CORMIER BREAKS OUT BY STAYING TRUE TO HIMSELF
Montreal-based La Voix finalist records first album with people he grew up idolizing
Listening to Travis Cormier’s debut album, Dollars and Hearts, you feel like you’re right in the middle of one of those big, booming Bon Jovi hits from the late ’80s, for better or worse. That only makes sense, given that it’s produced by Bob Rock, the Canadian knob-twirler who has made a career of churning out big, booming radio-ready hits for Bon Jovi and a slew of other artists, including Mötley Crüe, the Cult, Bryan Adams and Metallica.
The album, which comes out Friday, Nov. 2, also features two songs that the Moncton-born, Montreal-based singer-songwriter penned with Rock and former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora. Oh, and it was recorded at Adams’s studio in Vancouver. So of course it has that vintage mainstream hard-rock sound down pat.
But don’t think this is some crass commercial move on Cormier’s part. He comes to the Bon Jovi turf naturally. He began playing in hard-rock cover bands in Moncton when he was 14, and when he moved out to Los Angeles to study music and studio production, he sang in a couple of cover bands out there, one of which toured the U.S. opening for former Skid Row lead singer
Sebastian Bach.
When he decided, reluctantly, to audition in 2016 for La Voix, the Quebec version of The Voice, he wowed the judges with his take on the Aerosmith chestnut Dream On. It was a good enough cover that all four judges twirled around in their seats. Of course, he chose to work with the hardest-rocking of the judges, Éric Lapointe, who is known for raspy tunes that sound a lot like ... Bon Jovi. And Cormier actually opened for Bon Jovi in May at the Bell Centre.
He came in second on La Voix in 2016, which led to a deal with the record label run by Productions J, the company that produces the incredibly popular show.
“I started recording the album in Montreal with a different team of people, and it didn’t really click,” Cormier said in an interview at the William Gray Hotel in Old Montreal this week. “It wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to. So I pulled out. It was good, but it didn’t feel like me. It felt like I was trying to be someone else.
“I really wanted to keep the influences of the classic-rock bands I listened to when I was growing up, which are Bon Jovi and Aerosmith and all that. So getting a producer like Bob Rock was perfect, because we kept all those influences. That’s my passion. That’s what I do. So it was like the perfect match.
“It was kind of going towards more pop, more today kind of music. I love pop. I have nothing against it. But with this album, I wanted to keep that whole rock sound.”
He also stuck to his own personality on La Voix, which worked for him.
“When I went into La Voix, when I dove into that whole experience, I never changed what I was doing,” said Cormier. “Before La Voix, I was doing exactly what I was doing during La Voix. I didn’t let that show change anything. I kept playing the same classic-rock songs I’d been singing in bars for years, and I wasn’t willing to change it after either. I’m thankful and very lucky that people liked it. But even if they didn’t, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.
“It’s funny — you get discovered and Dream On got huge, and now I have to sing it at every show. They think it came out of nowhere. But I sang Dream On probably hundreds of times in small bars where people wouldn’t even pay attention to me.”
Cormier is francophone, but has always listened mostly to English-language music and has always sung in the language of Bon Jovi.
And he has no regrets about doing La Voix.
“To be honest, at the beginning I was kind of against those shows,” he said. “I believed in just working and playing and doing it that way. Now I see that it was the best move I could have done, because it’s just a great way to get visibility, and I still really worked for it.
“I went with no expectations. I said, ‘Let’s see how it goes and what happens.’ Even the day of the audition, I still didn’t know what I was going to sing. I decided at the last minute. Actually, it was my girlfriend who said, ‘You should do Dream On.’ ”