Music – Page 8 – annathepiper.org

July 17, 2012

Things I have NOT yet observed in Quebecois music

As a followup to my previous post, I would also now like to present to you this list of things I have not yet observed in Quebecois music, but which I’d pay good money to hear. Or commission. I’m just SAYIN’. ;)

Bouzouki players. Because who says the violin players get to have all the fun in these songs? Yes, I know, the Irish bouzouki is a modern instrument. But this only goes to prove my point that if we wish to have bouzouki players appearing in the lyrics of songs that’ll be sung in a couple more hundred years, clearly we must start writing them NOW. Hell, if I can pull an entire novel with a bouzouki player in a lead role out of my brain, surely somebody out there can whip up a song or two about a bouzouki player and his or her general awesomeness!
Zombies. Because I have the following now stuck in my head:

Dans la ville de Seattle
Il y a une zombie fille
Gris comme la poussière
Traînante dans le sommeil
Il y a trois capitaines
Elle veut manger leurs cerveaux

I blame this on the Charbonniers’ excellent “Dans la ville de Paris”, the first complete Quebecois song I have learned how to sing. (NOT the first French song–that honor belongs to “Trois Navires de Ble”!) Because I mean, damn, the girl’s trying to get her dad’s attention after three days of being stuck in a tomb? What ELSE is she about to do but eat his brains, I ask you?
Also, I blame it on my general obsession with zombies, but as you know, Internets, I AM a giant nerd.
On the general theme of ‘galant, tu perds ton temps’, I wish to see queer belles who, after blowing off the nearest capitaines who are trying ever so hard to get their attention, promptly snog each other.
On the flip side of the previous, a couple of capitaines snogging each other wouldn’t go amiss, either!
And speaking of Galant Tu Perds Ton Temps, While I am 99.99 percent certain that those girls are not actually singing about “Monsieur Pants” in the song “Les promesses du galant” (which actually queues up if you go and visit their website, if you want to hear what I’m talking about), I now totally want to hear a song all about Monsieur Pants. claimed to me that he must surely be a Quebecois folk hero, renowned for traveling the province and donating his pants to needy belles. Or perhaps at least ATTEMPTING to donate his pants to allegedly needy belles who then proceed to laugh themselves silly about his outrageous pants, which seems rather more in keeping with the entire actual genre. That this is not a song that exists makes me sad, Internets!
I have yet to see a song about a barista refusing the advances of overcaffeinated computer geeks. But then, that may be a song that’ll work way better in Seattle.
Another song that’ll work way better if set in Seattle: a ditty about my marketboys. But then, I probably better still write that one, when I build up enough French! It’ll work something like:

What will you sell me, boys of the market?
What will you sell me, handsome boys?
(Fill in a name here) sells me oranges

(…. and you keep adding in a new line for a new boy every verse!)

(New name) sells me bananas
(New name) sells me apples
And (new name) sells me the berries, the red red berries, the red red berries of May

Yeah. :)

