Make Black History Month a starting point for curiosity
‘Three Little Words’ completes a trilogy that draws from the past
There’s a reason every Dominique Fils-Aimé album has been released in February: Black History Month.
“I wanted to underline the link between Black history and music genres,” the Juno Award winner and Polaris Music Prize finalist recently said from her Montreal home.
It especially makes sense when you consider the trilogy of 2018’s “Nameless,” 2019’s “Stay Tuned!” and this year’s “Three Little Words,” released Friday.
Starting with “Strange Fruit,” a Billie Holiday song on the album “Nameless,” and concluding the album “Three Little Words” with “Stand By Me,” a cover of the Ben E. King classic, Fils-Aimé engages her mellifluous, often multi-tracked voice to unflinchingly explore African-American history through 37 mainly original songs rooted in blues (“Nameless”), jazz (“Stay Tuned!”) and R&B (“Three Little Words”).
She covers topics that range from atrocity to inspiration, from slavery and the murder of Emmett Till to celebrating civil rights icons like Rosa Parks, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King.
“My dream for this month is that it is the opportunity for people to discover the Black culture and everyone that is contributing to it right now, or has in the past, and to have their curiosity run deep enough for them to keep digging throughout the years, so that it does not become something punctual on the month but rather something that is the starting point of our curiosity until the day it feels obsolete.
“But right now, it doesn’t.” Fils-Aimé, a 2017 semifinalist on the popular Quebec talent show “La Voix,” said the ambitious project started to take shape when she considered making her first full album (an EP was released in 2015) and her manager told her she had six months to decide her approach.
“I started pondering, ‘What is my voice? What is my style?’ and began digging back into all the music and the influences that I grew up with,” Fils-Aimé said. “I noticed how everything that I didn’t know from history books, I knew from the emotion that was brought through music.
“There’s something very raw and very emotional when it starts with the blues and slave songs — to me, it’s a representation of the ocean — something that’s so big that you feel lost in it, but something that’s moving and yet calm.
“Then, when I thought of jazz, it had this aspect of speaking up, using your voice and using it loudly so that it may be heard properly. I wanted to make sure that was present in ‘Stay Tuned!’ ”
She points to the title track of “Three Little Words,” as an example.
“It’s mumbo-jumbo,” Fils-Aimé said. “It’s done a lot. I remember listening to some African songs when I was younger and asking a friend from Cameroon what it meant and he replied, ‘Nothing, it’s a feeling.’
“I love that: the idea of using the voice as an instrument stripped of words but simply sounding emotional — the same way all other instruments communicate.”
And the rhythm that kicks off the song has a hidden message.
“The percussive rhythm is Morse code for ‘love,’ ” Fils-Aimé said. “It brings it back to the idea of music being a universal language. I like the idea of having the pulse of the percussion impacting people with a subliminal message even if they don’t understand it.”
Fils-Aimé calls the immersive R&B of “Three Little Words,” “an explosion of joy, from soul to funk to disco to R&B to neosoul.”
“I wanted to really dive into all these types of music that make my voice what it is today and underline the fact that I don’t want to fit in a specific box.”
A former psychologist who worked for an insurance company, Fils-Aimé said the stress of the job led her to focus on a music career, accelerated by the confidence she got from the “La Voix” experience.
“It was such an emotional and intense job that I needed an outlet,” she said. “It became kind of my own personal therapy and the next thing I knew I never wanted to go back to work; I just wanted to keep pursuing music because it felt so good.”
Fils-Aimé has a sensory condition called synesthesia, which for her manifests as the ability to see colours when she listens to music. (Musicians Greg Jarvis of Flowers From Hell and singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers also have this gift.)
“For a while, I thought it was the same for everybody. Because if you hear a trumpet, it’s quite obviously somewhat of a bronze golden colour, because it is what the sound looks like in my mind.”
Fils-Aimé says Nina Simone “has always been red because there’s something fiery about her,” and with Billie Holiday “it’s a very deep blue that is extremely rich.”
“Although all the pictures I saw of her were black and white, there was always something deep and profound, so it’s like this blue that leads me again to the water. She always gave me this comforting, soothing blue.”
And Etta James is gold because “she has a shine within her that is fun and brassy.”
Does she see any colours when she hears herself sing?
“Sadly, I don’t,” Fils-Aimé said. “I hear the instruments around creating a mood and that gives me the sense of colouring, but when I’m singing it’s just transparent, as if I’m trying to get in that state of meditation where you become as vulnerable as you can to your emotion and project it through your voice.”
Now that the trilogy has been completed, what’s next?
“Now I’m at the phase where I get to think and I get to dream about what do I want to do. I don’t know what’s coming next, but I know for sure that I’ll make sure it’s something that feels authentic to me.”