CORNWALL, Ontario – It’s been a few years since one of our own, local musician, Melanie Brulée, moved to Toronto to pursue her promising music career.
It’s been a journey of discovery, healing and creating, as she readies herself to return home, for the release her upcoming French-language CD, Débridée.
Meaning “unbridled,” the word, débridé, which would become the creative driving force of the new recording, came up in a casual conversation, a while back, with a couch surfer from Paris (as is the case with most creative inspirations… N’est-ce pas?).
“I just became sort of obsessed with that word,” said Brulée. “I held on to it from there on, to the imagery of that and how that felt within me.”
“I wanted to feel free of shackles and unrestrained; it personified who I wanted to be.”
Later, that year, a trip to France, set in motion a series of events, where one thing would lead to another, and eventually, to the album.
“I started writing poetry in French, getting (my) language skills back,” said Brulée, who had attended francophone school, but felt she was losing it, over the years. “I had to make a decision to hold on to my culture.”
“Some were good and some were awful,” she said of her poems. “It was a matter of getting that happening in my brain again.”
The idea, she said, was to use them as little “memory markers,” to then write songs for the album. The whole process took a lot longer than Brulée had thought it would.
“I was lucky to do a lot of collaborations with other francophone artists; Anique Granger, she’s a huge influence on this album. She really helped me lyrically, helped me paint some pictures and helped me get out what I wanted to say with proper grammar. French is a complicated language.”
As art often does, Brulée said that album started changing. The name of the album took on a life of its own.
“I realized when all was said and done and written and recorded that the album was about healing the inner children within me” she said. “Particularly, the void left by the death of my father, at a young age.”
It turns out there was a lot of her father, not coincidentally a horse trainer, in those poems, but certainly subconsciously, the impetus for the album, and the symbolic interpretation by its artist.
Brulée will be bringing her new, four piece band, for a local launch with a dinner and show, at Truffles Burger Bar. Visit www.melaniebrulee.com. Photo by Jen Squires.
Here are three more new releases that came across my desk, recently.
If you’re into a little rockin’-alt-country music, check out Calgary’s Jacquie Drew at www.jacquiedrew.com.
Singer/songwriter/story/teller, Maritimer, Carla Bonnell, delivers a cornucopia of folk, blues, country, bluegrass, and roots. www.carlabonnell.com
With rock, latin, country, and jazz influences, crooner, Andy De Campos, recently released Colours. For a free download of one of the tracks, visit www.andydecampos.com/freesong.
If you have music news or an event you’d like featured here, email me at roxannedelage@gmail.com.
