Making it in the music business is hard enough. The odds of meeting the right people who can get your music where it needs to be heard are not very promising. But when a Canadian musician chooses to perform a large chunk of their material French in provinces outside of Quebec, those odds get even worse. Cultural preservation is apparently more important to those artists as much as album sales. Yet ironically, something else is also important to these artists, without which their careers might never survive -- Quebec.
CHALLENGES
"If there is a challenge, it is to maintain our language," says Danny Boudreau, a thirty-one
year old singer/songwriter who has been shaking up New Brunswick since the age of
seven with his rousing Acadian numbers and soft ballads. "It’s also a challenge not to be
tempted to go and sing in English just because the market is bigger. For me, it’s natural to
sing in French because I am French myself. But I live in a region where there are English
speaker as well, and I could have chosen to sing in English."
"Getting known; carving my name into the history of Franco-Ontarian performers.
Distribution is a big problem," says Jean-Guy "Chuck" Labelle, a country music recording
artist with three French CDs. "I tour a lot; that’s how I’ve been able to sell albums and
keep myself and my musicians working. I do a lot of schools in Ontario -- I’ve become
somewhat of a kid’s star without doing children’s music."
For Marcel Soulodre, the challenges of performing in French have changed over time.
Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Soulodre was born to a French-speaking father and an
English-speaking mother and was raised as an Anglophone. So, when he made the
decision to become a professional musician, it seemed only natural to write and sing in
English. That all changed a few years ago when Soulodre re-discovered his French roots,
became bilingual, and started writing songs in French. "It was a challenge to me to reclaim
that part of me that was there, but was dormant," he explains.
J’avais dans les yeux is his first French release, and the country/rock songs resound with
Soulodre’s ease in the language. But it wasn’t always like that. "I set my standards very
high. I had to re-familiarize myself with the basic rules and regulations of the language. I
wanted to express myself in French utilizing the same sort of images and metaphors I
would normally use, but learning how to utilize them in French," he says.
Now that he has mastered the language, the challenge for Soulodre is two-fold. On the
one hand he laughs that it’s "finding and audience," but when he finally does have ears
eager to hear his music, it’s "getting off the stage because I have so many songs that I
want to play!"
FINDING AN AUDIENCE
"Finding an audience," as Soulodre said, is a major challenge for those living outside
centers where French is spoken by any significant amount of the population. If a
performer sings in French, they won’t get played on the radio and they’ll have a harder
time getting gigs. But to those who take this route, the rewards of bridging gaps between
cultures and languages more than make up for the lack of exposure.
"Friends of mine who are in the business tell me I should switch to English because I
would get more gigs," says Crystal Plamondon, who hails from Plamondon, Alberta (her
grandfather founded the town) and includes three languages -- French, English, and Cree
-- in her repertoire of Cajun and Zydeco influenced pop and country. "But you know
what? I’ve had the most gigs, the most paying and fulfilling gigs, because I sing in French.
Why did I get a slot on the Canada Day celebrations in Vancouver? Because I’m a
bilingual performer. There are tons of Anglophone performers. People also say to me
that they think I must have such a hard time in Alberta because of the red necks, but that is
so wrong -- people love it."
The bilingual situation is much different in New Brunswick than in Alberta. There, a large
portion of the population is French-speaking, and that makes Boudreau’s job much easier.
"In my region in the north of the province, it is actually better to sing in French because
there are more places to perform and the number of French people here is very big," he
says.
When he does perform for Anglophone audiences, who often include French immersion
schools in the southern part of the province, Boudreau says the reaction is "pretty good.
Music is universal. You’ve got to give the audience something they can tap their feet to, a
melody to enjoy. The hardest thing is when I talk between songs, I have to talk very
slowly. But most of the time they were my better audience."
Soulodre agrees about the universal aspects of music. "The music cuts through most of it,
I find. Whether people listen to lyrics or not, most people get the music and that’s usually
what attracts them," he says. Therefore, the Anglophones who come to his shows "are
usually fairly appreciative. The majority of people are usually very receptive to it because
it’s an opportunity for them to hear something in a different language, and a lot of them
get to learn along with me."
Ironically, the only place where Plamondon has a problem is in Quebec. "When they book
me they will tell me they don’t want any English. When I get to the show I’ll put in the
Daniel Lanois song ‘Under A Stormy Sky,’ which is like maybe five percent English, and
after the show I’ll say ‘So, did you have a problem with my English songs?’ And they’ll
say, ‘Oh, I didn’t even know you sang any.’" she laughs.
