Montreal singer-songwriter Ludovic Alarie is 25 years old and sings like he speaks, gently and softly. His strength resides in seizing the complexity of a feeling, a moment. Former classical guitarist, he released his first solo album in French in 2014 and his second in 2017. In 2018 he starts his own record label - chouchou records. His new album titled “we’re a dream nobody wrote down” will be released by chouchou records and Blonde Redhead’s label Asa Wa Kuru on May 10th. The album features musicians Warren C. Spicer (Plants & Animals), Simone Pace (Blonde Redhead), Adèle Trottier-Rivard, and Mishka Stein (Patrick Watson). Warren C. Spicer also produced, recorded and mixed the album at Mixart studio in Montreal.

"we’re a dream nobody wrote down” is simultaneously cinematographic, dreamy and nostalgic. The album takes us by surprise from song to song, going from r&b to indie and folk, and yet stays within a universe that is at times nocturnal and at times radiant and warmly intimate. The fear of forgetting and of being forgotten thread their way throughout the album, which closes on a serein, touching note. Gentle, moving and ambitious, “we’re a dream nobody wrote down” carries the weight of living things, provoking in us the rawest and most sincere emotions.

Ludovic about the recording: “The songs were recorded in two sessions of four days with the whole group in the studio. I’d already recorded my last album with Warren, Adèle and Mishka, but we hadn’t met Simone yet. So I was sending him demos little by little before the sessions, by e-mail. The first day in the studio was the first time we met and that we all played together. It gave us the song “et tu reviendras” where you hear our longest jam. It’s really special to have been able to record this first musical exchange between us. We can feel it on the recording: we’re all listening to each other, and the musicians’ interventions are reserved – almost polite – in the last part.”

“The album was done in a short period of time, very quickly. You can feel the group’s energy throughout the pieces: often decisions were made on the spot, in the studio, to record our first ideas. For instance, there’s this piece (“les rivières veulent te prendre dans leurs bras”) where the mood wasn’t really there yet… So we went for supper to clear our minds. Warren put on A Tábua de Esmeralda and he and Simone discovered their shared love of Jorge Ben’s music. The next morning, we tried the song in a different way: Simone was in the live room on the drums, searching for ideas with his headphones. The rest of the group and I, in the control room, tried to find ways to orient the song. Warren, a bit by mistake, recorded a guitar loop and Mishka started playing a few notes over it, on the acoustic guitar. I began singing the melody and it gave us a completely different angle to the song. We stopped playing, to capture the moment. Simone joined us and we started recording, all of us together, with Simone’s new ideas that we heard as we were playing. This first take gave us the version on the album, you can really hear Jorge Ben’s influence – there’s a sort of warmth, and a breeze reminiscent of A Tábua de Esmeralda. Again, you can hear the musicians listening to themselves for the first time and giving space to the others. Without realizing it at first, this left a lot of space for the lyrics. Their linking with the music opened their meaning.”

Co-written with Tasia Bachir, the lyrics gravitate around nostalgia –things never lived, dreams never written down or remembered. Ludovic on the presence of both English and French: “There were simply lines and melodies that were more sincere when sung in English, and others that felt that way in French. The musicality of these languages is different and they fit better depending on certain songs, either in English or in French. It’s interesting, then, to approach them as two completely different instruments.”