“I’ve long said that I’m in a battle with myself,” says Marie-Mai at the beginning of our chat. “And that struggle is a topic I often fall back on in the well of my inspiration.”
Her seventh album, simply yet aptly titled Sept, is firmly rooted in the continuum of this thematic path, which she’s explored before on songs such as “Elle et moi” and “Conscience.” On this new album, launched Oct. 18, 2024, the singer-songwriter speaks very openly about her own duality, most notably on “Je le berce dans mes bras”: “Quand l’ennemi ne fait plus son effet / Il se tait / Pour le vaincre à son propre combat / Je le berce dans mes bras” [freely: “When the enemy becomes ineffective / It shuts up / And to defeat it at its own game / I cradle it in my arms”].
This oft-mentioned “enemy” is both the artist’s ego and her inner voice. “It’s that cassette, to be precise,” she summarizes. “That tape that keeps playing over and over, saying, ‘Are you sure this is the right thing to do?’ You know that feeling of never being enough, and of constantly having to do more and more?”
In Marie-Mai’s case, the cassette has been playing for a long time. She’s felt apart from others for as long as she can remember. “We can probably go right back to my childhood, in grade school when my ADHD was undiagnosed. I constantly felt the heaviness of other people’s gaze,” says the woman who had to wait until her thirties before the neurodevelopmental condition was officially diagnosed. “And for a long time, my emotions would take over. I was my emotions! It brought a lot of positive things in my career, but sometimes I would feel overwhelmed by my emotions. Now, I want to be the person above my emotions. I want them to be where they need to be.”
To keep her head above water, Marie-Mai has recently found solace in silence, notably through meditation. In one fell swoop, she felt the urge to stop all the noise around her. This explains, among other things, her six-year musical hiatus. “I wanted to take a step back, professionally and personally. And once I managed to surround myself with silence, I was able to hear my own voice,” she confides.
“So, in a way, a song like ‘Je le berce dans mes bras’ is me realizing that I no longer want to fight my darker side and my inner demons. It’s as if, in a general way, the album’s lyrics showed me I was now at peace with my darker side. There’s a peace that comes from accepting yourself as you are. Ultimately, it’s the realization that life will always be that way, punctuated by heartache, self-doubt, beautiful things and good moves… And it’s not a straight line, it’s a squiggly curve,” she says, while also referencing to the album’s closer, “Conte de fée.”
“I was really pumped up back then!”
Sept marks the artist’s 40th birthday, and the 20th anniversary of her earth-shattering debut, an emo pop affair titled Inoxydable. Just before that album, she’d burst onto the Québec music scene as the firecracker Marie-Mai, a contestant “with a tattoo on her back and a tongue piercing” on the inaugural edition of the TV talent show Star Académie. “I was really pumped up back then!” she says about her appearance on the show, as the youngest of the contestant, at merely 18. “I had no Plan B — that’s what I was going to do in life. I wrote my first song at age six. That’s also when I told my mom I was going to make music for a living.”
So when exactly did those “heartaches” and “doubts” begin? “They arrived with success,” believes Marie-Mai. “Too often, we put artists in boxes. When I started out, I was considered an artist for kids, and a rocker. Then I became a pop singer [who was compared to Lady Gaga]. Then I heard comparisons to Taylor Swift, and someone’s even said that I was the white Beyoncé! And then, when I started hosting TV shows, I was asked if I was afraid I’d lose my credibility as a singer. But all of those labels made me feel limited. I felt I had to fight to show that I didn’t just fit in the box they wanted to put me in. And that’s when the self-doubt took hold.”
Right from the start, after Star Académie, people doubted her ability to write her own songs, even though she herself never had a doubt. Luc Plamondon was supposed to be at the helm of her first album. “It was gearing up to be some kind of Marie-Mai chante Plamondon type of deal, where I would have sung his old tunes,” she explains. “I spent two weeks in Dublin with him and one morning he heard me singing, and said, ‘If you can write your own songs, you don’t need me,’ and it was really a piece of advice he was giving me. When I returned to the offices of the production company and told them I was going to record my own album, they looked at me and said. ‘Are you crazy? You had Luc Plamondon!”
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Any doubts about her ability to write solid songs were dissipated when she released her major hit “Encore une nuit” as a radio single in 2005. Marie-Mai had written that song, words and music, when she was 16. “I knew I wanted to write my own material, but I didn’t know if I was any good at it yet,” she says. “Once I got that validation from the public, I felt capable, and starting with my second album, I wrote or at least co-wrote all my songs.”
Collaborations are still crucial for her. On Sept, she enlisted the help of a host of creative minds to craft her songs, including Claire Ridgely, Clément Langlois-Légaré and Adel Kazi-Aoual (of Clay and Friends), as well as Lucas Liberatore, who produced and composed several tracks. “I like to collaborate because I can step outside of my own musical universe,” she says. “I like being challenged and exchanging ideas. It helps me get better.”
As has been the case since her second album, she keeps her hands on the wheel at every step of a project, a source of great pride for her. “When I left Musicor to sign with Spectra a few years ago, we held an event at Centre Bell to announce my new album and live show. When I grabbed the mic, I said: “Hey! Long time no see! Let me introduce myself: I’m Marie-Mai, singer-songwriter! Sure, I like fashion, choreography, live shows… But there’s nothing I love more than writing,” she says adamantly. “I’d be OK if I never set foot on a stage again… I can be perfectly happy just writing.”
Thankfully, that s a choice she’ll never have to make.