Music for me is a kind of soundtrack that you must always have around you. It’s a support that always feels good. If we’re sad, we can find music that puts us back into it. Other times, we want to be in the emotions and put on music for that. It’s something that can become meditative and other times it’s just for fun. It’s a release in one sense or another.
In my music, there is more French than English. My new album, for example, is all in French. Obviously, when we talk about this show, which was filmed a few years ago, we received people from everywhere. People from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec too, of course. Some were more English-speaking singers and in these cases, we respected their origins. But for me, personally, the majority of my musical life happens in French. When you make songs in English, there has to be a reason. For example, on my show, it could be to do a country line dance that goes with it or because it’s a throwback to my youth when I made more rock music. But it’s not filler. My repertoire is always in French, that’s what we prefer. Music, for me, is not like a spoken language, it is a universal language.
Walking around is a musical freedom that I really like to have, as we have freedom in our lives in general. It’s fun to be able to change style for a few minutes in a show, to bring rock or hard, whatever. For me, it’s a way to have fun in there. On TV, I’ll be asked to sing this or that song and I accept because that’s also music, being able to wander through styles. It’s as if I were a cook in an Italian restaurant and I never allowed myself to eat anything other than Italian. We can eat Thai, Chinese, traditional Canadian. I see it like that. I’m not looking for absolutely anything except musical happiness.
I’m the opposite of what people might imagine a country singer to be when it comes to horses. I got trampled by a horse when I was 8 years old, I could have died, it was very serious. So I’ve always been very afraid of horses and I really don’t ride horses. It’s a challenge for me to walk past a horse, even though I know they are docile and can be a human’s best friend. It’s really a trauma.
I have no musical training, nor vocal training. I haven’t taken any singing lessons, I don’t even know how to warm up my voice! I sing when I’m told to sing and I stop when I’m told to stop! I’ve always done this naturally. And as for my composition: the album I just made, on which I wrote, represented a new adventure for me. I wanted it in a simple way, I wanted to make texts very close to the way I express myself in life. I didn’t want to create texts where I express myself in a pictorial or slightly vague way. I am a very direct person in life, I don’t cut corners, I don’t try to sort out the way I express myself in public, even for personal things. I did the exact same thing when writing the songs on the album, I allowed myself to be 100% myself. When you release an album at almost 52 years old, I don’t think it’s the time to find another form of personality and change your style, especially for a first 100% original album.
I was a waitress in a bar to earn a living when I was young, in Lac-Saint-Jean, because that was all there was nearby to do. Then, I arrived in Montreal and worked in a florist at the Jean-Talon market. I loved making the arrangements for the bouquets, I still love it. I was also a cashier in credit unions. But apart from music, I would have really liked to be a kindergarten teacher. I couldn’t do my studies because we couldn’t afford them financially in my family, so I stopped. But I returned to university when I was older and my daughters were very young. But when you take another path, the music keeps coming back! So I obviously chose music, but I would have liked, in another life, to teach kindergarten.
