Bluesman Adamus goes south
Latest album draws from New Orleans
On the back terrasse of Casa del Popolo in Mile End, a sleep-deprived Bernard Adamus is slouched over a bowl of bright purple beet soup. In between slurps, the bluesman explains it reminds him of home cooking.
It’s a rare hint of his place of birth. Although Adamus speaks and sings in authentic joual, received all of his education in Quebec, and writes the blues from a distinctly Montreal perspective, he moved here from Poland when he was 3.
The traditional Polish dish also seems to be re-energizing him with every spoonful.
“I’ve been having some wild days lately,” the 35-year-old says, explaining that when confronted with the stimuli of touring and performing, sleep is hard to come by. “When I’m up, I go to shows, I do shows, I travel. Well, not around the world, but around Quebec a lot.”
Besides resting, another thing Adamus isn’t doing much of these days is writing new songs. Granted, his second album, No. 2, only came out last September and he has been touring the province ever since (along with visits to France), but he’s al- ready nervous about his next release. He’s writing for himself these days — which he does while using Antibalas’s repetitive afrobeat grooves as a backdrop — but nothing worthy of a song, yet.
“Sometimes, I feel like I’ve written and revealed too much about myself,” he says, citing the first and last songs on No. 2 as ones he should have kept private. “I’m trying to make an album that speaks like me, but doesn’t only speak about me. That’s going to be a challenge.”
Unlike many other songwriters, Adamus isn’t prolific: he suspects he has written only about 25 songs since 2008. Prior to that, he performed traditional blues and country covers, all in English.
As personal as his songs are, like any good bluesman, Adamus has an uncanny way of making his lot in life, and those of his friends, painfully relatable.
“My friends inspire my lyrics a lot,” he says. “They have their own problems, their struggles. They work a lot, and they fight, and they sometimes do things they shouldn’t, but when I write about their experiences, it’s just a quick flash in their lives. Two months later, things might be totally different.”
It’s also why Adamus sings in French, complete with Montreal-centric expressions, contractions and anglicisms. He’s so dedicated to colloquial accuracy, he even writes out his lyrics phonetically.
“Blues culture, it’s all American music, but in French, the tones are differ- ent,” he says. “Every time I tried to write in English, it came across as phony. My friends and I live our lives in French, so it wouldn’t make sense to sing it in another language.”
While his debut album, 2009’s Brun, was arranged as hillbilly kitsch, No. 2 is lacquered in the bourbon-soaked tears of New Orleans blues. He switched up his backing band in order to capture a raw Dixie sound: ditching the banjo and upright bass for a sousaphone, trombone and trumpet.
He and his band have yet to perform in Louisiana, because five years ago Adamus, then working for a Christmas tree-selling business in New York, was stopped at the border and barred from entering the United States. Adamus says the ban will be lifted this November, allowing them to make their American debut at the Festival Internationale de Louisiane in Lafayette next April.
As for one day performing in his native Poland, previous visits left him somewhat cold.
“I speak Polish well, but I have an accent,” he says. “So people end up constantly asking me the same questions about my life in Quebec. It becomes the same thing over and over.” No. 2 is available now. Ber
nard Adamus performs as part of Les FrancoFolies de Montréal on Monday, June 17, at Metropolis, 59 SteCatherine St. E. Tickets cost $35.40 and can be purchased at francofolies.com