French-speaking community of Western Canada, a dying community…« At first, I did not want to do it. But when I saw the fight young people were putting up to save their native language, I accepted. It was not easy. The first attempts sounded like a hymn, it was pretentious and I felt like giving up. Then, one day, I started writing what I felt, deep-down, about the west. I thought about my own youth and it just came out .» The result took him by surprised and hurt him, as if he was expressing his own pain.

A catching kind of pain. After listening to ‘Jours de plaine’, you feel an emptiness, the feeling of the slow and inevitable death of French-speaking Manitobans, a sad inside portrait by one of the community’s own offspring.

Going down memory lanes also colours the songs on face B, with the four earth-songs, a theme inspired by one of Mahler’s work.

From the flat land of his youth, where the memory of his ancestors is still blowing in the wind, Lavoie has extended his perception of earth to all its aspects, this earth we rolled about on in childhood, this life-giving earth, this earth which for a long time was our sole provider, this planet we have scorned so much, this earth which has always carried and sustained us.

« I felt it was in the air, that people needed to hear about the earth but I didn’t want to preach, to tell them we’re destroying it, wake up, it had to stop and so on and so forth. I wanted to tell them why we love and respect it.»

Attempts and experiments.

Another liberation was the technical side of the production, he was in charge for the first time. In a shed in the old district of Montreal, he played with sounds and music with the aid of another composer, André Lambert, his right-arm man. They produced a perfect mix of acoustic and electronic instruments but above all, a feast of vocals. The voices of Hart Rouge, of Maurane, of Warren ‘Slim’ Williams ( the tall black man of 'Pape du rap'). It gives a joyous result of attempts and experiments on 48 tracks, those tracks are in fact the results of two 24 tracks re-synchronised (a cheaper but as efficient a process).« I’ve often gone head-first into projects without knowing where they would lead me, but not this time, I knew straight away where I was heading for.»

«It’s taken me twenty years to get there. Up to now, I had never taken full responsibility for my records. This time I can. I can say what I think, what I feel, without hiding behind words. I’m more proud of this record than of any others, that’s for sure.»