July 17, 2012

The things I learn from Quebecois music

I’ve been having great fun, O Internets, learning that yeah, Quebecois trad is pretty much only a skip over from Celtic trad in general when it comes to the overall themes that show up in the songs. As I have frequently joked, the themes of Celtic music are Whiskey, Sex, and Death, and a lot of that applies to Quebec trad as well–though you could make a decent case for Religion also being a theme of the genre, in this case, and for swapping out Whiskey for Wine!
With that in mind, I have been taking note of overall character archetypes and themes I’ve spotted in songs I’ve been trying to translate, or which I have been learning off of translated lyrics from various bands’ websites or from lyrics wikis. I present for your amusement and edification the following things I have spotted in Quebecois trad music:
People:
Band members (inserting themselves into their own songs)
Belles (sleeping)
Belles (waking up)
Belles (who are daughters of rich fathers, and pretending to be daughters of the town executioner)
Belles (who want their lovers to murder their mothers)
Belle (who really seriously want their parents to BACK OFF ALREADY when it comes to their chosen galants)
Belles (with unfortunate choices in galants who do not clue in when they’re supposed to making with the snogging)
Dragons (who are actually human soldiers as opposed to mythical giant lizards)
Fishermen (who have issues with their boats tipping over)
Galants (who may or may not be wasting their time trying to win the affections of les belles)
Galants (who are kind of thick-headed when it comes to seeing opportunities to snog their belles in the woods)
Husbands (who lament the scolding of their wives)
Innkeepers (who have issues with their tables not having enough legs)
Knights (transformed into dragons by cranky witches)
Lawyers (who belles do not for the love of GOD want to marry, except their fathers are pressuring them into it)
Mothers (who somehow manage to be concerned about their sons even after being murdered and having their hearts removed, Edgar Allan Poe much?)
Parents (cranky about their daughters accepting the affections of unsuitable galants)
Parents (anxious about the chosen dangerous professions of their sons)
Priests (pursued by women)
Priests (pursuing women)
Priests (who are actually disguised gallants)
Princesses (who are doleful about their knights getting transformed into dragons)
Roofers (who have issues with falling off of roofs)
Shepherdesses (cranky about the shooting of their ducks)
Soldiers (successfully wooing belles)
Soldiers (NOT successful at wooing belles)
Sons of kings (who make shepherdesses cranky for shooting their ducks)
Vintners (who are very bad at making wine)
Vintners’ assistants (who are very GOOD at making wine)
Violin players (who are preferred lovers, not that there’s any bias in that song or anything)
Witches (going around transforming nice young knights into dragons, I mean, the NERVE of some people)
Wives (cranky about their husbands drinking too much, messing around with other women, or both of the above)
Wives (who are not terribly good at household chores, and trust me, you don’t want to know what this one girl wound up doing to her cat)
Wives (who want to poison their husbands)
Animals:
Blue Jays
Cats
Dogs
Dragons (who are actually transformed knights)
Ducks (STILL not sure what the heck they were doing next to the wedding bed in that song)
Hawks
Horses
Nightingales (singing)
Partridges
Pigeons
Robins
Snow Geese
Locations:
Bedrooms (in which locale the activity of the song ought to be obvious)
Churches (in which priests are frequently pursued and/or pursuing, or which young lovers are illicitly meeting)
Inns (all SORTS of shenanigans going on in inns)
Kitchens (more shenanigans)
Mills (yet more shenanigans, lots of mills in these songs)
Woods (oh my yes with the shenanigans)
Things:
Boats
Bottles (generally presumed to be containing wine)
Food
Guns
Poison
Swords
Violins

July 16, 2012July 5, 2020

One week and counting down to the Great Canadian Adventure!

PEOPLE OF ATLANTIC CANADA AND QUEBEC! There are but seven scant days until solarbird and I will be among you for two weeks of hanging out, meeting up with people, and general musical awesomeness!

We are looking very, very forward to meeting up with cow, with fellow Le Vent du Nord fan Susan, with framlingem hopefully (HEY EM ANSWER YOUR MAIL mmkay?), with lyonesse if she’s still in Montreal by the time we get there, with scrunchions, with Krista in St. John’s, with lethendy, and with anybody else we get a chance to talk to at Memoire et Racines, the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival, or the Great Big Sea show in Torbay!

Internets, I AM EXCITE! Almost as much for the chance to see Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer as I am Great Big Sea, really–because this’ll very likely be my only shot to see the Charbonniers, and did I mention the part where HOLY CRAP THOSE MEN CAN SING? And did I also mention the buying of French Canadian SF/F, and of tasty maple sugar products (I am informed that maple sugar ice cream is a thing that exists and THIS MUST BE SAMPLED IT IS REQUIRED), and of taking the Haunted Hike tour through downtown St. John’s (research opportunity WOO!), and of going to the Duke of Duckworth pub, renowned to me in song and story and Twitter updates?

Save us some bagels and Growers cider! We’ll be there next week!

