FROM BUSKING IN PARIS TO DOROTHY PARKER’S ALGONQUIN… THE UNCANNY INTIMACIES OF MYRIAM GENDRON
MTHE TITLE of Myriam Gendron’s new album, is a word with two meanings – one announcing the hopeful start of spring, the other a cry for help. Both ideas unite in this beautiful collection of variegated folk songs, some happy, some deeply sad, some sung in English, others in French, an album caught somewhere between catharsis and lullaby.
“The whole record is about that,” says Gendron from a room of guitars, books and music-stands in her Montreal home. “How hard things are in the real world and the safe space you have to find within yourself. My mother died in May 2022, while I was on tour and I’d quit my job as a book dealer. When I came back home I suddenly had nothing except all the grief I hadn’t had time to deal with. I to be a songwriter. It’s a hard door to open but I need that doorway. I knew it would do me good.”
Gendron’s initial doorway into songwriting was, she admits, a strange one. “I came
“I had to be a songwriter. I knew it would do me good.” MYRIAM GENDRON
to it through used material, the words of Dorothy Parker. That’s how I learned to write.” The LP Gendron is referring to is her 2014 debut, Not
So Deep As A Well, in which she transformed the poems of the Jazz Age satirist into songs of melancholy acoustic wit, brought to life by a voice of doleful yet intimate warmth.
Gendron, who’d had a strong music education through Canada’s public school system, and spent her teenage years busking in Paris, was adept at covering the work of others but had never written songs for herself. “I thought they were just demos we’d record professionally later,” she says, “but everyone was like, ‘No! We’re keeping those.’” Initially released on Feeding Tube Records,
Not So Deep… gradually accrued a cult following, especially as Gendron seemed to have vanished from the public eye soon after its release. “I was seven months pregnant,” she explains. “I went back to my regular life. Then I had another child. I was really into motherhood
and didn’t have a lot of space in my head for being an artist.”
A second album, Ma Délire –
Songs Of Love, Lost & Found, finally arrived in 2021, where she explored French and Québécois traditional songs and made them meaningful for today. It also found Gendron using folk archetypes as footholds by which to create her own magical new songs, which she crafted with the help of experimental guitarist Bill Nace and free/improv drummer Chris Corsano. “When I was opening for more conventional folk artists nothing special was happening with the audience,” she says. “But when I was opening for like, Godspeed You! Black Emperor there was something magical there. I felt strong.”
It’s an idea that’s continued on Mayday, which Gendron recorded with free folk guitarist Marisa Anderson, Dirty Three drummer Jim White, and Bill Nace, amongst others, all of whom invest the album with a sense of poetic unease. “When I write a song I don’t want it to be easy. I want it to be challenging, so you feel like you have to come back to it and there’s always something new to discover,” says Gendron. “I mean, that’s what I like in art.”
Myriam Gendron’s Mayday is out May 10 on Thrill Jockey/Feeding Tube.