Toronto Star

Reality show star breaking out of La Belle Province

After underwhelm­ing Toronto gig last year, singer Matt Holubowski back in town for another go

- BEN RAYNER POP MUSIC CRITIC

Matt Holubowski titled his second album Solitudes in reference to Two Solitudes, Hugh MacLennan’s famous novel on the figurative chasm that divides French and English Canada, but his experience of those two solitudes is a rather unique one.

Although the native of Montreal satellite community Hudson performs predominan­tly in English, his audience until recently has been almost exclusivel­y francophon­e, thanks to a 2015 stint on La Voix, the wildly popular Québécois version of TV talent search The Voice, wherein he made it to the “final four.”

As he put it to the Montreal Gazette in 2016, at the peak of his localized TV celebrity he “couldn’t go buy eggs in French areas without getting stared down. And if I wanted to be left alone, I’d just go hang out in the downtown core.”

These days, he’s in the strange position of facing the same uphill battle to get noticed in the rest of Canada that most francophon­e artists face.

“It’s my own weird twist on the two solitudes,” says a laughing Holubowski, who was born to a Polish-immigrant father and a Québécoise mother and can therefore move easily between worlds.

“It doesn’t make sense and it’s hard to decipher what it is that the Quebec public wants, but if you manage to capture what the Quebec public wants they’re behind you and they help you and they’re real about it. It’s not a one-time deal. Those people will follow you for a long time, as long as you continue to be true to what you do.”

A year-and-a-half of diligent roadwork in support of Solitudes, including 100 dates in Quebec alone, is gradually starting to pay off, in any case.

Holubowski and his band, which includes ace guitarist Simon Angell of Thus Owls and Patrick Watson Band notoriety, return to the Drake Undergroun­d on Thursday, Feb. 22, the site of a Canadian Music Week show last May that, he jokes, was attended by “about five people.”

It wasn’t quite that bad a turnout, but after a second Toronto gig at the Burdock last fall, he’s on the verge of a sellout at the Drake this time around.

Not quite the 300- to 600-capacity venues to which he’s grown accustomed since the onset of his “strange, bizarre, unexpected popularity in Quebec,” perhaps, but word on his open-hearted folk-pop — think Elliott Smith, Bon Iver and, yes, fellow Montréalai­s falsetto Patrick Watson — is starting to get around. Baby steps. Holubowski knows he’s got to work for it.

“I’m not gonna lie, coming out of a reality-TV thing, if you have an ounce of integrity, you’re gonna question whether you’re there for the right reasons,” he says. “I spent the better part of a year asking myself all of these questions: ‘Why am I here? Am I really here because I deserve it?’ And I realized that the only way I would have an answer to that question would be by going through the same channels that everybody else does, which is just tour, just do as many shows as possible and, like, suck sometimes. That’s the only way it can really work.

“I’m more ambitious than I’m talented, I think. But I’m also as hardworkin­g as I am ambitious, and I’m really working towards an objective and I know it’s not the kind of thing that happens overnight.”

Holubowski is now booked through the summer, including several festival dates in Canada and a run of U.K. shows opening for Ben Folds this coming May.

He had meant to take a break in there and spend a couple of months backpackin­g around India but an accidental plunge off a stage in Rivière du Loup last year that broke his foot — and left him performing “Dave Grohl-style,” sitting down with this leg up, for nine shows — put a swift end to that plan. So he’ll just keep chugging along.

Eventually, too, he won’t have to answer questions about La Voix anymore. Still, the “unavoidabl­e subject” inevitably comes up — usually in the context of “How the hell did you wind up on La Voix?” Matt Holubowski is not exactly Christina Aguilera.

“It didn’t make sense to many people, I think,” he laughs. “It didn’t make much sense to me, either. But honestly, it was one of those things where they invited me to come on, I said ‘No, thank you’ and they said ‘What have you go to lose?’ and I was, like, ‘You’re right. My life is kind of boring. I’ll try it.’ And I ended up selling a ton of my first record (2015’s Ogen, Old Man) because I was on the show.

“I ended up, as it turns out, getting the best end of the deal . . . I mean, that’s the reason you and I are having a pint right now. I had that push, I had that help, from that whole phenomenon in Quebec.”

“I’m not gonna lie, coming out of a reality-TV thing, if you have an ounce of integrity, you’re gonna question whether you’re there for the right reasons.” MATT HOLUBOWSKI

If he remains slightly embarrasse­d about his TV past, Holubowski has at least come to realize that his voice, his words and his music — and not a brief flash of talent-show fame — are responsibl­e for his continued ability to play music for a living.

“That was tremendous­ly difficult for me, to accept that I’d done it. Really, really tough,” he says. “But every time I have any sort of doubt, I go back to the people, the source. It doesn’t matter who they are, it doesn’t matter what they listen to — they can be fans of Ginette Reno — when they write to me and say ‘Hey, your music really touched me and my family at a really important time’ or, like, just yesterday I got a message from somebody saying ‘I’ve been listening to your record through my entire pregnancy and my baby was just born and I thought of you when he was born,’ that’s f---ing crazy.

“That’s insane. How amazing is that, that I was able to have that impact? I can’t even fathom. So all of the other stuff, the ‘artistic integrity’ crap, that kinda goes out the window.”

 ?? SONY MUSIC ?? Folk-pop singer Matt Holubowski is just breaking into Anglo Canada after success in his home province.
SONY MUSIC Folk-pop singer Matt Holubowski is just breaking into Anglo Canada after success in his home province.

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