Music: Tongue Twister

Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here. 

A Québécoise singer takes an Anglo turn—without abandoning her roots

When Béatrice Martin’s high school boyfriend broke up with her, he advised her to stop making music. “He told me, ‘You’ll never be able to do anything with your life. You’re not a good songwriter,’ ” she says. So, the next day, she wrote a song about him. It was spiteful and bad, and, oddly, she wrote it in English instead of her native French. The directness of the language suited the emotional intensity of the moment.

During that post-breakup flurry of creativity, she wrote four more songs, this time in French—all piano ballads that sounded nothing like the hardcore bands she played in at the time. She then did what any other seventeen-year-old in 2007 would’ve done: recorded a suite of “shitty demos” and uploaded them to MySpace. She wanted to call her project something that would make her seem less like a lone singer-songwriter and more like a band. She also wanted to rebuke her ex, who sang in a group called Songs for Sailors. The name she settled on, Cœur de pirate (Pirate Heart), is now famous in Quebec and francophone Europe.

Martin, who’s twenty-five and still based in her home city, Montreal, has sold a million records and played to sold-out concert halls in Brussels, Geneva, and Berlin. The last time I was in Paris, during the lead-up to her sophomore album, Blonde, her face was all over the metro. In Quebec, she’s credited with bringing the French-language chanson tradition, with its focus on narrative and wordplay, to a new generation of listeners. “I’m doing my part to keep the language alive for a little bit longer,” she said in a 2008 Montreal Mirror interview.

But this August, after two records of original French songs, Martin is releasing a third, Roses, still under the Cœur de pirate name, on which all but four tracks are in English. The stock explanation—that she’s abandoning her roots in hopes of climbing the American charts—doesn’t make sense, since a bilingual album isn’t more likely than a French one to win over anglophone listeners. Québécoise songwriter Ariane Moffatt, whose 2012 record, MA, was split between French and English songs, says that if she’d been looking to start over in the US, “I would have done the record fully in English.”

Martin is one of several French-language artists—including Moffatt, the Montreal hip-hop collective Dead Obies, and the Acadian songwriter Lisa LeBlanc—who are incorporating English into their predominantly francophone repertoires. She is flirting with the language in the same way that, say, David Bowie played with Philadelphia soul or Ray Charles with country. While it would be a mistake to read this new bilingualism as a victory for federalism over regional identity, perhaps it’s a win for self-expression over ideology. It’s also another way for an artist to build a viable career in an industry where eclecticism is more valuable than ever before.

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.