Just between you and me | Every morning, Pierre Lapointe prepares to die

In the podcast series Just between you and meartists open the doors to their memories, their reflections and their dreams, for a press-free interview.

Every morning, Pierre Lapointe thinks about his death. “I sometimes dress and say to myself: “Oh well, maybe I’m going to die if I’m dressed like that.” Choose your clothes, thinking that you might have blood on them soon. I push very far. »

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But what a chillingly morbid thought to get out of bed in! “At the same time,” explains the 43-year-old singer, “it’s a way of enjoying life and saying to yourself: wake up, enjoy your day, man! »

“I have always had a relationship with death and finitude that is very frank and very frontal,” he continues. Besides, that’s why I create so much, that I want to live every moment to the fullest. It’s because I know it’s going to end and in the meantime, I better have fun and enjoy everything, because it won’t last. »

We are talking about death and there is nothing gloomy about this interview. If she invited herself to do so, it is quite simply because death appears almost everywhere on Ten Old-Fashioned Songs for the Broken-Heartedthe nevertheless luminous new album from Pierre Lapointe. The title of his ninth piece could not be clearer: Madam, good evening (Unexpected conversation with death).

But it is because of another song (or thanks to this one) that the subject of our ultimate common destiny will have become the common thread of this interview: Like clay pigeonswritten by Pierre, on the piano, to “repair his heart”, following his mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

leave something

After 25 years of career, Pierre Lapointe adds to his repertoire, already abundant in immortals, one of his most moving songs, as if echoing another, Mamanthe proverbial hidden tune of his first album, in which he whispers in playful French: “if that’s what being 20 is like / I’d rather die now”. But the difference this time is that it is no longer the son who contemplates the precipice.

Was he really inhabited by so much torment two decades ago? “I arrived at 20 years old and I had been pissed off for 20 years,” he confides, evoking the sadness that settled in him permanently when he understood that he was not a boy. like the others, and a fortiori following his coming outpoorly received, we can guess between the lines.

“But in fact, in reaction to that, I really told myself, as a teenager, that I couldn’t cause my death, that it was nonsense. I reasoned with myself by telling myself: “Find a goal and arrange to have fun. Manage to leave something that will be bigger than you.” And that’s where I devoted myself body and soul, as a religious person would to pray to God, to creation and to art. »

Fruitful contradictions

Composed of songs that he wrote with other performers in mind (whom he refuses to name), Ten Old-Fashioned Songs for the Broken-Hearted once again encapsulates several of the contradictions of a man well educated in everything relating to fashion, but whose music has never hidden its reverence for a certain great song tradition. As evidenced by this new collection of studiously old-fashioned refrains, set with strings of sumptuous classicism.

“I am both a giggling 5-year-old child and an old man who says that life is rubbish,” he illustrates about his fertile contradictions. Another one ?

The second track of the album, Anthem for those who do not apologizecould also be understood as a celebration of all these identities which refuse to bow to the calls of a world enamored of narrow labels. Dedicated to Safia Nolin and inspired by “a liberation of speech and shame that changes sides”, it is perhaps the most political song in Pierre Lapointe’s repertoire.

“It has been very liberating, everything that has happened in recent years,” he confides, referring to the numerous movements of denunciation. “By being gay, I depend on the position of women in society. […] If women don’t have rights, gays don’t have rights, same thing for trans people. There is a hierarchy that I find stupid, but it is still there. »

“Safia is an example of someone who takes responsibility and lives in all her difference and all her beauty,” he adds, solemnly. And I emphasize the word beauty, because there are people who, it seems, have a monopoly on the definition of the word beauty, whereas for me, beauty is a billion business, and it is above all emotion, and a frankness, and a way of being. »