Two years after celebrating the 20th anniversary of his album ChihuahuaMara Tremblay is back. Butterflies – demos Shows drafts of what has become butterflies He proves that he remained faithful to raw emotions in the first moments of his creation.
We had been talking for a few minutes already when Mara Tremblay got up to go get something in her apartment room where she had installed several instruments. She returned with a tape in her hand. The singer-songwriter says, “This has been staring at me at my desk for 20 years, but I don’t have a device to read it anymore.”
On the tape, demos of songs butterflies, her second album, in which we find the overwhelming Aurora, but also rock and raw country folk. Raw pieces, sometimes deliberately broken apart, that invite the ear to get as close as possible to the spark it generated.
Butterflies – demos First of all, this note: everything is already there. The guiding principle of the songs, their structure and the lively emotion that make your heart beat faster.
Creation at that time was a need, a medicine, a tool. It was my way out. It was spinning all over the place [dans ma vie]Morsi was the creation.
Mara Tremblay
AuroraThe song, which Mara Tremblay says is the most represented, is not among the demos due to rights issues. We Don’t Lose In Change: The Song As We Hear It On The Album butterflies, is the model. “I find it shameful that people identified using this version because it is completely raw,” she says. We tried to do it again, but it didn’t work. ”
character like album
You don’t have to be humble to post sample songs, which are necessarily imperfect. “I’m not completely naked anymore [que sur mes albums]. Maybe I’m a person who’s used to binges too… I’ve always wanted to be out of my shoes, she explains. For me, the album is as personal as that. ”
There was nothing superficial, neither in sound nor in image. It was the music that sounded like me.
Mara Tremblay
Once in the studio, Mara Tremblay and partner Olivier Langevin gave the tone, accentuated breaks and moments of craziness, and wrapped the singer’s sometimes surprisingly soft voice (“it was the first time I sang like that,” she says).
“I knew the feelings I wanted to carry, but the voices, we look for them until it’s over,” she says. Nothing is really thought of when you enter the studio. It’s a lab. Together, they developed a sound environment that was subtle and suited a genre we hadn’t heard of in Quebec at the time.
She decided to publish her demos among others on the occasion of her departure from Audiogram, the record company where she was born as a singer and songwriter. Honest decision motivated to sell the label to Kibekor. She believes she owes it all to Audiogram’s founder, Michele Belanger, and that without him on board, the link has been severed. Butterflies – demos He appears on KatMuzik, the label founded by his big girlfriend Catherine Durand.
Mara Tremblay put aside the anniversary tour for Chihuahua What she wanted to do before the pandemic and focus on thatjust for you, published in the spring of 2020. Otherwise, she would no longer be composing. But she does not care.
I’m happy. “I don’t care,” she says. The pandemic has allowed him to realize that after 35 years of performing every summer, it’s good to breathe. There was one coming, it will come. I’m not dry well. At some point I will have another outbreak.”
Butterflies – demos
Mara Tremblay
CatMusic
