Sophie May Healey
On her latest record, 2018’s En cas de tempête, ce jardin sera fermé, Cœur de pirate has a fun little song called “Amour d’un soir.” As she cheerfully explained to us on March 8th, it’s about a one-night stand so bad that “I tried to escape, like, while it was happening.” But her fans’ connection to her music is less like a hookup and more like a committed relationship: sometimes it breaks your heart, sometimes it makes you cry, but in the end, there’s a love there so deep you’d never dream of leaving.
In the ten years since the Québécoise singer-songwriter Béatrice Martin, an openly queer mother of one, first took to the stage as Cœur de pirate, she has released five studio albums — four in French, one bilingual — which speak to all the ups and downs, anxieties and embarrassments, simple joys and overwhelming passions that come with Feeling Feelings™. She has tackled subjects as sweet and fleeting as a missed connection “en 2003 / dans un show en été” (2008’s “Printemps”), and as heavy and painful as marital rape (“Je veux rentrer,” 2018).
But while her music often aches — when “Place de la République” was followed by “Somnambule,” dear reader, I wept — Cœur de pirate never gives up the certainty that she’ll move on and grow from whatever is hurting her. Early in the show, she told us an anecdote about a crush on a boy that didn’t work out, which she went on to write a song about. The story boiled down to: “I’ve essentially made a career out of men fucking up. Instead of dedicating this song to those assholes — this is for you.”
Illustration by Sophie May Healey
It’s this, I think, that drew apparently the entire French-speaking population of metro Edmonton to the Winspear Centre on a snowy Friday night: the honesty, sometimes raw and sometimes painful — but often wry and tinged with hope — that Cœur de pirate brings to her art. Her opening act, Hanorah, a fellow Montréalaise dressed in purple crushed velvet and green paisley, also addresses trauma, loss, and healing in her music. Having left her band at home, the stage belonged only to Hanorah’s soaring voice and her spare and yearning electric guitar; and she owned it. While songs such as “Wooden Screws” occasionally lacked lyrical solidity, others, like “New Orleans,” spoke powerfully to a reluctance to leave home (“When I go, won’t you throw me a farewell party?”), but also the excitement of new beginnings.
The Winspear was the perfect setting for this intimate evening. With its stellar acoustics and top-of-the-line lighting tech, it was certainly an upgrade from the U of A’s own Myer Horowitz Theatre, which Cœur de pirate played in 2015. (The Winspear is also “really big,” she marvelled, “and there are a lot of people here! What is my life!”) The show served as the opener for SkirtsAfire Festival, Edmonton’s only multidisciplinary arts festival to put women front and centre, running March 8th to 17th at various venues. The 8th, of course, is also International (Working) Women’s Day; and with this in mind, it felt especially appropriate to hear two incredible women share the stories of how they’ve been hurt and gotten back up fighting. Whether they’re told in English, French, both, or neither, we could all use a few more stories like that.
