Daniel Lavoie: the official website

"My songs and I"

Interview Radio Canada - July 2000
Mario Proulx (MP)

MP: Daniel, music in your life goes back a long, long way, in fact to your earliest childhood.
DL: Yes, it goes back to my most innocent childhood. I was three I think and I already listened to opera with my mother who was a fanatic for classical opera singing. She had several complete operas at home and she made me listen and follow the operas with the libretto. Then I remember from the age of three, then four, I sang the opera songs for my mother. She made me sing and then I found it extraordinary. My mother was a singer and she sung in choirs. Eventually, my mother sang in the choir of the Winnipeg Opera because that had been her life’s dream. When they left the countryside to go and live in the town, my mother went straight away and did that which she had always dreamed of doing, that’s to say, she went on a singing course. She took the course right up to the day when she had to take part in the big choir of the Winnipeg Opera. And she sung in two operas and I think that was the crowning moment of her musical life because it was a big dream come true.

MP: She must then be quite proud of her son?
DL: Well, I don’t know … I’ll have to ask her. I think it’s yes, parents are always proud of their children’s accomplishments, then ok, I wasn’t such a bad son in spite of everything!

MP: And you, did you have a classical music training, how did that happen?
DL: I began by being taught the piano with the nuns in my village when I was five. My mother had always dreamed of just taking piano lessons but she hadn’t been able to do it as she lived too far from the village, and so I started, me, without really knowing whether I wanted to or not. I remember that I hated it greatly over the years for the simple reason that I had to go there every day and practice the piano with the sisters because we didn’t have a piano at home. So every day, when my mates went out to play, I had to get my things together and then walk half a kilometre to the nuns’ convent and then practice on the piano. Then after that, two days a week and more I had a lesson and I can’t tell you how much I hated that. But I had a very good ear and I learnt very quickly, then I took the course, oh I don’t know, seven years, and eight for the piano, and at the end of eight years I realised that I knew more or less how to read music because I had learnt everything by ear. All the pieces. The teacher read it out to me once and played it once for me on the piano, I listened to it and my ear remembered the score and I learnt it like that. I learnt to read music but not quite well enough. I only had to play it once, to scan the piece once or twice, then I had it off by heart. That’s why I never quite made it learning to read music and, now that makes it… then… 35 to 45 years that I learnt music and I know how to scan a score, any one, but I learn a score by heart. And I regret it a lot elsewhere, because its one of those things I would like to do in my life, to read music and to take a Chopin or Bach score and read it immediately. But I realised that I just didn’t have the patience because, to start at the beginning to learn to read music, I always find myself practising again for a day or two and I begin to write songs, then I forget I was in the middle of practising and then I go off on something completely different. So I don’t really h