23 March 2022 - Alex Nevsky ft. Cœur de Pirate - Jeter un sort

I'm going to open this post with a promise.  

No œ in tomorrow's post.  Not doing the Lights things again.

My intention was to do a whole French language week by Canadian artists.  And, well, so far, kinda did that.  It's just - well...

Alex Nevsky is an excellent artist in his own right.  A singer-songwriter, he's built a great career with daring music that is beautifully written.  This song - whose title literally translates as "Cast A Spell" - is a haunting, enchanting look at love.

Yes, they co-wrote this, but nothing I said in the last paragraph is untrue.

Ok, I just had to share this - it's footage of the two of them in the studio.... recording this. It's lovely to see this interaction.

22 March 2022 - Roch Voisine - Hélène

Roch Voisine was born in New Brunswick - which a lot of people don't know is a truly bilingual province - they really speak French there, and not just Quebec.  

He was destined to become a Canadian treasure.  

His breakthrough came in 1989 with this song, from the album of the same name.  It was a worldwide hit, nowhere bigger than in France, where it topped the charts for two months.

Yeah.  He did an English version, too.  It wasn't nearly the hit this was.   So, here it stands, alone.   

Anyone who casually reads this blog - or even who started reading it literally yesterday - has to know what's coming.

OF COURSE HE RERECORDED IT AS A DUET WITH QUEBEC'S SWEETHEART.

That's right.  I did just call Cœur de Pirate "Quebec's Sweetheart". She retweeted me. Fight me.  

This version, a bit more orchestral than the original, did chart in France and Belgium, too. 

21 March 2022 - Peter Peter ft. Cœur de Pirate - Tergiverse

Peter Peter is a French-Canadian pop-rock singer.  He used to be in a band called Post Scriptum.

I can't really think of anything else to say about this song..... hmmmm.  It'll come to me.  

The song itself is a delightful pop song that will have you singing along.  If you know French.  

Peter Peter revisited the song in 2014 as part of the 30th anniversary celebration of Quebec record label Audiogram (we've seen other celebrations of this before).  This is a more stripped down, solo version, but it's still a delightful pop song.

Oh!  Right!  We forgot to mention the original is a duet.  In this version of the video, which is the identical music to the first one, you can clearly see Cœur de Pirate.  Can't believe that slipped my mind. 

20 March 2022 - Spiritbox - Circle With Me

You know, we don't publish enough metal on this blog.  So, why not remedy that with some Canadian metal by Spiritbox?

Formed in 2017 out of the ashes of Iwrestledabearonce (Husband and wife duo guitarist Mike Stringer and vocalist Courtney LaPlante were both replacement members of the Louisiana band) , Spiritbox, from British Columbia, make music that's kind of hard to define as simply metal.  

The Canadian band is unusual in that their main fan base seems to be in the States.  They've had some success on the US Hard Rock charts, none bigger than this 2021 single of theirs.    

19 March 2022 - Bonjour Brumaire - Prunelle

I promise I'm not doing a thing.  It may LOOK like I'm doing the same thing I did last week.  I am not. 

Cœur de Pirate is not in this video because she left the band prior to.... this video.  She's actually the keyboardist of record on the song.  The keyboardist in this video is Karine Novelle, who replaced Ms. Martin in the band.

But Bonjour Brumaire wasn't about their keyboardist, who was not yet wielding the heart of a pirate.  No, it is the lyrics and vocals of Youri Zaragoza, which are emotive and unusual, that really sell this song, which is yet another love song.  

18 March 2022 - Jayli Wolf - Child Of The Government

In the US, we gloss over Native American issues.  

In Canada, they make relatively popular songs about them.

Jayli Wolf grew up thinking she was half-Mexican - but found out she was half First Nations at the age of eight and has reconnected with those roots as an adult.  And, with this, her breakthrough single, she took First Nations issues head on, detailing for a broad audience the atrocity known as the Sixties Scoop, when a lot of native Canadians were removed from their communities by the Canadian government, with Catholic Church assistance.

For those who can't read the text at 3:13 fast enough:

"From the 1950s into the 1990s the Canadian Government & the Catholic Church were responsible for taking, or “scooping” more than 20,000 First Nation, Métis, and Inuit children from their families and communities; known as The Sixties Scoop. They were placed in foster homes or adopted (accounts of children even being sold) into non-Indigenous families across Canada, the United States, & beyond.

Along with the loss of cultural identity, the government went so far as to change some children’s true ethnicity on file. Many experienced severe sexual, physical, and emotional abuse.

Jayli’s father was one of these children."

The song is delivered in a somewhat detached style, but is important enough for the CBC to call it one of the top ten Canadian songs of 2021.  

17 March 2022 - The Tragically Hip - Bobcaygeon

How the hell can I do a Maple Leaf March without the Canadian treasure that was the Tragically Hip?

This may be their best known song in Canada.  It is considered one of their greatest. Like almost every Hip song, it went nowhere in the States.  In this case, it might be a good thing.  Let me explain.

In the early 1990s, there were a series of antisemitic riots in Toronto, when members of the Neo-Nazi group the Heritage Front engaged in a street fight with a group calling themselves Anti-Racist Action.  A lot of Americans would never associate such violent antisemitism with Canada - and yet, it really happened, and this was the second time (there were similar outbursts in 1933).  

These riots didn't happen in Bobcaygeon - which was chosen just because it rhymed with "constellation" - but the video makes clear reference to them, and the themes of the song reference them so directly.

At any rate, Bobcaygeon relished the reference in the song, hosting a large viewing party for the Hip's farewell concert.

This was not Bobcaygeon.  This was Kingston.  But trust me - Bobcaygeon was watching.