Gisèle and Nicole had left Drummondville that morning promising each other one thing. “If we meet Richard Séguin, we say a rosary on the way back,” they confide to the main interested party, amused. Rosary, they must have said. Story of an afternoon with the singer.
The most famous citizen of Saint-Venant-de-Paquette saw the two ladies first and immediately went to meet them, not at all with the attitude of the artist who comes to pick his flowers, but rather as a proud man. of his village. Gisèle and Nicole just can’t believe it. A few words exchanged in front of the church and now their day is done.
We had the impression – the photographer Dominick, the sound technician Bastien and I – that we were going to Saint-Venant-de-Paquette, the small Estrie village that Richard Séguin has made his quiet haunt (and landmark) since 1973 , to record an interview. We had no idea that we would spend the whole afternoon with him.
“There is a pagan sacredness within me,” he answers a question about his spiritual life – an appropriate question since our interview took place in the sacristy of the Church of Saint-Venant, now a Art Gallery. And this “pagan sacredness” will be embodied that afternoon not only in an exceptional attention to the other, but also in a certain sense of ritual.
No question of settling for the interview without having at least a little knowledge. Richard welcomes us, hand outstretched, as soon as we get out of the car and immediately invites us to have a coffee at the Tree House, where he introduces us to everyone. This is where we will return once the interview is over, to warm up over tea, the church being chilly.
It’s at the Tree House that we’ll chat, without a microphone or recorder, about Jack Kerouac, the band The War on Drugs (which I’m introducing him to) and Dylan, more specifically about his song Murder Most Foul, a equipped with almost 17 minutes through the history of the United States, which he listens to on repeat in his engraving studio. “His voice becomes like a mantra to me. »
Not a single song from his repertoire – “except five or six”, he concedes – has been written anywhere other than Saint-Venant, since Deux cents nuits à l’heure, Fiori-Séguin’s album which almost brought together not only Serge and Richard, but also Michel Rivard. This is one of the big “what ifs?” in the history of Quebec music.
“Being away from the city, sometimes you get closer to it, you have a better perspective of what can be lived in the city, explains our host. When I arrive here, I find myself in front of my sheet and I see a bunch of people I met during the tour. »
Like Bruce Springsteen (to whom he has already lent a guitar), Richard Séguin has often witnessed the daily life of the proletarian, but has never had “real jobs” either, apart from a brief job as a janitor. “I feel like I gave voice to a generation that didn’t have it,” he says of The Refinery (1988), inspired by the factory life that broke his father.
Richard Séguin had already written, on several occasions, about his father, but had never carried out the same exercise for his mother, before the magnificent Very close to the aspens, taken from his most recent album, The links places. As if to raise a beacon in the middle of our exchanges, the songwriter quotes a writer dear to his heart to describe his relationship with his parents who are gone.
“The poet Mélanie Noël said: ‘They live inside of us.’ And it’s a fact: our parents live inside of us. They may be gone, but they’re still there. And I find that as you get older, you notice it even more. I feel closer to them, even with the passage of time. »
“I have voluntary hope,” summarizes Richard Séguin, about his refusal to give up, despite all the reasons to be swallowed up by cynicism. Like his mother, a devout Catholic, Richard Séguin is a man of faith, but who, rather than believing in the communion of saints, believes in the sincerity of a look and in this gentle resistance that it is possible to oppose to accelerating everything.
In the depths of the Appalachians, it continues to come to Richard Séguin the desire to believe in it, simply to believe in it, as he proclaimed in 1995 on Instinct. We didn’t say the Rosary on the way back to Montreal, but we had his songs with us.
Richard Séguin and Florent Vollant became friends more than 30 years ago, when the ex-Kashtin became his neighbor in Outremont. It was Richard who introduced his friend to Montreal – he tells our microphone about a particularly memorable Neil Young and Crazy Horse show they attended at the Forum. Florent then invited him to Mani-Utenam, to walk in the woods. This summer, they are the facilitators of the 40th Festival en chanson de Petite-Vallée. “We think, Florent and I, that music has the power to bring communities together. If we have something to say, it’s that through music, we can create deep bonds, great bonds of brotherhood. »
“Going on TV when you’re asked to do something other than sing. It’s strange, but there is little place for the song in the media, on television, even on the radio. It’s as if it doesn’t matter, it’s been trivialized, it’s getting smaller all the time. Even our songs, on television, they will find that it is too long. Three minutes is a long time, just give me your chorus, it’ll be okay! »
Several women have played a major role in Richard Séguin’s career: his sister Marie-Claire, the writer Louky Bersianik, the poet Hélène Dorion and Hélène Dalair, his conductor for almost a decade. “To see all the drive she could have, it spoke to a whole generation of women who felt they could take on the role of leader. »
