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There are two poles to the traditional singing of French Canada. On the one hand, the raucous call-and-response songs of Québec are full of a great joyous force, animated by centuries of booze and bad marriages, powered by foot percussion, and spun into the kind of epic songs that fueled the great bands like La Bottine Souriante. On the other hand, there’s a much more subtle and beautiful strain of traditional song, the old complaintes and medieval ballads populated by mystical bird messengers, drowned lovers, and quiet Sundays set aside for courting. Perhaps because of the incredible richness of his voice and his marvellously insightful fingerpicked guitar, I’ve always thought of the songs of Québécois singer Yann Falquet, of the popular trio Genticorum, as falling into this second camp. His vocals have a heartworn quality to them, an ability to draw out these old, sad themes of love that have haunted the hearts of lovers through the many years, first in old France, then on a new continent in North America. His debut solo album, Les secrets du ciel (“The Sky’s Secrets”), is a tour-de-force of his artistic vision. Though his vocals and guitar lead throughout, he’s joined by some powerhouse frequent collaborators like Keith Murphy, Allison de Groot (known for her duo with Tatiana Hargreaves), Quinn Bachand, Trent Freeman (The Fretless), Robert Alan Makie (Bella White), and more. Falquet arranges each of the songs on the album with the same careful ear he brings to his trio Genticorum, perhaps able here in his solo work to push the envelope a bit further. Swells of strings, the occasional horn, and some well-placed drums and electronics provide support for the songs.
Each song is chosen from Falquet’s years of research, and interestingly, he pulls from outside of Québec quite frequently. Like many other Québécois singers, he’s long been inspired by the traditional Acadian songs of Eastern Canada, featuring here songs collected from Northeast New Brunswick’s Acadian Peninsula, in the town of Shippagan especially (the same town the renowned Acadian fiddler André à Toto Savoie came from). With a recent rise in original songwriting amongst Québécois artists, it’s nice to see a singer really dive into the tradition, focusing on the incredible lyricism in the old songs. The album’s opening song, from Shippagan, La belle est en prison d’amour (The Lady is in a Prison of Love), is a great example. Set in a medieval mode and rich with metaphor, the song asks about a lost lady, kept in a prison of love, who was recently seen on the road. The singer asks what she was wearing and finds out there was a bird on her shoulder, to whom she confessed her secrets. But when the bird is interrogated for her secrets, it asks to be left alone, as all birds should be, to tell its secrets to the sky (the album’s title, Les secrets du ciel, comes from this final line). It’s poignant, and a bit funny, and a classic example of the peculiar French mythology that sees birds as messengers of love, passing secrets mystically between men and women over the ages.
Water and the sea factor into these songs as well, as you’d expect from both the Québécois side (known for the river-running voyageurs) and the Acadian side (known for centuries of fishermen). Du long de la mer jolie (All Along the Beautiful Sea), learned from the great Québécois singer Michel Faubert and from Madame Zépherin Dorion of Bonaventure, Québec, tells the story of a young maid who tricks a sailor press ganging her onboard a ship by pretending to be the poorest lady in the village (she’s actually the richest!). Les mers et les montagnes (The Seas and the Mountains) is one of the rare pure heartbreak songs of French Canada, learned here from the great Acadian singer Benoît Benoît (from the Acadian Peninsula), and showcases a powerful female perspective from the woman in question (“How would you have me heal you?” she asks, “I’m not the daughter of a doctor”). Les deux noyés de l’île aux Basques (The Two Drowned Men of Île aux Basques), from Shippagan, New Brunswick, is a shocking story of a tragic storm on the Saint Lawrence River in the early 1800s that claimed two lives. “We found Germain drowned on the shore,” the singer recounts. “His wife collapsed when she saw his face.”
So many people know the French-Canadian song tradition through crowd-favorite call-and-response songs. But there’s a whole other tradition of complaintes in French Canada that gets far less attention. These old ballads unfurl slowly, with great lyricism, and don’t have the same raucous call-and-response structure that encourages singalongs. Here, medieval fables of talking birds and doomed lovers abound, and the heart is given space to truly ramble through the thickets of love. Falquet is one of the few concentrating on these songs, which take a lot of focus and interpretation to sing. With Les secrets du ciel, he proves himself worthy of these great old songs, an interpreter of French-Canadian ballads with a remarkable voice and powerful artistry on the guitar.
Les secrets du ciel (2024) Self Released
Order Les secrets du ciel via Bandcamp: https://yannfalquet.bandcamp.com/album/les-secrets-du-ciel
