Born in Ottawa, Myriam Gendron moved around a lot in her youth (Gatineau in Quebec, Washington, DC, Paris), but at 16 years of age dropped anchor in Montreal, where she still lives, having recently completed her second album there. Available on CD and cassette October 1 through Feeding Tube, with 2LP vinyl expected late in the year or early in 2022, Ma Délire – Songs of Love Lost & Found reinforces her skills as a guitarist and singer of natural beauty and verve while incorporating her skills as an interpreter of folksong and as a writer of original material. Astutely conceived over seven years, its 15 tracks cohere into a statement of astonishing power, making it one of 2021’s finest releases.
In 2014, Myriam Gendron’s Not So Deep As a Well was released. The vinyl, now in its fourth pressing with copies still available, has been handled by Feeding Tube as the compact disc was issued by Mama Bird Recording Co. An absolute gem of a record, it featured nine poems, 11 on the CD, by the great writer Dorothy Parker set to Gendron’s guitar-based music.
It is the sort of record that, when discovered long beyond its initial release, can leave a listener momentarily scrambling to reevaluate notions they thought were largely solidified, in this case specifically about the musical highpoints of the year 2014. But hey, it’s best to not ruminate over jackhammered conclusions. Instead, it’s better to rate Not So Deep As a Well as one of the very finest debuts of the decade we’ve only just recently left behind.
After getting hip to the album back in 2018, I will confess to wondering how Gendron was going to follow it up. That is, not pondering if she could; along with its level of success, there is a quality of sustained confidence in Not So Deep As a Well that effectively eradicated assumptions that its brilliance was fleeting. One simply doesn’t attain its level of ambition and achievement by accident. But rather, my thoughts were focused on what Gendron would do next? More Parker-based works? Engaging with another author? Unveiling her own songs? Or maybe, shudder to think, nothing at all?
Gendron’s discography isn’t a vast one. Those two CD bonus cuts from her debut, “Bric-à-brac” and “The Small Hours,” were put out on 7-inch in 2015 by Feeding Tube and the Montreal-based publishing house L’Oie de Cravan. And last year, as the fourth installment in Feeding Tube’s limited lathe cut QuaranTunes Series, there was a 12-inch in an edition of 31 that offered five unique versions of her Parker compositions along with two covers of songs by fellow Montrealer, another poet, Leonard Cohen.
Those tunes, “Queen Victoria” and “Iodine” were strong enough that Feeding Tube suggested a full album of Cohen covers as her next release. Nice idea. But as Ma Délire – Songs of Love Lost & Found makes clear, that’s not what transpired, though her recollection of “The Lost Canadian (Un canadien errant),” Cohen’s remodeling of an old Quebecois ballad from his sixth album, 1979’s Recent Sons, did plant a seed of inspiration.
But the influences that shape this album are far more complex. During an August 2016 residency at the Old Mill in Le Bic in Quebec, Gendron was introduced to the traditional song “Au Coeur de ma Délire” as recorded by Dominique Tremblay and Philippe Gagnon on their 1971 album for Polydor Canada, Présentent avec le Stainless Steel: Ça roule.
Their version impacted her so strongly that she recorded the song herself during that residency, with the Old Mill’s boat repair shop serving as the locale. It is this version that is included here, complete with the background sounds of machinery at work and the voice of her young daughter Cleo (there is also some subtle Moog from Tonio Morin-Vargas, who helped to produce the album, plus chirping crickets and fragments of what sounds like a news broadcast).
Over time, Gendron couldn’t shake thoughts of how the end of Catholic hegemony in Quebec had resulted in traditional Quebecois folk music falling into neglect and being largely forgotten. In an interview with the website Aquarium Drunkard, she explains that as religion was discarded in Quebec in the 1960s, so too was the French and Québécois repertoire of folksongs.
Cohen’s updating of “The Lost Canadian (Un canadien errant)” served as a model for how these trad folk sources could be successfully (meaning, non-dogmatically) explored in a contemporary context. That’s when Ma Délire – Songs of Love Lost & Found really began to cohere as an idea. A grant Gendron was awarded right around the beginning of Covid-19 quarantine helped to make the album a reality.
Along the way, the conceptual scope broadened in a number of ways. For starters, Gendron’s folk inspirations increased (partly through a deep dive into the inexhaustible Anthology of American Folk Music), tapping into US models as she recorded two songs credited to John Jacob Niles. Those familiar with Niles (perhaps through his impact on Bob Dylan) likely know that his style could be deliciously unusual, but Gendron’s version of his “Go Away From My Window” opens the album with pure sweetness of string and voice, a combo recalling the ’60s folk boom at its very best.
It establishes that the album’s strong roots are just Gendron and her guitar, though as the recording progressed, the decision was made to introduce additional instrumentation, with the version of Niles’ “I Wonder As I Wander” spectacularly integrating Simon Pagé’s harmonium and Guillaume Bourque’s bass clarinet, its jazziness the type one might hear not inside a swank club but from under a tent in a camp on the outskirts of town.
Between the Niles tracks, Gendron tackles six traditional songs, though “Poor Girl Blues” is properly described as something new from old models, being musically based on “Poor Boy Long Ways From Home” (specifically, Mississippi John Hurt and John Fahey’s versions) as the lyrics are a free translation of the song into French with elements of “Un canadien errant” added.
For “C’est dans les vieux pays,” Gendron switches to electric guitar (Bill Nace joins her, his contribution added remotely) but continues to sing in French, simultaneously transforming the traditional song while remaining true to its core. This is the tack taken later for “Par un dimanche au soir,” but prior to that she switches back to acoustic for a close-miked (beaucoup string friction) instrumental version of “Shenandoah,” with its vibe decidedly American Primitive. A second more distant reading of the song, this time with vocals, closes the album.
Also acoustic is “Waly Waly,” the tune of Scottish origin with lyrics in English. Its ambiance is unsurprisingly Brit-folky but with a crucial touch of Appalachia. The record’s other traditionally sourced tracks are a masterful solo acoustic transformation of the lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses” and the sustained beauty, with injections of Gendron’s harmonica, of “Le tueur de femmes.”
The above selections firmly establish Ma Délire as a superb album, but it’s the inclusion of four originals, all sequenced in the album’s second half, that push the set into masterpiece territory. The most striking of the bunch, “La jeune fille en pleurs,” comes first, with Gendron on electric, singing in French, as the drums of Chris Corsano, added remotely a la Nace in “C’est dans les vieux pays,” widen the palette and deepen the emotional weight.
“Une rose (pour Richard)” is an instrumental, played on acoustic, hanging without a hitch with the best of the indie folk boom that thrived a couple decades back, though there’s truthfully nothing weird or freaky about it. I’d say the same for “Farewell,” except that Gendron’s vocals could easily convince new listeners that it derives from a test pressing of an unreleased album cut in 1967 for Vanguard or Verve or maybe even Elektra.
It’s when Gendron plugs in that she gets closest to various going-on in the 21st century u-ground, sometimes with a ragged edge, as exemplified by “C’est dans les vieux pays” and “Par un dimanche au soir,” but occasionally, like during “31.10.2011,” the last of the album’s originals, quite pretty and with an engaging sense of the unexpected.
But really, there’s not a thing that’s predictable about Ma Délire – Songs of Love Lost & Found, a record that’s making was clearly profoundly personal for Myriam Gendron as she reinvigorates timeless, universal themes. It is a contemporary folk album of the highest tier.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A+
