The music fan would be strikingly wrong to believe that Olivier Bélisle came out of nowhere. Indeed, he was the pillar, in the composition and guitar-riff departments, of the ferocious all-round funk ensemble Coyote Bill at the beginning of the last decade. Then, for a while now, we’ve been hearing his guitar, banjo and voice in the music of the teeming octet Canailles. Finally, as a solo singer, he is now on his third collection, after Olivier Bélisle in 2012 and Une fois par jamais in 2016.
Let us situate the aforementioned music fan by specifying that Olivier belongs to the same Franco-Masonic lodge where the singers Michel Robichaud, Simon Laganière, Nicolas Gémus and David Marin also live, that is to say, authors of picturesque, refined, sometimes slightly caustic lyrics.
Tonio Morin-Vargas produced Broderie. Everything was composed and written by Bélisle, except for the songs “Quitte ou double” and “Crabe ou pas”, co-written respectively with Olivier Gourde and Maxime Bouchard, as well as “L’inflation à Saint-Fidèle”, a poem by Patrice Desbiens adapted by Bélisle.
Bélisle’s work on Broderie thus consists of texts full of truculent outbursts, ingenious alliterations and wild juxtapositions. All of this is set to folk tunes that remain wise. The music fan, if they take the time, will savour this Rabelaisian idiom of French extraction.
