ON the wall of the music room in her Montreal home, Myriam Gendron has hung several posters: one from a party to celebrate the poetry publishing house run by her partner; another from a Michael Hurley show at La Vitrola, where Gendron played support; and a billing for Pour La Suite Du Monde, a documentary set in the fishing community of a small island on the St Lawrence River.
There too, is an enlarged print of a photograph the singer took of a studio house on Villa Seurat in Paris. “Henry Miller used to live there,” she says. “I was a huge fan of his when I was a teenager, so I went to visit where he lived.” The picture she took to commemorate that day did not turn out as planned; a problem with the camera film distorted the image of the street. She gestures to the white flare that blooms across the photograph. “But I thought it was beautiful,” she says. “I’ve always had it.”
It is simplistic to suggest that this collection of artworks fully encapsulates Gendron, yet there is something in their marriage of literature, music, tradition that seems to carry her essence. It is there even in that unanticipated flash of beauty of the Miller picture – a kind of illuminating effect between expectation and actuality.
Over the past decade, Gendron has established herself as an artist of immense craft and interpretive instinct. Her first album, 2014’s Not So Deep As A Well, set the poetry of Dorothy Parker to music and became a quiet cult hit. Her second, 2021’s Ma Délire – Songs Of Love, Lost And Found, saw her reinterpret and explore traditional material from Canadian folk tunes such as “Au Coeur De Ma Délire” and “Le Tueur De Femmes” to more familiar and long-storied songs such as “Go Away From My Window” and “Shenandoah” – alongside a couple of her own compositions.
Her voice is a curious thing, over and over and over again, then got . That was during a time when I had a group of songs that I was trying to polish with the intention of making . I found that Myriam’s two records were things that I returned to for inspiration. For a powerful distilled intentional presentation of superficially simple arrangements of complex pieces of music. I can listen to her records all day, every day.”