July 2, 2012

Une chose merveilleuse

On my way home tonight I was listening to tracks off the album À la grâce de Dieu by the Charbonniers, and in particular, the song “Allons vidons”. Jean-Claude Mirandette was just getting started on the first verse when I had that delightful double-take reaction of HEY HEY STOP I UNDERSTOOD THAT! I backed up, played that bit again, and sure enough, the sentence “C’est dans notre village / Il y a un p’tit moulin” popped right out at me. “In our village there is a little mill”. It’s a tiny sentence to be sure, but I was inordinately proud of comprehending it.
It’s weird and wonderful to hear a whole sentence in another language, only to understand it just like it’s the language I grew up with. I’m still getting bits and pieces of songs piecemeal, but that I’m getting them in general gives me ridiculous amounts of glee. My main goal is still musical, i.e., to be able to understand the lyrics of all these awesome songs and therefore appreciate them more. Anything I get out of it for conversational purposes is really icing on the cake.
But that said, I was also very pleased to be able to construct this whole sentence all by myself when posting to Facebook: “Je lire les paroles en anglais et français, j’écoute les chansons en français, je peu à peu comprends plus et plus!” Which means, “I read the lyrics in English and French, I listen to the songs in French, bit by bit I understand more and more!”
A good chunk of that sentence did in fact come to me either straight out of songs or else from poking around on band websites. “Les paroles” I know as “the lyrics” from looking at the French edition of leventdunord.com. “J’écoute”, “I listen”, I swiped right out of the lyrics to “Écris-moi”. “Chansons”, “songs”, is all over the place in all the songs in my collection. “Plus et plus” I got out of the lyrics to “Le dragon de Chimay”.
I’m still also heavily using Google Translate–but sometimes I only have to use it to doublecheck gender of nouns or verb conjugation spellings, because some of the words are starting to actually pop into my brain on my own and I just need to doublecheck them. As opposed to having no idea what the words actually are. Progress! I has it!
So yeah! Plan to learn all the Quebecois trad by slow osmosis: proceeding nicely. :D
ETA: , who is a wise and clever wordsmith apparently in more than one language, advises me that the proper first person singular conjugation for “lire” is “je lis”. This, children, is why you always ask for language help from people who either speak the language or who have studied it better than you have! Also, this is an extremely important verb for a writer and book geek to know!

July 1, 2012July 5, 2020

Memoire et Racines is GO!

I just doublechecked the Memoire et Racines site, and see to my massive, massive delight that Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer do, in fact, have a presence on the schedule on the 28th–the day I’m targeting for solarbird and me to be there! Which means I will get to see them!

Seriously, seriously excited by that! Aside from the boys of Le Vent, the Charbonniers are the Quebec band who’ve most grabbed my attention, just because I love their vocals on their live album so very, very, very much. I’m going to have to do a marathon listen to all of their albums now, just to make sure I’m briefed on the stuff they’re most likely to perform.

Also helpful: it looks like events don’t get started until noon, which will give plenty of time to get up there in the morning from Montreal. And now I’ve bought day passes for Saturday the 28th for myself and Dara! framlingem, if you’re reading this, and you’re still up for the festival, you might want to go ahead and snag a ticket for yourself–the site was giving me messaging indicating these tickets are in high demand!

Ditto to lyonesse if you have interest in joining us!

June 27, 2012

Pretty things in my mail!

Susan, The Most Awesome Le Vent du Nord Fan on the North American Continent (and very possibly the entire northern hemisphere), has arranged a show for those boys in August in Uxbridge, Ontario! And as part of that, she got a whole mess of promotional posters! And, being the super-awesome Susan that she is, she promptly flung me an email to ask me if I wanted one!
For the record, Internets, when someone asks you if you want a poster of pretty Quebecois musicians, the correct answer is YES PLEASE I’LL HAVE SOME! I said as much to Susan, after hastily checking with the equally awesome and local Dejah to see if she wanted one too! Two please, I requested of Susan!
Internets, she sent me FOUR of these pretty things. (And she also sent me four posters! >:D ) They showed up in the mail today and I found them waiting for me when I got home tonight! Who knew four Quebecois musicians could fit into one poster tube?
took one look at these posters and proclaimed, “That’s one sexy hurdy-gurdy!” He is quite correct!

Now to see if I can safely hang up one of these lovelies by my desk at work!

June 18, 2012

And now, a fangirly PSA: Le Vent du Nord in Oregon in November!

It appears that the boys of Le Vent du Nord are beefing up their application for the position of My New Favorite Band, because this morning, this happened on Facebook!

