When you’re a group where most of the songs you sing are a hundred years old or more, you don’t often get to hear what the composer thinks of your arrangement of their work. However, we do occasionally sing music by living composers, and it’s always a little nerve-wracking to send it to them because you never know if your re-interpretation will fly or flop in their eyes.
We got to experience this emotional roller coaster last week with Le Diable et le Fermier, written by Nicolas Boulerice of Le Vent du Nord. You may remember the work-in-progress video we sent you over the summer, and you can read about the background of the song in that post: patreon.com/posts/39779501
Last week, we attended the online Folk Alliance International music industry conference (the same conference where last year we performed with some unexpected accompaniment). Le Vent du Nord was also performing this year, and we reached out to say hello. Their manager invited us to join them in their virtual green room before one of their sets to say hi to the band and maybe even share a few lines of Diable. Given that we four hadn’t gathered in person for this conference (and the invitation was for the same day!), we scrambled to put together a quick video to share the song, which is what you see here.
In the virtual green room, we had just a minute or two to send them the link and say how much we appreciated this piece, so we didn’t get to see their reaction to it and left the call thinking, “At least we got to say hi and thank them face to face!”
The next day, we saw a Facebook post from Nicolas sharing our video and expressing his excitement about our arrangement, and since then we’ve seen a steady stream of comments on his post with similar sentiment. It’s hard to overstate the level of giddiness you feel when a wildly successful musician whose work you have so long admired respected turns their appreciation towards you! It felt especially validating because it’s the first piece we’ve done where we’ve translated the text from the original language, which felt like going out on a limb in some ways.
To add a little more icing on the cake: shortly after Nicolas made his facebook post, we got a message from a radio DJ in Quebec who wanted to play our piece! That show aired just a few days ago, and you can listen to it here: L’affaire est dans l’trad CIBL 101.5 The DJ starts talking about Le Vent du Nord and Windborne around 13:20, and plays the original version of Diable, then our version. All the commentary is in French, so if you just want the music you can skip to the 16 minute mark to hear the two versions of the song–it’s first public airing!
We are so delighted to have the Nicolas Boulerice Stamp of Approval, and we wanted to share that joy with you!
