This new album “is a tribute to music, because music has never let me down,” says Hubert Lenoir. PICTURE OF YOURSELF: Musique directly, his new album, exposes the cracks that have formed on the enfant terrible facade of Quebec rock by this singer-songwriter who has the talent to leave no one indifferent. An intimate and sometimes vulnerable record, rich in symbols and melodies, a long and passionately adventurous album which, warns Lenoir, will lead the listener on unexpected musical paths.
Obviously, Lenoir and his team wanted to take all the necessary precautions to prepare for this. The promotion of the album was accompanied by a long preamble signed Noémie D. Leclerc, the author of the novel Darlène, of which his companion imagined the dazzling rock soundtrack. Hubert also cracked a text of a few revealing pages, inserted in the album booklet. Towards the end of his foreword, he launches this sentence, written in capital letters: “This album is made to be uncomfortable at times. “
During the interview he gave us the day before the start of his new tour in the United States and Europe, Hubert Lenoir admits that he wanted to prepare listeners for what they were going to discover: “I found it important that the album has its context ”, especially since it was only announced by two extracts, the funk-pop Secret and Sunday night, taciturn pop song with an eye for hip-hop. Of course, everyone will have their own tolerance for discomfort, but between us, PICTURE OF YOURSELF (partly recorded in Los Angeles with indie rock troublemakers Mac DeMarco and Kirin J. Callinan) make up their avant-garde pretensions very well with solid, catchy songs.
The surprise, then, is to measure the extent of Lenoir’s musical register: the electric guitars which dominated the sound of Darlene were put away in favor of synthesizers and drum machines. His song rubs shoulders with rap, jazz, funk, electroacoustic music. His pen remains familiar, like his melodic snitch, but his voice, often tampered with, passed through various special sound effects, this time more often borrows from the prosody of rap – the composer and beatmaker High Klassified collaborates on the writing of two songs, the excerpt Sunday night and October, bewitching duet with Bonnie Banane.
“The context is also to ask listeners to take the time to listen to it”, from start to finish, all at once, chapter by chapter, each of them separated by a brief extract from a song by Robert Charlebois… performed by the experimental punk group CRABE. “I have a debt towards the music, I need to pay it”, says Lenoir about this form of homage, also paid to Prince: ” Sign o’the Times [1987] was a big influence on this album, he says. Prince has been one of my favorite artists for a long time. He showed me that duality is correct. That it’s okay to be both commercial and experimental at the same time. It’s okay to be both funny and serious at the same time, it’s okay, the fluidity of genres, too. “
Taboo
“Honestly, I wasn’t planning on talking about such personal stuff on this record,” says Lenoir. It’s just the last three or four years… You know, when something intense just happened to you and you wonder what just happened? The shock of celebrity is another theme of the album, hers having been erected in part by bursts of brilliance. “I know I’m a controversial artist, and I’m proud of it,” comments the musician. I think filming a sky with thunderstorms is more interesting than filming a blue sky. “
These dazzling past years have confused him, he admits. During the creation of the album, “I felt that what I was composing didn’t relate to anything, that this music was not close to my heart”. It was while rummaging through all these little sound recordings archived in his phone, stolen conversations, atmospheric noises captured over the years, that he found his breadcrumb trail.
“Listening again made me think of direct cinema”, an immense Quebec contribution to international cinema. “This way they had of speaking the truth by capturing the real. I had a eureka moment: making direct music ”, by building the album from these fragments of sound life which give it this unique cachet, not without recalling the experimental soul style of Blonde (2016), de Frank Ocean.
This is perhaps what Hubert Lenoir is referring to when he warns us that listening could be uncomfortable at times; his foreword mentions in particular a suicide attempt. “We don’t talk about these things, but I know that there are plenty of people who also feel the same. I just thought that talking about it could make it less… taboo. I feel like everyone is doing a big deal about everything, and my gender identity or orientation [sexuelle]. “In the end, we are all different, in our own way,” adds Lenoir. I would love so much that more people could live together. I think music is for that. “
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