How thoughtful is that? And I mean, it ain’t like I wasn’t going to go already anyway, but if I hadn’t already known about the show they’re going to do in Oregon in November, this would TOTALLY have convinced me to!
Because oh my yes this is happening. November 10th. A Saturday, ever so delightfully enough. There will be a very likely plan of scamper down from Seattle on Saturday morning, hit the show in the evening, and hit Powell’s on Sunday afternoon before heading home again! (Because you cannot be a Pacific Northwest geek, go anywhere near Portland, and NOT go to Powell’s.) Interested parties in the Portland area are highly, HIGHLY encouraged to attend this show if possible. Do it for the podorythmie! Do it for the hurdy-gurdy! And do it for the chance to join me in showing Nicolas, Réjean, Simon, and particularly Olivier how we do La Danse Verticale in Cascadia!
Still need convincing? Three words: Tromper le Temps! You don’t even have to learn French, people, they’ve given us translations of the lyrics. Because they’re just thoughtful boys like that.

May 23, 2012

Alan Doyle kills me DED FROM SWOON, 5/22/2012

Those Francophone boys I’ve fallen in love with these past many months may have been heavily distracting me, but I’m tellin’ ya, people, when it comes to downright ability to take me right out at the knees, The Doyle Himself is still unparalleled. I still prefer him in the company of Great Big Sea, just because the classic style of GBS music–i.e., the irrepressible, roar-at-the-top-of-your-lungs trad–is more my thing than his solo style.
But that said, Alan Doyle by himself is still pretty damned swoonable, and we did have great fun at the Tractor last night. Dara and I got up by the stage, right in front of Alan’s mike, along with fellow fangirls Jaime and Sara. I’d never been to a show at the Tractor Tavern before, and it was an amazing switch from what I’m used to these days, with Great Big Sea playing the Moore.
Alan’s opening act was this young man named Dustin Bentall, and he was good, but I was more actively impressed by Kendall Carson, the fiddle player who first played with him and then with Alan’s full band. She was GREAT.
Then of course Alan came out and we all went nuts. I’m still getting to know the material on his new album, so except when he jumped over to do a few Great Big Sea songs, I was mostly singing along on what choruses I could pick up. Until he got to the part of the show when he was taking Twitter requests. Of which there were three.
I, being, well, me, asked him for “Trois Navires de Ble” (because yeah, spot the girl in this audience who’s been passionately absorbing French Canadian music the last many months, wut?) or “alternately, anything by Elvis” (because I’ve been dying for years to hear Alan sing something by him). Dara, being Dara, promptly decided to ALSO ask for “anything by Elvis”, and got Jaime and Sara to do so too, just so we could twitterbomb Alan in the hopes of getting him to make a joke about it.
We didn’t expect him to actually take us up on it. He made a wry crack about how “there was some collusion” in the audience, at which point the four of us all shrieked happily.
And then this happened. And I died DED OF SWOON. This is Lynda Elstad’s video of the full song.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2ntEY8EW2s&w=420&h=315]
And THIS is Dara’s version, which is much grainier and isn’t the full song, but DOES have cuts to me for reaction shots of OMG OMG OMG OMG. Note how I keep biting my hand. This is because I’m trying desperately not to squeal at the top of my lungs, or maybe trying to keep from dropping dead RIGHT THERE ON THE SPOT, because O. M. G., Internets, Alan Doyle sang “Can’t Help Falling in Love” because we asked him to.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHsHCIlKjHA&w=560&h=315]
Sara and Jaime shoved me right up in front of them–I’d been standing behind them up until this point–and kept holding my arms to make sure I wasn’t about to keel over. They and Dara told me after that my eyes were HUGE.
The rest of the show, it was great and all (and I DID quite like Alan’s cover of Russell Crowe’s song “Testify”, which was rockin’), but none of it topped this: being right in front of Alan’s mike as he crooned an Elvis song. And not just any Elvis song–the seminal, most swoonable, most iconic Elvis song ever. And I sang harmony back at him, because good gods how could I not? And my eyes were full of stars.
ETA: And I had to add in a couple other comments about the show as I remembered them, just because for reasons I can’t get into yet aside from this show, THIS WEEK HAS BEEN AWESOME and my brain is quite scattered!
Awesome thing #1: Alan kept having trouble tuning his mandolin, and made a joke about how ‘I LOVE WATCHING PEOPLE TUNE THEIR INSTRUMENTS!’ Dara yelled back at him, “We tune because we care!” And he heard her and agreed, “We tune because we care!”
Awesome thing #2: Alan also kept making charmingly self-deprecating jokes about how as we were the very first show of the very first tour of the Alan Doyle Band, we got to see all the screwups and “the terror in our eyes”, and how in four or five more shows they’d get everything right, but we were getting all the good stuff. Also he kept repeating how “there’s only one first night!” When he joked about wondering “oh God what have I done?”, a guy in the audience yelled back, “Something awesome!” And Alan was all “I feel the love in the room!”
Awesome thing #3: Being that close to Alan meant I got a good look at the guitar strap he was using, a leather one, with his name embroidered on it in green down near where it connected with the neck of his guitar! And it was pretty cool seeing him play mandolin, even if I lamented the lack of his usual bouzouki.
Awesome thing #4: At the end of the show, Alan looked out at us all and said he saw several familiar faces, all of us who’ve loyally come to Great Big Sea shows. (heart) (heart)

