For several years I’ve been obsessed with trying to write new songs that sound like old classics. And I feel like I hit the nail on the head with Jules’s First Christmas. It’s luminous melancholy, chiaroscuro lucidity.

And at the end, the pa-pa, pa-pa, it’s Gilberto by Diane Tell, which is a centerpiece of French song and a fine example of a song that sounds like a new classic. It sounds like great bossa nova, but we also feel the signature of Diane Tell.

In What We Already Know, there is a bit of Phil Spector’s Christmas album, but there is mainly the saxophone from See My Baby Jive [1973] by the group Wizzard. It was a mega hit in England, a sort of strange mix of glam rock and 1950s music. The singer had platform shoes and a multi-colored beard. It could be in bad taste, but since the musicians I work with are good and self-deprecating, it always comes across well.

[In 2005, several members of the Audiogram team recorded this song written by Pierre Lapointe in a We Are the World style.]

It’s funny, because I would make that song disappear, even if it’s a bit like the genesis of the album Winter Songs. I had written it two or three years before signing with Audiogram, and at one point the company wanted to raise money for Young Musicians of the World, so we asked everyone to be there to record it: Ariane Moffatt, Daniel Bélanger, Pierre Flynn, Mara Tremblay, Karkwa, etc.

I was still at my beginnings, I didn’t understand everything that was happening to me, but it was the first time that I felt like I was part of an artistic family, a family that was made up of all my idols.

And there was Lhasa [de Sela] who was there. I must have seen her in a show at least ten times in Outaouais, sometimes in venues where I was not allowed to enter, because I was not an adult. I remember that one evening, Yves Desrosiers [Lhasa’s guitarist sidekick] let us in through the dressing room, because he thought it was irrelevant that we had been turned away at the door. During a concert in Lhasa, we were all still in a trance.

Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas (1967) by Ella Fitzgerald. It is both very joyful and solemn, the arrangements are magnificent.

The Jingle Cats one. It’s the funniest and most disgusting thing in the world. But respect to these cats, who must do very good numbers on Spotify during the holidays.

I received tons of them. I would say that for 95% of people in the queer community, coming out did not go well and had an impact on the relationship with parents which, fortunately, often ends up being replaced.

And I’m tired of it. We try to make ourselves believe that everything is arranged, that everything is fine, but there are still countries where homosexuals are burned, there are still parents here who disown their children because they are homosexuals. I don’t really know how to react to this, other than being sad and also, at times, very angry.

It’s one of my Christmas songs that I play even in the middle of May.

Nathalie Simard, for me, is childhood. One of the first songs I learned by heart was Donne la patte Chibouki.

When she came to participate in my show Two by two gathered [on ICI Musique], she was very stressed and she asked me when she arrived: “Can I hold you in my arms? » She took me in her arms and there was an interstellar connection that happened, cosmic. She was afraid of not being good enough, perhaps because I give off an image that is not in line with who I am.

And when we sang together… Oh, my God! His smile ! Her whole body comes alive when she sings, she has a voice of fire. It seems that she sang a lot in her life. What she has is rare.

It’s El Mundo [1988] by Mitsou, whose 35th anniversary we’re going to celebrate during the show, even if they’re not Christmas songs. She’s underrated, perhaps because she came in with sexy looks that hogged the spotlight. For me, a good album is four strong songs, and there are more than four on this album and on Terre des hommes [1990]. They deserve to be listened to again.

It was in Whistler, during the Vancouver Olympic Games in 2010. Every evening, on the stage where the medals were awarded, there was a Canadian artist playing, like Nelly Furtado and… Pierre Lapointe. And Pierre Lapointe, in Whistler, he is known to a few Francophones and Francophiles, but otherwise, no one gives a damn.

The arena was huge and there were maybe 30 people there. That’s where I learned that an audience clapping with mittens on doesn’t sound good. I had fits of laughter during the show, but giggles! I asked myself: What am I experiencing?

Before the last song, I said, “Okay, gang, what’s coming is probably the biggest fireworks you’ll ever see in your life. You’re going to get about $15,000 worth of fireworks each, enjoy. »

That’s why I often say that anyone who does this job and has a big head is an idiot, because there is constantly something that reminds you that even though you are known somewhere, you you are not elsewhere.

[In Every year we come back]

Family has that je ne sais quoi that feels good Even if it sometimes disgusts us Every year, we come back to it They seem to call it the magic of Christmas

I have a lot of love and respect for my family, but it seems like around the holidays, everyone is obsessed with trying to recreate a chemistry that isn’t necessarily evident with the addition of blondes, friends, children. We want to recreate something unnatural in a very specific context, during an intense period when we all arrive tired.

But there is still magic at Christmas, there are still extraordinary moments. I still like seeing the people I love.

This mixture describes well my way of seeing life in general. I’m never really sad, never really happy.