Not so long ago, TALK dreamed of having an agent, a record deal and chart success. He already had all that – and even hundreds of millions of online listeners – before launching The Lord of the Flies
TALK is not yet a household name, but it already resonates in Quebec much louder than anywhere else in America. Not so much because he made a good impression on the show Tout le monde en parole on October 15 as because he made two notable appearances at the Quebec Summer Festival: in 2022 as the opening act for Luke Combs and in last July just before Imagine Dragons.
He too was marked by it. Before singing in front of a huge crowd on the Plains of Abraham – 60,000 or 70,000 spectators – on his first visit to Quebec, he gave his biggest concert ever in a room of 400 people… We are not surprised to hear him say that this gigantic walkabout is one of the great moments of his young life.
TALK is the artistic name of Nicholas Durocher, born in Ottawa to a mother from Val-d’Or and a father from Ontario. From his Quebec roots, he still has his name and French colored with a thick Anglo accent. And a song, La ziguezon, that he likes to sing at all his shows in Quebec and that he even had added to the Quebec version of his album The Lord of the Flies
The discrepancy between La Bottine’s response song and his own could not be greater. TALK likes catchy rock that displays its ambitions. In his songs we find a grandeur inspired by Queen (History) and Elton John, but transposed into tunes that also recall the tights rockers of the 1980s.
“My father listened to the Stones, the Beatles, The Mamas
TALK finds that rock is too self-conscious these days. He wanted to bring back madness, positivity and theater. He was also quite impressive when he was invited to James Corden’s Late Late Show to sing his hit Run Away to Mars: he wore a kind of space suit and had a star drawn on his right eye .
No doubt, this guy has showmanship. He has to, because he never wanted to play bar rock. The image that emerges when listening to his songs, almost all colored by a guitar solo, is a jubilant arena.
TALK discovered his powerful voice late in life, towards the end of high school, when he started singing to “impress the girls”. He says this with a smile, knowing full well that entire generations of guys before him have picked up a guitar or stood behind a microphone in the hope of getting noticed by the opposite sex. He had the voice. “It took me a while to realize that I could also write songs,” he emphasizes, however.
If, musically, his songs have something light, his lyrics are not necessarily. Run Away to Mars is about loneliness and A Little Bit Happy is about learning to love yourself. Afraid of the Dark, on the other hand, is not as dark as it might seem: among other things, it invites us to tell people that we love… that we love them.
“My songs that people like the most are the real songs, which are also important to me. They come from the heart and I think people feel that, says the 28-year-old. Run Away to Mars no longer belongs to me. She passed me. She now belongs to all those who love her. I think that’s why we make songs: to give them to people. »