May 22, 2012July 5, 2020

Further arrangements for the Canadian Adventure!

Just snagged weekend passes for Dara and me to the Newfoundland & Labrador Folk Festival, the big festival that was our main reason for going to St. John’s to begin with–even if we’ll be skipping out on it on August 4th to scamper up to Torbay for Great Big Sea instead. :D We figured screw it, we’ll just get passes for the whole weekend anyway so we’ll be able to wander in and out at whim. Now I just need to see a full schedule for who’s playing when, since I have particular interest in seeing The Once and the Dardanelles.

Meanwhile, keeping a sharp eye on the Memoire et Racines site, waiting for tickets to be on sale for that too so I can snag passes for Dara and me for July 28th, the Day of Podorythmie! Priority interest will be with Galant Tu Perds Ton Temps and the Charbonniers, but really, my little fangirl heart is desperate to know if I get to see Le Vent du Nord twice in one year.

And speaking of Dara and me in Quebec, side note to either framlingem or scrunchions–if either of you might be interested in hosting a tiny house concert for Dara, let us know, hey? Dara’s got one for Toronto and one for Moncton, and if she could do one in Montreal, that’d make it a TOUR. ;D

And hell, for that matter, anybody following me in St. John’s, if YOU want to host Dara for a teeny house concert, we’ll have way more time to play with there than we will in Montreal! Talk to us if you want to host a Cascadian Supervillain with her Bouzouki of Mass Destruction!

May 11, 2012July 5, 2020

Further musical planning for the Great Atlantic Canadian Adventure!

*squeal*

Keeping a hawk’s eye on the tour Calendar on leventdunord.com just paid off. Looks like they ARE booked to play on the 28th at Memoire et Racines, the weekend that Dara and I will be in Quebec! Which means that the priority of getting to that festival for a day trip on the 28th just shot up to CRITICAL. :D Because yeah, I need me another Le Vent du Nord show STAT, and I especially want to see how they work a Francophone crowd. Also, it would be sporting of me to give them another fighting chance at my musical affections, given that Great Big Sea will be steamrollering over everything else once Dara and I reach St. John’s in August.

I also note with huge delight that Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer’s tour schedule ALSO shows July 28th (and the 29th, but the 28th is the pertinent date here). Which means that ideally I’ll get to see them too! They better not be scheduled opposite Le Vent, or else I shall be quite sad! Now all I need is to determine whether Galant Tu Perds Ton Temps is also booked on the 28th, to complete the trifecta of awesome–though really, if I get Le Vent and the Charbonniers in the same day, that’s quite a bit of awesome right there and that may be enough all by itself for me to explode from squee. :D

(Special side message to framlingem! You still in for this? Let me and Dara know! The Festival’s official full program goes online on June 14th and I’ll be getting Dara and me tickets, I want to make sure our plans can still align!)