Myriam Gendron Album Review – Mayday

Myriam Gendron Album Review – Mayday

Myriam Gendron's musical journey from her humble beginnings busking Leonard Cohen tunes in the Paris Metro to her latest album "Mayday" represents a fascinating evolution, each step refining her craft and deepening her connection to the essence of folk music. In 2021, she released "Ma délire - songs of love, lost and found," a testament to her ability to reimagine traditional Quebec folk songs. Now, with "Mayday," Gendron continues to explore the depths of the human experience, offering songs that feel like timeless dispatches from the collective unconscious, melodies that could accompany tasks as mundane as sweeping floors or as elemental as felling trees.

Between her debut album "Not So Deep as a Well" in 2014, where she set Dorothy Parker's poetry to music, and "Mayday," Gendron has honed her set of timeworn tools: her voice and guitar strings. Her vocals possess an earthy, unadorned quality, akin to a Swiss Army knife capable of conveying stoicism or wistfulness with equal potency. Drawing inspiration from influences like Fairport Convention and Josephine Foster, her warble infuses songs like "Look Down That Lonesome Road" with a deeper sense of folk tradition, evoking a sound that resonates as powerfully from a gramophone as it does from a secluded forest clearing.

In "Mayday," Gendron seamlessly weaves together themes of love, loss, and longing, singing alternately in English and French. The lyrics are soil-covered and windswept, imbued with imagery that speaks to the human condition…

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