GROENLAND FINDS A WIDER SPACE
Montrealers meet sophomore-album challenge by expanding on the rich arrangements of their successful debut
Sabrina Halde and Jean-Vivier Lévesque, the brain trust behind happening Montreal band Groenland, were sitting in the well-worn St-Denis St. bar Quai des Brumes on a recent afternoon talking about the dreaded second album.
“You write your whole life on that first album,” said Halde, Groenland’s lead singer.
That’s exactly the dilemma. You’ve written your whole life, and all of a sudden the record company is looking for that followup album and you’re desperately seeking inspiration.
In the case of Groenland, that pressure was even more intense, because their debut album, 2013’s The Chase, was quite the indie success story. The collection of unique chamber pop sold more than 32,000 units in Canada, which is huge in this age when paying for music is a novel concept. They also performed in the neighbourhood of 160 shows here and in Europe — doing particularly well, oddly enough, in Germany. So it was even a dilemma to find the time to pen the new songs.
Unsurprisingly, the second Groenland album, A Wider Space, which was released Friday, is chock full of lyrics from Halde about what happened since that first album changed their lives.
“In the lyrics, I talk a lot about our evolution as a band,” said Halde. “Personally, I’m trying to make sense of everything. When you’re so tired, it’s like you can’t step back from it all. It’s like we’ve been in this band for five years and that’s all we’ve been doing for that time. You feel a bit of vertigo and you wonder why you’re doing all this. It’s also about how I can do better myself. If I do think I’m moving forward, I become anxious.”
It’s a classic scenario: it’s fun for a new band to be out on the road, but at the same time, it’s stressful.
“Psychologically and physically, you really have to take care of yourself on tour, and it’s not something you learn before you go out on the road,” said Halde. “It’s a learning process. The shows are always fun, but it’s the stuff around it that’s tough. You don’t sleep much, you don’t eat properly. There’s stress.”
“It’s like we became musicians,” said Lévesque. “I’ve been a musician for 10 years, but it was like this is when we really became musicians. It’s an album that talks about that. Look — fact is, we didn’t do anything else but tour and play music.”
When they finally stopped, then came the pressure of coming up with another set of songs. By the time Halde and Lévesque sat down to pen the tunes for A Wider Space, they had the feeling they were already late.
Still, they weren’t going to rush it. They wanted to be satisfied with the songs, to have a set of tunes that they’d be happy to play during the next 160 concerts. The result is an album that features more of the rich arrangements that were the selling point of the first record, powered by the stellar playing of Halde on ukulele, piano, steel drums and percussion; Lévesque on piano, melodica and synths; Jonathan Charette on drums, piano and synths; Simon Gosselin on bass; Ariane Gruet-Pelchat on violin; and Gabrielle Girard-Charest on cello. But — and it’s a big “but” — there’s more of a pop feel to some of these tracks.
“We knew we didn’t want to do exactly the same thing as the first album,” said Lévesque. “We wanted it to be less folk. It’s always fun to do something you haven’t done before. And we surprised ourselves. There are even a couple of moments that sound almost disco. But we didn’t make a 180-degree turn. I was not at ease with the idea that there would be nothing on the album that sounded like the first album. That first album is us.”
Groenland are francophone Montrealers who perform songs in English. Halde said it just comes naturally for her to pen lyrics in the language of Cohen. It’s not a big deal for them, but to their surprise, they found themselves at the
centre of a linguistic controversy a year and a half ago. During a concert at the Festival de musique émergente in Rouyn-Noranda, Pierre Karl Péladeau, who at that point was in the race to become Parti Québécois leader, yelled out, apparently a couple of times: “En français, s’il vous plaît!"
“PKP doesn’t represent me,” said Halde.
“I didn’t think it was only a negative thing,” added Lévesque. “Whether you agree or not with him shouting out ‘en français!’ at a show, I just think it’s so not like your average politician to do that. Politicians are so politically correct. So in a sense, I thought: ‘Bravo — you’re a human being and you said what you thought, even though you knew it would look bad.’ But I’m not necessarily in agreement with what he said.
“Anyway, PKP is not even in politics anymore. And it was the biggest ad we ever had for the band.”