The music moguls in Quebec also don’t have a problem with Plamondon’s Cree selections.
"Quebec is really mainstream in a sense they are almost like FM radio. They listen to the
Celtic, they’ll love the Cree, but they won’t like the English. It’s like the people in the rest
of Canada. They’ll listen to Celtic and they’ll listen to Kashtin [a Native duo that
performs in the Innu language] but they don’t want to hear French on English radio."
Labelle knows about the fickle nature of radio all too well. Four years ago he was
commissioned to write the song "Look At Me, I’m Climbing" for the Special Olympics.
As requested of him, the song contained both French and English lyrics. "The French
radio stations would not play it because it had English content, and the English radio
stations would not play it because it had French content. So, boy, did I learn a lesson
there!" he says. The song went nowhere as a result of scant airplay, and when approached
to write another song for the national Special Olympics in 1998, Labelle did not go the
bilingual route.
QUEBEC: FRIEND OR FOE?
Although Quebec might seem to be a haven for those who sing in French, since for many
years the province has supported its own music industry, in recent times the market has
become saturated, the gigs fewer, and the same names cropping up over and over again,
with others disappearing into nowhere. As Soulodre explains, "it’s a very difficult market
to get into as an artist because you’re regarded as an outsider. They are having enough
trouble propping up their own industry these days because it’s saturated and might be
falling in on itself a little bit, with ‘here today gone tomorrow’ kinds of artists."
"I did a television show in Montreal last year for a few months," says Plamondon. She
hosted the first and only French country music show in Canada on MusiMax, the sister
station to Musique Plus. "That was a godsend for me because I saw that there’s no work
for performers out there. They have Montreal as their main center but they can’t work all
the time. They only work in the summer months because of all the festivals then."
"There’s so many artists coming out of Quebec that you really need to give them
something that they’ll flip over. They won’t take any chances. If it’s good they’ll take it,
but if you’re from Quebec I would say your chances are a lot better than if you are from
outside," says Boudreau, who is getting ready to record the follow-up to his 1994 release
Sans Detour.
Labelle agrees. "They want to keep the business home. It would require so much energy
from my team to push me into there. I would probably have to move to Montreal," which
he explains would cause his emerging English career (he is currently working on No
Getting Over You, his first all-English release) to falter. "Here’s the Catch-22 : ‘He’s
singing in French but he’s really English.’ I don’t want to get into that. I’m just a singer,
you know, I’m a songwriter -- who happens to be bilingual."
Despite its saturated music scene and the apprehension of outsiders, Quebec is still very
much important to these performers. When asked what would happen to them without
Quebec, Plamondon asks wryly, "You mean what would happen if they separated?"
"The province is important to us in the sense that anything Francophone in Canada --
cultural grants and schools, for example -- comes from Ottawa and Montreal or Quebec
City. So in that sense it would be harder for us," she explains. "Something very funny is
that once people know I am Franco-Albertan, they have no problem with the French.
They all ask me ‘Are you Quebecois?!?’ and I say no, and explain my background to them.
What they are tired of is that Quebec wants special treatment. They don’t want o hear
French shoved at them if it comes from Quebec. And I don’t either -- I’m just as angry
about it as they are. I’m not Quebecois. There’s 172 000 Francophones here, and most
of them were born here."
"For some people [Quebec is] very important depending on what you want to do," says
Soulodre. "My ambitions lie in Europe. That’s always been the case since I started in
French and checked out the Montreal scene and realized what it was like. A lot of the
people in the Quebec industry laugh at me for wanting to do that. They say, ‘Oh, it’s so
difficult’."
"The industry here in New Brunswick is very new," says Boudreau. "There has always
been music, but there were no studios, or managers -- no infrastructure to allow us to
produce good albums. Since 1994 all that has changed quite drastically. Then a program
was established to inject a lot of money into studios. There were about 30 albums
produced in French in 1994 which was more than the past 25 years. But if we want to
survive in what we are doing, just the New Brunswick market isn’t enough."
The goals of these artists are very much along the lines of what Boudreau describes as "to
play in front of more people and to be able to live off of our music, of our art. My main
goal has always been just to keep on enjoying what I am doing and have people enjoy
what I am doing."
