Ten years after her debut, the Montreal singer-songwriter on burnout, getting sober and the garden sign in Paris that named her new album.
The title came from a garden gate. “I was in the middle of an anxiety attack in the streets of Paris when I saw that sentence on a small sign on a garden’s entrance,” says Béatrice Martin, the Montreal singer-songwriter who records as Coeur de Pirate. En cas de tempête, ce jardin sera fermé. In case of a storm, this garden will be closed. “It really resonated with what I was experiencing, and it stayed with me.”
It’s now the name of her new album, out today, and the storm behind it lasted the better part of two years.
Martin was still a teenager when her self-titled debut arrived in 2008. Songs like “Comme des enfants” made her a star in Quebec and then in France, where the song won the Victoire de la Musique for original song of the year in 2010. She took the Félix for debut artist of the year in 2009, and in 2012 won female singer and pop album of the year for Blonde, along with the prize for the Quebec artist most celebrated outside Quebec. Somewhere along the way she was handed the job of making French-language pop matter to a new generation.
“It’s been crazy,” she says. “I still feel insanely lucky to have made it this far and that people listen to me. It’s been a mix of hard work and a lot of luck.”
In 2012 she stepped off the road to have her daughter, and she says motherhood taught her patience, in life and in music. “It’s great to have someone to do this for on a more direct level,” she says.
The harder stretch began in June 2016. After the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Martin came out as queer in an open letter, meant as an act of solidarity. The response was ugly. French tabloids, media figures and fans online picked through her life and her past, and she felt people took advantage of it. What she kept from that time is a thicker skin. “People have different perceptions of you and everything and it’s completely normal,” she says. “I used to take criticism so seriously.”
Then came the touring. Last summer she played a long run of shows across Europe and North America while also producing them herself, and by the end she was close to burnout. She couldn’t focus on the album, and she was drinking to get through.
“I entered a void. I couldn’t write anymore and everything was horrible,” she says. “Then I stopped drinking and all my emotions came rushing back. Everything I had repressed came back and I was able to write again.”
What came back is on the record. “Obviously all musicians write about their own lives at one point or the other, it’s so cathartic,” she says. “I’ve been through a lot because I was forced to grow up so fast and I wanted to talk a lot about facing my own demons and coming to terms with patterns I kept repeating in my life.”
The album opens with “Somnambule,” about loving someone broken and feeling the connection come apart. “Prémonition,” the first song she shared from it, sets an old question to an electro pulse: why do people who make each other unhappy stay together?
“It’s going back to things you know when change scares you,” she says. “It’s not healthy but it is what it is. We find comfort in that.”
The sound is new for her too. She wrote and recorded in Paris with Michel Berger, France Gall, Dalida, Italo disco and her fellow Quebecer Pierre Lapointe in mind. “It’s been a good reflection of what I’m into,” she says. “I’ve gone from folk to 60s yéyé to alternative but still true to my roots and French chanson.”
Ten years in, would she do anything differently?
“Nope,” she says firmly. “Well, maybe not bleach my hair so much.”
Words by Braeden Alexander. Images by Maxyme G. Delisle.
