Jabbour unveils single, “Dans ton café” from Carling Lake album
How many friends do you really have—and not just online? How well do you know the members of your family? How many times do you promise to make a date to catch up and never really do? Do you know what your friends and family take in their coffee? Maybe it’s time to make a New Year’s resolution to follow through and find out.
The new single from Quebecois folk group Jabbour, “Dans ton café,” is about exactly that. Sung in French, the song details all the small things friends and family could do to get to know each other a little bit more: “As it is, I don’t even know what you take in your coffee.” The song arrives accompanied by a charming, animated video where coffee cups transform into guitars, and the steam of a hot beverage becomes the strings of a violin. “Dans ton café” is the lead track on Jabbour’s 2021 album Carling Lake, named after a small Pine Hill ski centre in the Laurentians, which closed in the mid-1990s. The album uses the image of Carling Lake as a nostalgic symbol of the innocent camaraderie, family spirit, and the appreciation of nature that reigned there; conditions that contrast with the pandemic context in which the album was recorded. The album’s previous single, the title track, sung in English, was launched with a music video mixing archival film with modern footage of the still standing but shuttered resort.
Jabbour creates folk music with accents from the regional Quebec communities where the members live, from the Laurentians to Montérégie, sung in both English and French. Carling Lake is the group’s third album, produced by John McColgan (Durham County Poets, Mama’s Broke), a 12-song collection that incorporates different sonic textures, interviews, and field recordings. The group’s identity crystallized during its 2015 tour of British Columbia when the musicians realized they had found their niche on the Canadian folk music scene. That winter, the band recorded its debut album Round the Clock, over a weekend on stage at the Oscar Peterson Hall in Montreal. This debut album won them a Stingray Songwriter Award and airplay on SiriusXM, Stingray, CBC, ICI Musique Radio-Canada, and several community and university stations. It also gave them the opportunity to tour the Maritimes twice and perform at various festivals. In 2019, Jabbour released their second album Saint Bernard, and toured throughout Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba; conference showcases at Folk Alliance and Folk Music Ontario and concerts at the Folk on the Canal Festival in Montreal, La Série Découvertes at Place des Arts and other Quebec festivals.
Watch the video for “Dans ton café” below and learn more about Jabbour via our mini-interview.
Care to introduce yourself?
Our band is made up of 4 friends (Guillaume Jabbour, Carl Rufh, Bill Gossage, and Bill Collier) who basically met in Montréal while playing in a longstanding Cajun dance band called Grouyan Gombo. We now all live in different regions of Québec – from Gore in the Laurentians, where Guillaume is based, to Ormstown in Montérégie, where Carl Rufh, also the bassist with the Durham County Poets, lays the upright down to rest each night. For rehearsals, we usually meet “halfway” at Bill Gossage’s place in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, on the Western tip of the island of Montréal, and Billy drives over from Saint-Paul-de-l’Île-aux-Noix.
This album was made during the pandemic and is filled with nostalgia, solace in isolation, and creative outbursts born out of having time to focus on being creative since we weren’t playing as many shows. Our producer, John McColgan, really brought it out of us and helped to fine-tune things as the ideas were born. We could not have done it without him. Over the past years, the project has operated on somewhat of a different dimension involving a lot of content creation and digital launches thanks to support from the Canada Council for the Arts’ Digital Now program.
Our families, friends, and fans have been incredibly supportive throughout the whole process, and it has been an immensely validating experience. We put out four live videos shot in different locations and an animated music video for Dans ton café, and there is more to come this spring. We look forward to playing live again, and until then, we really hope audiences enjoy the content we’ve been putting out. Making it kept us going and allowed us to stay connected and creative.
Tell us about the process of writing “Dans ton café.”
The idea for the song Dans ton café came to Guillaume after he attended a family member’s funeral. He found himself in a conversation with the widower next to the coffee machine. After some funeral small talk, Guillaume offered to pour a cup of coffee and realized he had no idea what to put in it due to their not having spent a lot of time together recently. On the drive home, Guillaume thought about funerals and weddings and how you reconnect with long-lost friends and relatives at these events. Sometimes you make plans to call each other and get together. Sometimes it happens; often, it doesn’t. The song was written very quickly, except for that descending, canon-like line, which emerged during rehearsals. A common feature of many folk tunes, especially Cajun two-steps with lyrics, the joyful melody played over a somewhat somber topic works well here.
What’s it like being a musician in Quebec?
Like anywhere else, there are great things about it, and there are challenges. There are so many amazing trad and folk bands here, which is incredibly inspiring and lovely to be a part of. If you are so inclined, you can supplement your income by leading workshops in schools. There are great organizations providing funding for that kind of thing, like Culture à l’école, ELAN ArtistsInspire, and LEARN, and it’s great work.
When it comes to the live concert scene, it depends on what kind of gigs you want, frankly. There are bars and clubs that made it out of the pandemic, so kudos to them! If you are aiming for gigs on the soft-seater tour networks, then you really have to step up the game. Some musicians also teach.
Where it gets interesting for this band is that we are unapologetically bilingual, and that seems to challenge some notions. It is hard to explain why the lyrics to one song are in English and another in French. It happens that way. Guillaume grew up in a bilingual household, always speaking French with his mom and English with his dad. He only realized that was different when friends started coming over, and they had trouble following the conversation at the dinner table. Guillaume’s French Canadian roots and network are a huge part of who he is. At the same time, he went to an English school in rural Quebec and is connected with Quebec’s English-speaking community. He used to say he lived a double life with his English friends at school and his French friends in the neighbourhood, but now he sees it more wholly.
Anyway, this is about music, not language, which can itself be considered a flexible tool for phrasing and framing poetry in a musical way.
Who was the first Canadian artist to blow you away?
Here are answers from all of the band members:
Bill Collier: Stan Rogers for me. The earnestness of his writing really helped me early on.
Carl Rufh: When I was a kid? Valdy. His approach and delivery seemed so fluid and easy.
Bill Gossage: Joni Mitchell!! poetry, musicality, the voice, the evolution
Guillaume Jabbour: Claude Léveillée records played all the time in our house while I was growing up, and my mom took me to see him at Place des arts in my late teens. His speed, accuracy, and the fact that he was self-taught blew me away. I also remember noting how much he was adored by Montrealers.
You’ve been making music for a while now. What’s one piece of advice you can offer to those starting out?
Listen. Not just to music, but to sounds, to your sonic reality. There are so many layers to sound; become a great one.