Five years after the powerful The Ballad of the Runaway Girl, Elisapie offers Inuktitut, an album of covers, in her mother tongue, of rock songs that filled her youth. A lighter project in appearance, but which has taken on capital importance for the Inuk artist, and which is attracting international attention.
Elisapie is well aware that the direction of this new album risks causing surprises. She herself would never have thought that performing pieces by Metallica, Cyndi Lauper, Pink Floyd or Fleetwood Mac would make her dive so deep within herself.
“I didn’t expect a covers album to become so significant,” she confides. But ultimately it’s very, very personal. I have never been so challenged. »
What appeared as a “small project on the side” therefore became big by force of circumstances. This is because the singer-songwriter realized that every time she spoke about a song to her accomplice, guitarist Joe Grass, who produced the album, she was “on the edge of bawl.” “I told him: “I don’t know what’s going on, I’m going through things…”
The cause of this overwhelming emotion? All these songs remind him of his youth “in the North” in Salluit: a state of mind, a person who mattered, a nagging pain, a moment of abandonment in the party. The hypersensitive young girl that she was captured everything about the pain linked to the loss of bearings, to the suicides, to the trauma of previous generations, and this is what comes back when she hears I Want to Break Free, Going to California or Wish You Were Here.
Elisapie has also written short texts to explain what each song reminds her of precisely, and above all who.
For Wild Horses, for example, she evokes a friend who listened to the Stones’ piece to forget the abuse he experienced as a child. Elisapie concludes in her text that “music has this incredible gift of reconciling darkness and light”, a sentence that could sum up the entire album.
“Yes, I think I managed to go to both poles. » Joe Grass had the intelligence to follow her in this emotion and, above all, to capture it without overplaying it. Elisapie’s interpretation is moving in its sweetness and sobriety, her voice brought to the fore in a coating that respects the essence of the original pieces, with just enough distortion to evoke the realm of memory.
“We had to keep this project humble, as simple as possible. Joe told me that’s when it works, when I’m not trying to reinterpret, when I’m most myself. »
Once the decision was made to devote time and energy to making a real album, we had to obtain the rights for all these immense classics. A person was hired to present requests to publishers, a long-term task.
“She told us, ‘Give me a year.’ » Metallica, Queen, the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac quickly agreed. “When we saw that, we said: OK, that’s good! » Were there any rejections? “Yes, Abba. It’s a shame, we had a completely fucked up version of Chiquitita. My daughter doesn’t listen to them anymore because of this! » But almost all the requests ended up working, even in extremis with the more complicated duos, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and Roger Waters and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.
Elisapie does not know what interested the artists in her “little nothing project” compared to the scale of their work. “Maybe they saw it was in indigenous language and thought it was special. My dream was that all artists would listen to it and write to me! »
This did not happen, but extracts launched over the last few months have had quite a bit of exposure. Debbie Harry from Blondie and the group Metallica shared on their social networks her moving and haunting versions of Heart of Glass and The Unforgiven, which the prestigious Rolling Stone magazine also echoed.
“We found someone to play the album to Robert Plant when he came to perform in Montreal this summer. I don’t know if he’ll listen to it, but hey…” She is in any case delighted to see that recognized artists still allow themselves to be touched by other artists.
Elisapie readily admits that she cried a lot during the making of the album. Now that she’s going on tour, we hope she doesn’t put herself in this state at every show. ” No not at all ! I presented it at the FME in Abitibi, and honestly, it was a joy. »
The singer loved seeing people dance and sing, their looks, their smile. “There was also emotion, people crying because I tell the stories behind the songs. I feel like I’m the one watching a show seeing them react! Being their mirror was also the goal. »
At the end of the process, Elisapie does not know if she has exorcised all her pain. “Some of it maybe… but maybe there are others? ” She laughs. “I think I realized I had some stuff stuck in my body. » But she also encourages everyone to “not hide from sadness”.
If the album obviously has international potential, Elisapie does not know which direction it will take, towards France, where she already has a loyal audience, or the United States, which is starting to discover her. “We don’t know how the cards are going to play out. But we can already see that it is causing a lot of reaction among North Americans. »
In addition to the tour which begins in Quebec for at least a year, she will soon go to promote in France, then “an interesting showcase” in the United States. What would she like for her album?
“I hope it brings emotions to life. I would love to do a big festival in the States, that’s for sure. But I can be impatient in life, so I try to be without expectations, take it step by step and have confidence. Just to give it a soul, a spirit. Send him some witchcraft. »
