No music industry career guidebook will recommend making a first album entirely out of Dorothy Parker poems or waiting seven years between releases or singing in French or hardly touring at all or eschewing most forms of social media. Still, French Canadian singer Myriam Gendron has made an unconventional path work for her, finding success on her own terms on the strength of fervent word-of-mouth recommendations, luminous small shows, and exceptionally beautiful songs.
As she prepares for the launch of her third full-length, Mayday, a co-release on Thrill Jockey and Feeding Tube Records, we spoke to Gendron about how she’s gotten here. It’s a story about lucky accidents, leaning into inspiration however it strikes, and following an idiosyncratic muse. Says Gendron, “There was absolutely no strategy.”
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Gendron came of age in Montréal’s freewheeling rock and garage scene, even playing guitar in a metal band at one point. She liked lyrics, though, finding her way to singer-songwriter folk in her mid-teens through Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. Then came a fascination with literary French pop singers, including Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens, and Léo Ferré, but she didn’t write a song of her own until her mid-20s.
Gendron was browsing in a bookstore in Montréal when she stumbled onto a book of Dorothy Parker poems. “I picked it up and read the first poem, and it was ‘Threnody,’ and I heard a song,” Gendron remembers. “Then I flipped the page, and it kept happening. I brought it home, and I started putting the poems to music.”
When she had nine songs, she shared the music with her partner, Benoit Chaput, and he liked them so much that he sent them along to his friend Byron Coley and to Vincent Bancheri at Mama Bird Recordings.
“I thought I was sending demos and that if anyone ever picked it up, I would re-record the songs,” Gendron recalls. “But they both said, ‘No, no, no, don’t touch these. They’re perfect.’”
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“When we got the tape it was a no-brainer,” Coley remembers. “She had a magical way of spinning together beauty and sorrow in a way both Ted [Lee of Feeding Tube Records], and I agreed should be heard by everyone.” Feeding Tube released Not So Deep as a Well in 2014.
Gendron was seven months pregnant with the first of her two children when it came out and, as a young mother, felt unable to tour or promote the album. It would be seven years before she made another one.
Then, in 2016, Gendron undertook an artists’ residency at Old Mill in Le Bic, Quebec to work on an old French Canadian folk song, “Au coeur de ma délire.” Gendron explains that, unlike British or American folk, Quebecois folk music had been absorbed and overshadowed by the dominance of Roman Catholicism. “Because the church was so oppressive that it kind of swallowed everything,” she says. “The only recordings we have are from that time, and they often have this Catholic morality in them. And since we stopped playing them, they just stayed there and are museum objects. They’re just stuck in time.”
Gendron’s next album rescued these traditional songs from dusty historicity and made them relevant again. She interpreted the work freely, adding field recordings and tapping French Canadian traditionalists and avant-garde improvisers Bill Nace and Chris Corsano to fill out her arrangements. That album became 2021’s Ma délire, a record that significantly raised Gendron’s profile and ended up on multiple year-end lists, including those from NPR and Slate.
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Offers for live shows poured in, and Gendron toured more than she ever had before. On returning to Canada, however, she learned that her mother was ill. At first she and her family thought she would recover, but on May 2, 2022, they learned she was terminal. Gendron’s mother died just three weeks later.
“When I came home, I had all this grieving to do. I hadn’t really had time for it,” says Gendron, who spent that May caring for her mother. “May is such a beautiful month, especially here where winters are so long. But she was dying. So there was this contradiction between how you should feel and how you really feel,” she remembers. In grief, in shock and, for the first time in her life, without a job, Gendron began writing Mayday.
After making one album with another writer’s words and a second based on old folk songs, she emphasized, for the first time, more original, personal material. There’s a song about her mother dying, another about a friend passing away and a lullaby for her daughter. Gendron notes that she had included two originals on Ma délire (“Farewell” and “La jeune fille en pleurs”) and felt increasingly confident in her songwriting ability. “My idea was to keep working in that direction, to get inspiration from traditional forms but to try to write original melodies and lyrics, but always in a conversation with other stuff,” she explains. “I don’t know if people actually do write songs that are not a reference to another song. I don’t think I could.”
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Byron Coley, who has known Gendron’s work longer than almost anyone, is enthusiastic about the new direction. He says, “Myriam’s new songs are great. The way she is able to combine old lyrical tropes such as ‘The False True Love’ with her beautifully sparse and modern guitar style is amazing. I had been worried for a while that she was too well-read and literate to be able to create lyrics that would satisfy her when compared to models like Dorothy Parker and Leonard Cohen, but it was just a matter of time. The three albums she has released thus far are a model of how an artist’s own voice can evolve. It’s been wonderful to observe.”
Now, Gendron is emerging onto a larger platform—no longer a secret, unpublicized treasure whose rare live appearances generate excitement among a few dedicated fans.
“She has kinda done it the old fashioned way, by playing great live shows whether there are 20 people in the audience or a thousand,” Coley admits. “She has an idiosyncratic and incandescent approach to singer-songerwriter-ism that is both refined and ecstatic. What’s not to dig?”
