Recipe for Survival Listening Post 374. The keyword from Andrea Menard’s fifth album is “rubaboo,” a stew typically made of meat, vegetables, flour, pemmican and sometimes maple syrup. The mixture is also an apt emblem for the artist and her people: Menard is a...
Unbursting the Bubble Listening Post 371. Art that evokes the Holocaust works best not when it shocks but when it enlightens. The melancholy music of Silent Tears may sound familiar—and its setting might be recognizable if the stage hadn’t gone dark in 1939. In the...
A Vocal Afterlife Listening Post 355. If poetry is a lost art, Lenka Lichtenberg’s latest album is a welcome reminder that what is lost can also be found. In 2016, the Czech-Canadian Jewish singer-songwriter was in her native Prague, sorting through the belongings of...
Tradition, Renaissance & Maple Syrup Listening Post 343. Though their high-latitude homeland is more than twice the size of France, the Québécois know they’re surrounded by North America’s immense Anglophone universe and their geographic awareness has helped shape...
Tilting at a New World Listening Post 323. When Alex Cuba imagined his eighth album his dream may have seemed unreachable: He wanted songs that reflect the struggle and emotion simultaneously separating and uniting all humanity but he didn’t want them forever...
Bringing It All Back Home Listening Post 280. They met at a fiddle jam in 2007 and married three months later; they live outside Horsefly, British Columbia, a village of 1,000 souls in the foothills of the Cariboo Mountains, where they build and sell banjos and raise...
The Long and Windy Road Listening Post 275. Quebec’s Route 132—stretching 1,000 miles (1,600 km), up the St. Lawrence all the way to Gaspé but skirting major cities—is a good metaphor for the journey of Erik and Sonny Caouette, who specialize in folk songs about...
Corner of Bitter and Sweet Listening Post 261. In physics, politics and romance, poles apart tend to come together. Les Cowboys Fringants are not the only musicians who explore humanity’s darker reaches with comedy and cynicism, let alone with harmony and...
Tipping Toward Joy Listening Post 251. Dickens was right in concept but exaggerated the singularity of his age: It is always, in every era and every land, the best and worst of times. Great art often emerges from hard lessons, but sometimes songs written before a...
Optimal Bandwidth Listening Post 225. In the natural world, wind and time typically join forces to produce erosion and environmental damage, but the union of Le Vent du Nord and De Temps Antan, two leading bands on Quebec’s traditional music landscape, has a purely...
Borealis in Wonderland Listening Post 198. Oz, Neverwhere, Asteroid B-612—great artists create worlds or pair real domains with fantasylands to explore larger questions. Count in this company Le Vent du Nord, vanguard of Quebec’s progressive folk movement. On...
They’re Playing Our Song Listening Post 189. Song can be a pathway to survival for threatened languages. Over the past generation the 10,000 speakers of Innu in Québec and Labrador have seen a creative surge in new music. The folk-rock duo Kashtin gained prominence in...
Tenor of the Times Listening Post 177. In the popular imagination, time travel typically involves a fanciful machine. In real life, Jeremy Dutcher visited the past using the wax cylinders of an Edison-era phonograph and digital technology that preserved recordings...
Who Needs Bright Lights? Listening Post 151. You can’t take the country out of the boy. And with 2Frères—Erik and Sonny Caouette—you can’t really take the boys out the country, either. When the retro folk-rockers dreamed big, they moved from Chapais, population 1,600...
To Life! Listening Post 148. The song Shpatsir in Vald (A Walk in the Forest) has everything—poignant dialogue between lovers about to be separated by war, a dulcet Russian waltz melody and the spellbinding voice of Sophie Milman (video 1). The lyrics were penned in...
Time Well Spent Listening Post 112. Charmingly deceptive, Galant, tu perds ton temps literally means, “Young man, you’re wasting your time,” but in practice the name of the five-woman ensemble of traditional Québec music seems as much a term of endearment as a...
Northern Exposure Listening Post 110. The ties that bind the disparate genres of the Jerry Cans’ third album—country and folk, rock and reggae—are the people, families and language of Canada’s Nunavut territory. Fronted by native Inuktitut speaker Nancy Mike (vocals,...
What’s in a Name? Listening Post 102. She was a reality show star on Québec TV at 13 and comes from a musical family, but on Émilie Janvier’s eponymous debut album and in the interviews she’s done to promote it, she reveals her core shyness, crafting lyrics and music...
Bridge Over Time Listening Post 97. Yiddish is often discussed in before-and-after terms. As a language of daily life it barely survived the Holocaust, and postwar Jewish migrations led to further decline. So when the Czech-born Canadian singer Lenka Lichtenberg...
Angels and Alchemists Listening Post 88. When cognac ages, the elusive portion that evaporates is called the angels’ share (La part des anges). As François Léveillée—humorist, singer-songwriter, author, director and beloved fixture of Québec culture—has aged, he has...
Bluegrass on Ice Listening Post 82. Among Claire Lynch’s many talents is an uncanny ability to embody a man’s song—her angelic voice not imitating the opposite sex but simply erasing the importance of gender. She memorably personified a Civil War soldier in Kennesaw...
Belle Epoque Listening Post 76. Erik and Sonny Caouette sing songs of love and social awareness that evoke, in the words of one reviewer, “the belle époque of the chansonniers”—an age of activism that animated Québec culture in the 1960s and 70s. Nous Autres (We...
French Fried Listening Post 52. When Sophie Tapie appeared on The Voice/France she wanted to perform songs by Johnny Cash but bowed to warnings of how French viewers might vote; she did Bruno Mars and Johnny Hallyday instead. Lesson learned, when the time came to...
North Stars Listening Post 16. If you associate the North Wind only with cold air, open your ears. Le Vent du Nord, the four-man vanguard of the Québec folk scene, offers the sounds of melodeon and hurdy-gurdy, assorted strings (violin, bouzouki, guitar), rhythmic...
Thank You Notes Listening Post 1. One of the great French-language singers of the twenty-first century, Québec-born Isabelle Boulay devotes her latest album to the work of her role model—and one of the masters of chanson française—of the twentieth. Like her...
