When I saw Éric Lapointe arrive in the studio at QUB, I didn’t recognize him. He had lost weight. He was muscular. Her skin was beautiful. He had a tanned complexion.
Gone are the gray-green complexion and the belly! Bye bye black eyes and puffy face!
But what was especially different from the Éric Lapointe I interviewed in November 2023 was that the rocker looked good. Just good.
When he told me that he had just celebrated six months of sobriety, I understood why he was no longer the same man.
ONE DAY AT A TIME
In November, when I interviewed him for Éric Lapointe facing his demons which was broadcast in January on TVA, the rocker was so nervous and stressed that I thought at any moment he was either going to “fart at the fret” or get up and leave the set at Mels studios. I had before me a hunted animal, which was going all out.
Now, at QUB, this week, Éric Lapointe was a man who no longer had a hunched back, and who was proud of not having been “under the influence” for more than six months. “The last time I was sober this long, I was 12,” the man who became an alcoholic as a teenager told me.
Lapointe told me a touching story. He received his six-month sobriety token from his godfather on April 21, the birthday of one of his sons. “I saw in my children’s eyes that they were really proud,” Lapointe told me.
Why am I telling you all this? Because we live in a society where people constantly talk to us about tolerance, acceptance, redemption, forgiveness.
But there are still artists who categorically refuse to sing on the same stage as Lapointe, even if he pleaded guilty to the charges against him and even if he benefited from a conditional discharge (the conditions of which he respected ).
THE SAINT-JEAN
This summer, for Midsummer’s Day, we had already planned to pay tribute to Jean-Pierre Ferland, because he would have turned 90 on June 24. Since Jean-Pierre died on April 27, the tribute planned for Saint-Jean will be amplified.
However, it is good to remember that Éric Lapointe has recorded six songs by Jean-Pierre over the years. We of course remember What could it possibly do?.
But on Lapointe’s latest album, the rocker also covers a little-known song by Jean-Pierre called At low tide. When you read the lyrics, you understand why the rocker chose to sing it. It’s about the friends who are there for you when you’re at the top, but who leave the ship when you’re in troubled waters. “You’ve seen, we have a lot of friends / On high tide days / You’ve seen how they’re always far away / When we need them at low tide.”
“Jean-Pierre will always have put into words what I was going through,” Éric told me in an interview this week.
I don’t know about you, but for me, if this summer on Saint-Jean in Montreal or Quebec Éric Lapointe sang the little king, we would see that it was the return of the tide.
