Listening to Ferland

One Saturday morning when I was 7, everyone in the house was asleep. I’m in the living room. My mother doesn’t want me to watch TV. Not before noon. So I turn on the stereo.

I’m going through my parents’ record collection. Frank Sinatra, Claude Léveillée, Glenn Miller, Félix… Oh! There’s a new one. I take it out of its pouch, place it gently on the plate, and press the button…

It snowed in Port-au-Prince
It’s still raining in Chamonix
We ford the Garonne
The sky is full of blue in Paris

This is how I discovered Jean-Pierre Ferland. I find this beautiful. I don’t understand all the places named, but here comes the chorus…

Make a fire in the fireplace I’ll come home

I know the fire in the fireplace. The fireplace is right next to the stereo, and my dad makes a fire every night. I don’t know what it’s like to come back home, I’ve never left our home, but I’m so comfortable there that I imagine it must be sweet.

Two years later, I’m in the basement, digging through my 16-year-old older brother’s records. Nothing to do with those of my parents: The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Santana, the Woodstock double album and an all yellow cover. Where is the singer’s name? I am looking on the back: Jean-Pierre Ferland. My parents’ singer became my teenage brother’s singer. In two years, Ferland has become 16 years younger. He went from 36 to 20 years old. He will be 20 years old all his life, when you love, you are always 20 years old.

From YELLOW, my memories of Ferland are overwhelming, because he is everywhere. It is national glory. So much so that in 1975, on Saint-Jean’s Day, we not only celebrated Quebec, we celebrated Jean-Pierre, born on June 24. On the Mountain, the little king is surrounded by princesses: Emmanuëlle, Renée Claude, France Castel… Arrives the conquering queen, Ginette 1^Dwho catapults his song A little further in the transcendental universe.

At the start of the 1980s, Ferland was already a monument. But a monument which does not remain on its base. A monument that is on the move. In the summer of 1981, he hosted a daily variety show on Radio-Québec, entitled Station-Soleil. Jean-Pierre Ferland likes TV. He knows his power. It is by animating Youth obliges, 20 years earlier, on the airwaves of Radio-Canada, that he became known to the general public. It is at Station-Soleil for a new generation to discover it. And that I rediscover it.

Nobody animates like Jean-Pierre Ferland. It’s a free electron. He may be in the biggest studio in Quebec, but he is in his living room. So comfortable that you’d think he was born under a follow spot. He enters his guests’ bubble, with so much charm that they are happy to see it burst. His guests are more than guests, they are his friends. Even those he meets for the first time. His show is more of a spectacle than a broadcast. THE Jean-Pierre Ferland show and that’s why it’s good.

Ferland is not just a beast of the stage, he is a beast of the screen, and that is why he has stood the test of time so well. His songs never got dusty. Because he never stopped singing them on TV, as if it were the first time.

And when we start to think that Ferland is the man of memorable successes, he releases, in 1995, don’t listen to that, another cult album, which rejuvenates him once again – not to say rejuvenates him! A YELLOW two. (You can insert your omelette joke.)

In the 2000s, I spent hundreds of days auditioning tens of thousands of candidates for Star Academy And The voice. What is the song that comes up most often? A chance we have. The song of an artist that I listened to in my living room, 50 years ago, is the choice of young people flos. This is what we call being hot a long time. This is called being an eternal flame.

In this world of sprinters, Ferland is a marathon runner. He has always been present, and the present are always right.

We traveled through time, listening to Ferland. In The musichis talisman song, he asks:

Music, my love of music
Do you still love me ?

In 2008, I was backstage at Celine Dion’s big show on the Plains of Abraham. Jean-Pierre sings A bit higher with Ginette and Céline. I look at him and I see happiness, in person. Happiness is him, he is so happy. Subjugated.

The two divines, who interpret his work with so much passion, it is the music that responds to him: “Jean-Pierre, I still love you. I will always love you. »

That evening, Jean-Pierre Ferland ascended to heaven.

Saturday was the second time.

I know, Jean-Pierre, paradise is here.

But over there is the beginning and the end from here.

You came back home.