I chose Miss Ecstasy [2001], even if it makes me happy to play it, because people have a relationship with this song that is beyond me. Example: last summer, in Dolbeau, I understood that Miss Ecstasy has been touring a local bar for years and that makes Miss Ecstasy have an exceptional dimension there. We couldn’t not play it.
But when I play it, I have to tell myself that I’m revisiting the kid I was at 18. It appears in the text that I graduated from Arts and Letters at CEGEP. I hadn’t found myself yet.
I could have chosen a few from The Time and the Place [2012], but I’m going with Never Break. [Plays the song on his computer and winces.] It’s terrible what you’re doing to me!
I was in a funny zone when I made that album. It was my return with Carl [Bastien, director of Cours des jours, 2003]. I thought magic was going to work, but magic can’t work when the tunes aren’t there. We had set a release date, but we should have taken another year. It’s weird, but after 10 years of success, I kind of lost my confidence. When I listen to the album again, I hear it. There is a new generation coming up and I was looking for my place. Never cease, it is an attempt The Kinks in French not very successful.
One day, we go through Quebec, and in Quebec, I always play CHYZ, the university radio. At some point, something plays and I’m like, “That’s cool, that, I think I have that at home on a record.” Then there, I turn on: it’s one of my tunes, one of the instrumentals from the EPs! [In 2008 and 2009, Dumas recorded four EPs.] I can’t remember which one exactly, maybe 11-40.
A Perfect Day [2014]. When I wrote it, I was not used to visiting that area, to talking about paternity. Today, with the quarantine, I have much less difficulty going into intimacy. It is also the album on which I was beginning to regain my confidence, but I was still looking for myself.
Singing with Bashung in 2005 is hard to beat. The other beautiful memory is my first Spectrum, in 2003, a few months after the release of Cours des jours. During Linoléum, it began to sing spontaneously. It was the first time that I felt that people really knew one of my songs. And that’s when I thought, OK, it could be, it could work.
I would like to work with Régine Chassagne, in French.
I find that Somewhere [2009] did not have the success it could have had. The version on the EP [Rouge] is cool, but not great, because we were doing things quickly, and in the Traces version, I removed a melody that I should have kept. I always thought Isabelle Boulay could sing it. [Laughs] I never told him.
Atlantica [2009]. François Plante [his bassist] keeps telling me that I should put on a show just with obscurities.
Leitmotiv [2023], because it represents the courage it took me to ask Philippe Brault [producer of his most recent album, Cosmologie] to come and listen to my demos. We didn’t know each other before we met on the mountain, while we were both running, during the pandemic. Well, Philippe says that he left me a message on my answering machine at the time of The Writer [2001] asking me to play bass with me and that I never called him back. [Laughs] For me, it’s the Quebec Rick Rubin.
There is also Chicago [2023]. I sat down on the Michel Rivard chair [Dumas rents a rehearsal room once occupied by Michel Rivard, who left a stool there with his name inscribed on it] and she jumped out. It hadn’t happened to me for a long time.
[In Elsewhere, 2023] “Maybe I’m just a dreamer, who knows? “Because it describes how whimsical I am on a daily basis, but also because dreams still inhabit my life as a creator. I don’t feel like I’ve written my best song yet.
