It is his most intimate song: Pierre Lapointe, star in Quebec, delicately delivers the sadness of a son confronted with a mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, in his new album between emotion and self-mockery, “for those who have the damaged heart. In more than 20 years of career, Pierre Lapointe has become a master in the art of sad songs, which he always crafts in an offbeat, funny or spicy way. Self-deprecation as armor, poetry as shield: the recipe remains unchanged in “Ten old-fashioned songs for those with damaged hearts”, an opus with accents evoking the classics of popular song, to be released on Friday.
Even with around fifteen records on the clock – 1.5 million sold worldwide – multiple collaborations including Mika, Albin de la Simone and visual artist Sophie Calle, as well as a media life as a radio columnist and coach in musical telecrochets, the singer has always taken care to preserve his private life. “It’s very important. For me, it’s a kind of sanctuary,” confides to theAFP, Pierre Lapointe, passing through Paris.
“Good for people”
Suddenly, disaster! He learns that his mother has Alzheimer’s disease. “I had underestimated the shock of the diagnosis and I received it right in the face,” he explains to his audience in a video posted on the networks, where he describes the genesis of the song inspired by this point of no return. Shaken, the singer feels the need to cling to his other refuge, music. Like when, as a teenager, “I felt that the vibrations of the piano helped me repair myself,” he remembers. It will take time: a year off where he travels and writes, months of gestation to “let the words arrive”, being careful not to “fall into something corny”.
Finally this open-hearted title was born, “Comme les pigeons d’clay”. “Now, I see memory as a flying object that can explode at any moment,” compares this French-speaking poet, made an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by France in 2020. Before any broadcast, he seeks advice from his close circle and warns his father and sister: he can, if necessary, “invent a story” or any other pirouette to put the subject at a distance. “And both of them told me: ‘No, go ahead, it will do good for people too,’” he says.
“Confessions of defeat”
“I admit I never really understood / Your way of playing with life / You always believed that happiness had a price”, sings Pierre fils, at the same time “sad”, “disappointed” and “angry “. Because far from any adulation or a childish gaze, Lapointe carries the vision of an adult “in mourning for a relationship that never existed with his mother, of great respect, a lot of love, of understanding , but also incomprehension, frustration. This song is the “antithesis”, according to him, of the nine others designed as an “exercise” with a nod to the great singer-songwriters, from Brel to Aznavour.
-He had also written them for others, before finally taking charge of them, banking on a powerful interpretation. As when he leads an “unexpected conversation with death”: “Madame, good evening…”, he intones to the Reaper, another female figure, among his favorite subjects. “There are little admissions of defeat in my songs, that is to say moments where a human being says to himself ‘I’m not as beautiful, as strong, as brilliant as I want’. But I have the impression that that’s when we start to be beautiful and brilliant and interesting, when we embrace our weaknesses,” he observes.
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(afp)
