Ariane Moffatt at The Media Club, Tuesday, Feb. 26. Doors at 8 p.m., Tickets $13 available in advance online at amoffatt.bpt.me.
A relative unknown in English-speaking Canada, Montreal's Ariane Moffatt is a big deal in the province of Quebec.
The Québécoise singer-songwriter's 2002 debut album, Aquanaute, went platinum in her home province, earning 11 nominations at the 2003 ADISQ Awards and winning three Félix awards (for Discovery of the Year, Album of the Year and Album Producer of the Year).
In 2008 she collaborated with Franco-Israeli singer-songwriter Yael Naim on Tous les sens (All the Senses), which was awarded Francophone Album of the Year at the 2009 Juno Awards and the Charles Cros Academy Award in Europe.
Moffatt was born in Quebec City, the heart of francophone Canada and before she went on a long vacation at the age of nine she'd had little contact with the country's other official language.
"I started speaking English and listening to rap music," Moffatt says. "I liked to be in the English world also.
"I was always curious about anything that could produce a sound or a beat. It was natural for me. I started taking piano lessons early and began writing songs and decided to study music in college and university."
She studied jazz singing at Cégep de Saint-Laurent and then continued on to the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).
"There was a program called Pop Music," she says. "I thought I could bring some of my own songs into the program and keep my work going on at the same time I was learning. I did two years but I didn't finish as I was hired by Daniel Bélanger and he took me on tour with him as a keyboard player and backup singer."
Moffatt was forced to make a quick transition from student to professional musician opening for Bélanger on guitar with her own material and then switching to keyboards to finish gigs as a member of his band.
"I didn't expect to be hired," she says. "I knew I could play but he gave me so much confidence and a lot of responsibility so that was a great way to start a career. It was a big learning process."
Over the past decade Moffatt has continued to grow as a musician, regularly releasing albums that extend her conceptual reach. In 2010, she recorded 12 tracks (all covers of English-language pop songs) for the Radio-Canada medical show Trauma and released the collection as a soundtrack album.
The disc, featuring mainly piano and voice reworkings of songs such as R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts," Leonard Cohen's "In My Secret Life," and Cat Power's "The Greatest," gave Moffatt the opportunity to exercise her English chops. Her treatment of Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry's "Be My Baby" (made famous by Phil Spector and The Ronettes) is a soulful demo making a seamless connection between the art of French chanson and contemporary pop music.
"The producer of the show contacted me and asked me to make little acoustic versions of some classic pop songs," she says. "It was her idea and I was so happy I dove into the idea. It was my first chance to show the public that I was interested in singing in English and it inspired me to try and write songs in English. I knew I would do it someday but I wanted to be sure I was ready. I didn't not want to translate songs from French to English but to think in English and that's what happened when I created MA my latest album.
I was going to the studio and some songs were coming out in English and others were in French and that's when I knew I was ready to go on."
With MA Moffatt is moving outside of her comfort zone into new sonic territory with a 50/50 split between English and French songs.
"It was natural for me," she says. "My influences are bilingual and it seemed like a natural progression. It was something that I wanted to experience. If I wanted to break into the English market it might have been easier to go entirely in English but I thought it was a nice picture of the reality of Montreal and of my neighbourhood, Mile End, to go both ways. Mile End is multicultural and pretty much bilingual."
MA is not only a hybrid lyrically but musically as well. Moffatt, who early on played with the trip hop band Tenzen, mixes electronica in with her pop material. The two go hand in hand, in fact, she enlisted DJ Ghislain Poirier to create remixes of all the tracks and released those versions as a separate project.
Usually Moffatt begins working on songs with lyrics but on MA it is all about the music building tracks with a hypnotic electronic feel.
"With this record I had no plans or deadlines of doing a record," she says. "I wanted to rediscover the everyday act of creation. I went to my studio, which is a five-minute walk in my neighbourhood, and dug into the music. It was pretty much about starting with the music instinctively with no rational thinking. I was fascinated by the power of words like the first line you put on a melody. Why do you choose this word or that word? I wanted to dig deeper as to why I chose the words I did - that's kind of how the lyrics started, sometimes with automatic improvisation on the melodies."
Writing in English gives Moffatt an entirely different approach to her music. Even her voice and vocal mannerisms seem to operate at a lower register than they would in French.
"English was a way to escape from my own story," she says. "Having less control of the language allowed me to go into fantasies and scenarios that weren't about me. In a different language we have different things to say, different emotions come up."
