Country girl

Isabelle Boulay. (Audiogram)

When Isabelle Boulay performs live, she can embody Edith Piaf singing in a smoky Paris café or Lucinda Williams aching for love in a Memphis dive. Sometimes, she even comes off like the best girl rocker ever, Chrissie Hynde.

“Music came into my life through the voices of women,” the Quebec chanteuse recently told about 2,000 people packed into Montreal’s Théâtre St-Denis. It was a concert to launch her tenth album, Nos lendemains (Our Tomorrows). “My parents owned a restaurant. My mother set up a little room for me in the basement. That’s where I slept while she worked. She would put on albums by Edith Piaf, Mireille Mathieu and Nana Mouskouri.”

Boulay, whose last album, De retour à la source (Back to the Source), is up for a Juno Award on April 6, is one of the most influential pop singers to come out of Quebec in the past decade. The diminutive redhead talks a lot about her childhood on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. Born in the small village of Ste. Félicité, Boulay says she believes the people she grew up with — as well as the Gaspé’s harsh coastal landscape — had a major impact on her music, particularly her yearning country lilt.

“We lived with my grandmother and aunt. My aunt would sit me down and play country albums,” Boulay told me in a brief interview before her recent Montreal show. “I was singing country songs in the local bar when I was seven years old.”

Boulay's newest album, Nos lendemains (Our Tomorrows). (Pierre Choiniere)

While Céline Dion’s country-girl act seems contrived, Boulay’s appears to be genuine. Although she shuttles between Paris and Quebec, Boulay’s permanent home is in Point Saint Charles, a working-class Montreal neighbourhood. The 35-year-old singer has a killer handshake, an open, sincere smile and a bit of a cowboy saunter, despite her five-inch spike heels.

Boulay isn’t one for rehearsed sound bites; she likes to chew the fat, which is why her interviews are carefully monitored by her handlers. (Her publicist told me: “If you ask her a question, she’s going to give you a good, long answer.”)

Indeed, Boulay’s rural persona is part of her appeal in Quebec and in Europe, where she is immensely popular. Since her start in a small-town singing contest in 1990, Boulay has sold four million albums around the world; she has also won 13 Félix awards, the Quebec equivalent of the Junos. For nearly a decade, Boulay has been a Top 20 mainstay in both Quebec and in France and has performed at Paris’s famed Olympia concert hall more than 15 times. Over 200,000 people worldwide are expected to see her Nos lendemains tour.

Onstage and on record, Boulay is at her best when she draws on the music she grew up listening to in her parents’ small-town restaurant — especially aching Quebec country tunes and the heart-breaking ballads of Piaf. Nos lendemains, Boulay says, is about the “joy and hope” of tomorrow. It’s also her attempt to revive the days of dance halls and variety shows, when music was an intimate experience.

“Thirty years ago, live music was important. Singers weren’t accompanied by synthetic consoles, but by musicians. The arrangements and the instruments were important,” Boulay says, her hands reaching emphatically up to the sky. “I’m drawn to that artisanal way of making music. And I wanted to get back to that. To sing more traditional songs.”

Boulay wins Female Singer of the Year at the 2007 ADISQ, the Quebec music industry awards, in Montreal. (David Boily/Canadian Press)

If the Montreal concert was any indication, Boulay doesn’t attract many studied hipsters. But she appears to draw just about everyone else. The mainly francophone crowd was unpretentious and multi-generational and, interestingly, included as many men as women. (The men perked up considerably when her band let rip with a few wailing guitar solos.)

Nos lendemains includes a French version of Ron Sexsmith’s Tomorrow in Her Eyes. Boulay adapted it with the help of Guillaume Vigneault, the son of iconic songwriter Gilles Vigneault (who wrote the Quebec anthem Gens du pays).

“I listen to Ron Sexsmith a lot. I love his work. I feel close to him musically,” Boulay says. “Tomorrow in Her Eyes is one of the most beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard. But I didn’t want to simply translate it. I wanted a French song written based on his words.” If and when Boulay records in English, she hopes it will be a folk-country album based on Sexsmith’s work. “He’s already sent me six original songs that I might use eventually.”

While De retour à la source was a collection of country songs beloved by her Quebec fans, Nos lendemains is clearly aimed at La France. Well-known French songwriters such as Didier Golemanas, Maxime Le Forestier, Julien Clerc and indie pop singer Benjamin Biolay all contributed to the record; one Quebec critic deemed the album “très France.” Modern French pop and old-fashioned chansons de cabaret are the album’s dominant sounds, but many of the songs are also infused with the twang of a steel pedal guitar.

Nos lendemains includes one of the most haunting tunes I’ve heard in a long time: Dieu des amours. The song was composed by elusive French singer-songwriter J.-L. Bergheaud, the only contributor Boulay didn’t meet. “He’s the bad boy of French music,” she says. “He just sent me this stuff. And of course it took a musician from France to write me a country song.

Boulay also does a melodic version of Cucurrucucu paloma. Penned by Mexican songwriter Tomas Mendez Sosa, it was memorably used on the soundtrack to Pedro Almodovar’s film Hable con ella. Boulay also sings an Italian version of Sentado a beira do caminho by Brazilian singer Roberto Carlos. A few of the ballads are banal, sugary and strained, particularly those written by Jacques Veneruso, who (surprise, surprise) has worked extensively with Dion.

Like De retour à la source, Nos lendemainsis a mournful album. Boulay told me that her favourite country artist is Lucinda Williams, one of the most heart-wrenching crooners around. Boulay should take the lead from the grande dame of country music and stay away from songs that are too sweet. As with Williams, sadness becomes her.

Patricia Bailey is a Montreal-based broadcaster and writer.

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