DAY
For ten years, Ingrid St-Pierre has made her place in the music industry in her own way, with gentleness and poetry. On his new creation, Reines, the artist from Cabano puts his fist on the table. “It's the most frontal, rawest album I've done,” she says.
The delicate Ingrid St-Pierre, who was careful not to crease or polarize? It is not in this powerful ode to the women in her life that you will find her.
Transported by the liberation of female speech thanks to the #metoo movement, Ingrid St-Pierre denounces, is indignant, worries about the state of the world she gives to her two-year-old daughter (The Ocean Liner), pays tribute to a former neighbor (Madame Croft), evokes the plight of the elderly who live alone (A single plate).
Listen to the title track to convince yourself. She slays the “gangsters and bastards of first class” who play “kings of the mountain to the top of the mountains of Venus”.
“It legislates in our entrails, in single file the minuses”, she proclaims, surly, before promising that the “Queens lights will raise their finger, honor and spine”.
< p>“Let us raise our voices without fear, my sisters. Nothing hurts us anymore,” concludes Ingrid St-Pierre, fist raised.
Emancipation
In an interview with Le Journal, the singer-pianist says she allowed herself “greater freedom” on this sixth album.
“I have always been a very reserved girl who does not take up much space. I am not a very exuberant person, but in these texts, there is a kind of emancipation, I want to be all-powerful, to be untied. […] I write about what I want, the way I want. »
All this has been brewing for a long time. Of Reines, the song, she says that she wrote herself in her for several years.
“I don't want to fall into caricatural militancy, but I have wanted to express how I felt, how many times I just put on my hoodiewalking down the street with my head down and crossing my fingers that I wasn't going to get raped. This has been my life for 37 years, this is my normality. What is more shocking is normalizing this. During all these years, I found it completely normal to do that, because it is my daily life. Well, let's see that I knowingly accepted that,” she wonders, saying it out loud.
A committed artist?
The 38-year-old artist does not claim to have solutions and answers. “I did not save my skin, how to save yours”, she confides to her daughter in Le paquebot, one of the most beautiful tracks on her album.
Her view of motherhood (her lover Liu Kong-Ha and she have a boy) also gave rise to the song Mothers, which the organization Mères au front has recovered to denounce climate inaction.
Would she have become a committed artist? No, answers Ingrid St-Pierre. “My songs are not political, they are just embodied”, notes the artist, well aware that we can nevertheless “stick them to many things. »
The impact of her music, she appreciates it just as much when it is felt in intimacy, “at the height of a man, at the height of a woman”.
“If I change things because 'a mum puts on my music to put her little one to sleep and when he falls asleep faster, she can go do other things afterwards, it's to be engaged, somewhere. »
One thing does not change with Ingrid St-Pierre. Whether her pen is revolted or not, she invariably finds the words to say it with a sense of poetry and evocation that commands admiration.
Sometimes you even have to open a dictionary ( or go to Google) to find out what a sensitive fern is (it's a fern) or what the Latin phrase nihil obstat means.
A land of game
“For me, the French language is a playground”, says the one who was raised listening to the great voices of the musical Francophonie.
“I listened to Moustaki, Françoise Hardy, without really understanding the meaning of each song, because I was too young. What I like is the musicality of words in French. We can play with the images that the words evoke for us. I really like playing with sounds, sweet words, there is something very musical in the French language that I love and cherish. »
She smiles with happiness at the idea that her love of French is passed on to those who listen to her music.
“What really pleases is when people of all generations write to me. There are very young people, I have mothers who write to me that their children listen to my music. I have teenagers, teachers who work on my works in French in their classes. People my age too. That's the best compliment for me. When teenagers write to me to tell me that they made my song at Secondary en spectacle, that they would like to have my scores, it gives me chills. »
“If it can awaken the taste for French, she continues, the desire to write, the desire to go further, to listen to other things beyond what we are offered on the radio. and on TV, I will have made a small difference. »
The album Reines, by Ingrid St-Pierre, on sale Friday.
In concert at the Club Dix30 in Brossard, on April 15, and at the Grand Théâtre de Québec, on May 27.
For all dates: ingridstpierre.com
Doubt and humility
“With each album, I doubt. I regularly doubt. Doubt is an engine. I find it necessary in my job. The day I will stop doubting, I will simply stop making music. »
It is not because she has now accumulated a decade of experience that Ingrid St-Pierre considers that her highly deserved place among the cream of our artistic colony is cast in stone.
“It is a privilege to be broadcast, to be listened to, to have a place after ten years. For me, it's not something acquired, it's something that is constantly renewed, which honors itself, which questions itself a lot. »
The Ingrid St-Pierre who says that is the girl from Bas-du-Fleuve, raised in a family that placed humility at the top of its scale of values.
“I will always keep this, I will always be Cabano's daughter. I embody that, I am that and I always will be. On the other hand, appreciating the place that we have and that we are given, that does not necessarily mean that we lack ambition ”, takes care to specify the one who, now that her children are growing up, sees herself singing in Europe .
Curious
Doubting about Ingrid St-Pierre also means that assessing the possibility of changing careers has become an annual ritual.
“It happens to me once a year, it's like a running gag. I am on the site of the University of Montreal, McGill, or any university, and I explore. I would like to do everything. I like to have strange projects, contrary to what I am doing now. »
Yes, she questions herself, but her doubt is therefore also fueled by her great curiosity.
« Listen, I looked at the landscape architecture program there. not so long ago, she says with a smile. I have a very wide field of interest, I like to do lots of business, I have fun with everything and I want to choose the profession of musician because I want to transmit something, I I want this bond with people that is so special and that I can't find anywhere else. I need to choose it, otherwise I lose my relevance, I lose the desire to write. With each creative process, I question this place, I question my desire to make music and every time, I answer yes, because, obviously, I'm still there. »
For a long time to come, hopefully.