Beyoncé will never have Vincent Vallières’ chance. What luck ? Immersing himself in the daily life of the towns and villages where his last tour stopped, a long solo journey from which he brought back his first book, Du bitume et du vent.
Updated yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
“It’s like Volkswagen blues that you read on the road/except the rest of us aren’t chasing anything,” sang Vincent Vallières 20 years ago in “OK on part,” one of his most rousing songs, heard with the windows down.
But this time, the one he tells about in Du bitume et du vent, Vallières was actually a little behind. Not after his brother, as in Jacques Poulin’s cult novel, but after something more fleeting but also essential. Hope: This is the last word of the book and it is undoubtedly the most important.
His most recent album was titled “All Beauty Is Not Lost” and the musician was obviously trying to actually confirm the belief contained in that title. This is confirmed in the landscape, in the look of the waitress in a café and in those long hours that he spends with himself behind the wheel of his car on the roads that wind through this vast province towards Chicoutimi, Matane, Natashquan, Victoriaville or …extend hull.
Based on the notebooks he published online during his last solo tour, this magnificent first book maps the territory of Quebec, one show and one encounter at a time. “What I have experienced is valuable, it is a great opportunity that I have,” notes Vallières in an interview.
Beyoncé will never have the opportunity to sit down in a cafe, two eggs, bacon, be quiet and chat with the man who tells you about his business, his life, his city.
Vincent Vallieres
Link places
So here is a book about territory and movement, but also about time, as is the case with so many of Vincent Vallières’ refrains. About the time that has been burning the faces of people and cities for almost 25 years, where it returns once per milk run.
And about the time that creates new faces: In Sudbury, presenter Éric Robitaille presents the songwriter with the two children he fathered with a girl he noticed at one of his first shows in northern Ontario.
“Every place is inextricably linked to the encounters that inhabit it,” writes Vallières, who, between these pages, is at once a diarist, a philosopher and a bit of a humorist. “The one magnifies the other, they become forever indivisible in my memory. »
All thanks to the music that we both say to each other, suddenly moved. Complete transparency: your journalist’s name appears somewhere in Du tarmac et du vent, in a list of “cultural columnists who live for the muse”.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Vincent Vallières constructed Du bitume et du vent from the notebooks he published online during his last solo tour.
Music is not trivial, we must never forget it. My daughters’ love for Taylor Swift is no joke, it’s serious, it’s contagious.
Vincent Vallieres
The deeper he goes into the streets, the deeper the 45-year-old penetrates into himself, and the numerous detours on the road become a reflection of his own doubts and questions. If Serge Bouchard had been a folk singer, he would most likely have written this book.
“In the era where everyone is in their own space [2003]“The goal was to turn the place upside down, to be with my friends, in friendship and the noise of guitars,” he remembers. I went to bed thinking about the people who sang the songs during the show. I haven’t yet thought about the impact of the end of major industries in the city where I play. I wasn’t there yet on my journey and my ego. »
“But it feels so good to see the world from someone else’s point of view,” he adds. We all know more or less what is happening with the foundry in Rouyn-Noranda, for example, but when you are in the Notre-Dame district and see the young mother pushing her baby, you understand things differently. »
When he visits Mani-utenam among the Innu, one of the funniest and most moving chapters, the Sherbrooke-born white man wonders how it is possible to complete his assigned task and encounter so few First Peoples representatives. “And the answer is that our universes are still divided. It’s painful to say, but it’s the reality. »
Will it be okay, will it be okay?
The Vallières children are now adults. During this tour he came back to the luxury of not having to rush home, listening to a lot of music in his tank and thinking about these stories, funny or serious, that were collected all over Quebec and French Canada by these people who like him, stubbornly believe that the best is not dead.
He watches with emotion as they transform abandoned factories into microbreweries and churches into event halls. So much so that in the end we also believe that everything will be fine, that everything will be fine – maybe – despite inflation, polarization and an ecological apocalypse that seems much closer than before.
Vincent Vallières returns home in his guitar cases with a little of what he needs to allay his worries about the future, “but the answer that the road offers lies in the new questions that it asks us and that allow us to to formulate,” he says. and in the ability we find there to listen to others in their responses.
Bitumen and wind
Inkwell reminder
255 pages