Thus far, singer and guitarist Myriam Gendron has had an unusual musical career, though it’s doubtful she thinks of music in careerist terms. Her first album, a collection of songs based on the poetry of Dorothy Parker, found an unlikely underground cult audience. Seven years later Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found, an album full of French Canadian and American traditional music doused with avant-garde instrumentation, made its way into the world and captivated an even larger audience. With an upcoming album featuring songs that skew close to pop music, set for release on stalwart indie label Thrill Jockey, Gendron’s profile is further on the rise.
The daughter of a French Canadian journalist, Gendron lived a fairly peripatetic life as her father moved the family from Ottawa to Quebec to Paris to Washington D.C., until Gendron finally settled in Montreal at the age of 16, finding work as a book dealer and copy editor. She taught herself guitar and busked in subways before composing and recording a suite of tunes using Parker’s poems as lyrics. Released in 2014 on the Feeding Tube Records label, effusive word-of-mouth praise helped Not So Deep as a Well find rapt listeners in unexpected corners of the world.
“That was a surprise for everyone, including me,” Gendron says of the album’s popularity, before elaborating on its origins. “I picked up a book of Parker’s poems and heard music. I can’t describe it but I read the first poem and it was a song. I heard it, I flipped the page and it kept happening; it was all impulse. Parker does refer to ‘My little song’ a lot in the poems, but not every poem can become a song. The rhymes and number of syllables in a line of some poems, everything is already there to make a song. It taught me how to write music.”
Gendron recorded and mixed the songs in her bedroom with no intention of releasing them as an album, until her partner encouraged her to send them to his friends Byron Coley and Ted Lee, who run Feeding Tube Records. So lo-fi was the recording and mixing process, Gendron thought she might have to re-record the songs, but to her surprise the label released the tracks she gave them.
Gendron took time off from performing and recording after she became a mother, releasing her second album in 2021. Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found was a bold leap forward conceptually and musically, containing 12 traditional French Canadian and American songs beside three Gendron originals. Her unique approach to a familiar form, along with the commanding presence of her voice and assured guitar playing, made the album an instant classic. Though a folk presence made its way known throughout Not So Deep as a Well, here it was boldly announced.
“I learned English at the age of 10, and started listening to folk music around the age of 15,” Gendron explains of folk music’s influence on her songs. “It started with Leonard Cohen, probably my biggest influence, and Bob Dylan helped a lot. Then I discovered the Anthology of American Folk Music, and John Fahey was a huge inspiration.”
Though her tuneful, almost soothing voice is likely to be more pleasing to the casual ear than the vocal of Cohen or Dylan, and is surely a large part of her appeal, the Fahey influence should not go unnoticed. Like the “American Primitive” godfather, Gendron’s fingerpicking is complex and hypnotic, capable of drawing the listener into a reverie. This style has its origins in many of the folk and blues artists Fahey and Gendron would have first heard on records from the 1920s and ‘30s collected in the Anthology, though neither of these artists had to contend with the time constraints of a 78rpm record, so can draw out their tunes.
Something else that sets Gendron apart from most traditional performers is the musical texture in which she occasionally envelopes her songs. Though most of the tracks on Ma délire feature Gendron and guitar unaccompanied, sound artist Bill Nace (one half of the duo Body/Head alongside Kim Gordon) and undaunted drummer Chris Corsano appear on the album, with instruments such as bass clarinet, harmonium and Moog synthesizer scattered throughout. If this seems somewhat spicy seasoning for such ostensibly gentle music, Gendron explains the process all unfolded fairly naturally.
“The audience the first record reached seemed to be more in the avant-garde scene. I did open for a few trad folk acts but it didn’t really work. The shows that seemed to work better were opening for Body/Head or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I don’t know why this is, but I don’t really see myself as a folk singer, I need to mess things up a little and I like experimental music. For this album we decided it might be a bit monotonous for 75 minutes of just me and my guitar, that we needed to add something, so I reached out to Bill and Chris.”
Gendron’s forthcoming album, Mayday, continues to lean into these avant impulses, even while the lead-off single “Long Way Home” sounds as grounded in 1970s-era folk pop as it does any traditional music. Drummer Jim White and guitarist Marisa Anderson both have such distinct styles one can immediately spot their playing, but they are also adept at blending into a song by serving its arrangement. For Gendron, they were obvious choices for collaborators as she continues to explore songwriting and composing, stating simply, “Jim and Marisa understood what I do.”
If Not So Deep as a Well taught Gendron how to write music, the process of creating Ma délire taught her how to write songs. Being bi-lingual allowed her to interrogate traditional songs in a more inquisitive manner than most interpreters of the material.
“I gained confidence in writing lyrics because I changed the language of some of the songs from English to French,” Gendron says. “And about a quarter of the record contains original lyrics. But they’re always in a relationship with other things that already exist. I don’t want to ruin a song by researching it too much and being intellectual. People will tell me things afterwards or I’ll look into it after I record it. Same stories keep turning up in different places and there are details that can’t be a coincidence. I like to use archetypes and forms of popular folk culture and transform them and make them mine, talk about who I am and how I exist in the world today.”
When asked how she chooses which songs to perform, if tune or lyrics first catch her ear, Gendron is emphatic in her answer.
“Music touches me on a more fundamental level at first. A song that has good lyrics and a bad melody, I don’t think I’d notice it. For me, ‘Shenandoah’ is the purest melody that exists. There are so many versions of this song, can I sing it and bring something new? It’s intimidating. But if I don’t, then I’m missing my purpose. I tried all sorts of things, I read it has French Canadian origins but I could find no version of that, so I realized this is how I can do it and make it mine, by rewriting the French version.”
Since the American tunes on the album (“Go Away From My Window,” “Shenandoah,” “All the Pretty Little Horses”) are fairly well-known in traditional circles, I assumed the French Canadian tunes (“C’est dans les vieux pays,” “La jeune fille en pleurs,” “Au cœur de ma délire”) were well known in Quebec. On the contrary, Gendron explained. Following the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, in which the long-standing conservative religious government was ousted, making way for the secularization of culture and education, Gendron says French Canadian traditional culture has all but been forgotten.
“Most people in Quebec don’t know anything about our own traditional music, because when we became modern we lost our connection to it,” contends Gendron. “Often people are suspicious of this music, it seems tied to the darkness of religion and oppression of the church. Most of the recordings we have access to feel really religious, there aren’t a lot of field recordings available like in America. Usually the recordings stayed with this religious culture, and they seem like museum objects stuck in the past.
“I happened to hear a song that was recorded by fiddlers in the 1970s and it moved me so much I started crying. I looked to see what it was and saw it was a traditional tune, a version of the title track of Ma délire. This is how I began working in traditional music. I had a baby so I took more time off between albums than I wanted, but when I started to record again I knew this was the starting point.”
The recording began while Gendron was in a residency at a village in Quebec, in an old mill that had been turned into a boat repair shop. A photo from that village of the falls at the Rivière du Bic appears in the gatefold of Ma délire, an album awash in aquatic imagery. While in the village, Gendron made field recordings of birds, insects and the falls, all of which are incorporated into her version of “Au cœur de ma délire,” creating an almost three dimensional audio effect.
Though Gendron laments the loss of traditional culture in Quebec, it’s possible she is helping to revive it. It’s not just that people buy her records and are turning up for shows, demonstrating there is some appetite for this music. She’s also noticing more people performing it as well.
“I’m finding that there’s starting to be a current interest in it in Quebec, other musicians are playing traditional music,” she says. “The public response has been good, and it’s because people need this music, we need stories.”
