Lisa LeBlanc & Deliverables
November 19, 2022
Bronson Centre, Ottawa, ON
Taking on French language concerts can be daunting for any Anglophone music fan, but with Lisa LeBlanc’s warm, welcoming approach to the love of language and Canada’s East Coast within her infectious and wild approach to Acadian music, it’s difficult not to get swept away.
“When you speak French, and you make French music, you are going to be someone who is militant, even without knowing it,” said LeBlanc in an interview ahead of her November 19 performance at Ottawa’s Bronson Centre with openers, Deliverables.
After her 2014 EP, Highways, Heartaches, and Time Well Wasted, and 2016’s Why You Wanna Leave, Runaway Queen? were decidedly English recordings, LeBlanc returned to her rural New Brunswick roots with Chiac Disco. In doing so, she places the very rural New Brunswick dialect known as Chiac in full spotlight as she blazes through glamorous track after glamorous track that had the Ottawa audience celebrating their roots in the Francophone communities of the Maritimes.
“The album is a huge homage to Acadie,” she says. “It’s really my accent, and it’s celebrating that accent because it hasn’t been easy for a lot of people. The hot topic right now is linguistic insecurity; when you’re French isn’t good enough, or it’s judged by other people. I’m happy to help anybody to be proud of the way they speak and not be afraid to have an accent.”
LeBlanc’s bilingual performance in Ottawa was peppered with songs from across all of her four albums of “trash-folk” and included absolute bangers such as her banjo-led cover of Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” and the brilliant and infectious “Aujourd’hui ma vie c’est d’la marde,” but make no mistake, the performance had a decidedly ‘70’s vibe as LeBlanc celebrated the “disco” in Chiac Disco; that she says came from a particularly positive dose of social media during the pandemic times of April 2020, of course!
“My boyfriend and I were hosting bingos on Facebook Live, so we started making bingo music, and I had an alter ego called “Belinda” who was doing 90’s dance music with bingo themed lyrics,” LeBlanc explains. “This was full on lockdown, April 2020 and it just became something super fun to do that was positive and just something kind of ridiculous that put us in a really good mood.”
“I had so much fun writing those Belinda bingo songs that I was like I want to keep this vibe but just do a more serious record that was the disco record.”
Lisa LeBlanc will rap up her 2022 tour this week with shows across Quebec, including stops in Montreal, Salaberry-de-valleyfield, Rimouski, and Rivière-du-loup.
Deliverables
Lisa LeBlanc
