Les Hay Babies at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, July 15-17 at Vancouver’s Jericho Beach Park. Tickets, schedule and info: thefestival.bc.ca.
Despite the fact that her Les Hay Babies bandmates Katrine Noël and Julie Aubé were firmly against it, Vivianne Roy’s mind was made up.
Invited to perform on Parliament Hill for Canada Day in a concert televised on CBC and broadcast live on CBC Radio, the honour came with an opportunity to meet fellow performers – Metric and Alex Cuba included – along with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau.
It was in that receiving line moment where Roy went rogue. When it was her chance to greet the Prime Minister, whom the bandmates are “big fans of,” Roy decided to play a classic practical joke. She pointed to Trudeau’s shirt, saying, ‘I really like your tie.” Then it happened.
“Vivianne flicked Justin’s nose,” says Noël.
“We were against it, Julie and I. She was like, ‘I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it.’ We were like, ‘Don’t do it!’ But then we’re happy she did,” she adds.
According to Noël, Trudeau took the gag well.
“You could tell he probably likes uncle jokes,” she laughs.
The “nose flick” was captured on video and can be viewed on the band’s Facebook page, which is continuing to chronicle their road antics. Les Hay Babies are in the midst of a number of West Coast dates, slated to perform at a number of festivals, including this weekend’s Vancouver Folk Music Festival at Vancouver’s Jericho Beach Park.
“It’s the first time we’re doing folk fests out West and it’s always been a dream for us, so we’re stoked,” says Noël.
The trio are all New Brunswick natives, Noël is from Dalhousie, Aubé Memramcook and Roy Rogersville. Currently the band is based out of Moncton where Noël and Aubé reside, and Roy lives in Montreal.
“We’re totally different, the three of us, so it’s great to have three different brains, three different minds. Julie’s the most level-headed one and Vivianne’s the most spontaneous and wacky one, which is great too for song writing. We’re totally different in that realm too. Since we’re so different and we know each other so well too - we’ve grown together - we usually don’t drive each other insane,” says Noël.
She was introduced to music at a young age thanks to the influence of her family.
“My mom, she always sang, and taught me how to sing karaoke. … Eventually my father bought me a guitar and then I started learning and singing. Pretty early on I met Vivianne and Julie, when I was in tenth grade. We pretty much learned a lot together,” she says.
Since their launch five years ago, the band, which mainly writes and sings in French, has continued to work hard and released their debut EP, Folio, in 2012, followed by their first LP, Mon Homesick Heart, in 2014.
“We’re still building and we’re getting to the point of where we wanted to be. It’s just always getting better and we just have so much fun doing it,” says Noël.
Their next full length album is due for release in October, marking somewhat of a new direction for the band, which up until this point has been described as an indie-folk-country music trio.
“It’s definitely going to be different from Mon Homesick Heart. We experimented a lot,” says Noël.
The new album, produced by New Brunswick’s Pierre-Guy Blanchard, is promising to be more rock-focused, translating into a shakeup of the band’s original instrumentation, which saw Noël play ukulele, Aubé banjo and Roy guitar. Their new songs mean the ukulele and banjo have been traded in for electric and acoustic 12-string guitar, electric guitar and bass, omnichord and analog synth.
“We’re still three girl singers, there’s still harmonies, there’s still acoustic guitars, but you couldn’t call it folk or roots music,” says Noël.
“We’re super happy with the results,” she adds.
Another change on the new album is the inclusion of their three fellow Moncton-based backing band members, Mico Roy on guitar, Marc-André Béliveau on drums and Kevin McIntyre on bass and keyboards. Whereas on previous releases the trio would call on studio musicians when it was time to record, this time around they had their touring band members in tow.
“It’s more like a family thing, because they’re really our boys now,” says Noël.
To pen the 13 new songs, 11 of which are in French and two are in English, the trio rented a cottage in Quebec, a beautiful spot on a lake, for eight days in March.
“We’re so busy and because the three of us don’t live in the same city, it’s hard to always contribute equally. But this time we made sure we wrote most of the album the three of us together. … It was really a team effort. Sometimes one girl had an idea in her head or a verse or something and then we all worked it together. At the end of that we had eight songs. So then at that point we wrote the rest, Vivianne wrote some on her side and Julie and I wrote some in Moncton. We still arranged them together,” says Noël.
Also keeping the three Les Hay Babies members busy are a number of side projects. For example, Roy has a solo project under the name Laura Sauvage and released her first full length album, Extraordinormal, in March.
The other two Les Hay Babies are continuing to dabble in their own initiatives, for example Noël plays bass in a band called Tampa, and later this year Aubé plans to record a blues-rock project, produced by her boyfriend Mike Trask, owner of analog studio MRC Recording in Memramcook.
Noël and Aubé also run a vintage boutique in Moncton called Ok My Dear.
“We’re sad to leave it behind for the summer but we have a business partner that’s taking care of it right now for the next three weeks. We started that a year ago. Super exciting,” says Noël.
