Bilingual Montreal tunesmith Aleksi Campagne carries on a family tradition
At Festival du Bois, the singer-violinist will blend Québécois fiddle tunes with an indie-folk sensibility
Aleksi Campagne
Festival du Bois presents Aleksi Campagne in the Grand Chapiteau at Mackin Park on March 7 at 4:30 pm and on March 8 at 11:35 am
SOMETIMES, THE BEST pathway to finding new inspiration is to tap into an older way of doing things. When Montreal’s Aleksi Campagne set out to write songs for the follow-up to his debut album, 2023’s For the Giving/Sans rien donner, he did what any other young tunesmith would do.
“Last year I did a month of creation to try to write songs and I decided to go into archives in Quebec to immerse myself in Quebec fiddling music, which was really interesting,” Campagne tells Stir in a telephone interview. “So I was learning fiddle tunes with the purpose of writing new songs.”
Okay, so maybe hitting the archives isn’t what most songwriters would do at all, but Campagne has already established himself as an artist uninterested in following the standard operating procedure.
For the Giving/Sans rien donner, as you might glean from the title, is a bilingual album. This doesn’t mean there are a few songs in English and a few in French, mind you. In fact, the double LP includes each of the 10 songs in both of Canada’s official languages.
“I grew up in a bilingual house, so that’s how I live,” Campagne says. “I know there’s a lot of people in Canada that live that way. It’s important to try to promote that, to me personally. Also, it’s a great creative process. For me, it’s really exciting to think about how to translate lyrics. Sometimes you have to weigh the melody or the emphasis a bit more, and so you’re trying to find a different metaphor to express the same thing.
“They end up being different, and if you understand both languages, you can listen to both songs and get what I think is a more elaborate picture of what I’m trying to say,” the singer and violinist says. “You actually get a second perspective on the same story, which is interesting.”
Sometimes, though, a wholesale translation proves elusive, which is why the ingeniously circular English wordplay in the chorus of “Another Day” wound up reappearing in “Encore une autre journée”: “Anything I do comes to/Nothing that I do comes to/Anything I do comes to/Nothing.”
“At times, I write a song in one language and I just decide that finding a way to translate it is going to be a problem for later me, because at the moment I can’t see how I’m going to do it,” Campagne admits. “But then I have sessions where I work with my aunt, Michelle Campagne, who is also a great songwriter and translator, who helps me problem-solve for those difficult moments.”
Michelle Campagne is a member of the long-running family band Hart-Rouge, of which Aleksi’s father, Paul Campagne, is also a founder. Aleksi’s mother is Canadian folk-music icon Connie Kaldor, with whom he often shares stages alongside his brother, singer-guitarist Gabriel Campagne.
“I was definitely trained into this life from a very young age,” Aleksi says. “My parents like to joke that they would have disowned me had I been a lawyer. Obviously, that’s not true; they wanted me to do whatever I want. They were supportive of any decision I made. But it would have been hard, I think, for me to do anything else.”
He’s done all right for himself in the family trade. For the Giving/Sans rien donner earned him a Canadian Folk Music Award for French songwriter of the year. “Folk” is perhaps not quite broad enough a descriptor for the album. The lavishly cinematic opener, “When I Close My Eyes”, soars to the baroque-pop heights previously navigated by Owen Pallett and Patrick Watson. Later on, “Dancing Back to Back” showcases Campagne’s instrumental skills in the form of an incendiary, string-shredding electric-violin solo.
Expect Campagne’s sophomore release to be similarly eclectic while also reflecting his more recent immersion in Québécois folk forms.
“I’d like to try to bring out those influences, those roots, while still sounding like what I like, which is a bit more modern indie folk, that kind of sound,” he says. “I’m definitely really excited about this development for me personally, because it feels more like what I’ve been wanting to do, which is to marry that traditional music, those sounds, to what I like in indie folk and songwriting.”
Local audiences will likely get a preview of this fusion when Campagne and his band—guitarist Zacharie Bachand, bassist Stéphane Krims, and drummer Maude Bastien—play a pair of shows in Maillardville as part of this year’s Festival du Bois. As for the new record, don’t expect that until the end of the year. If he truly takes after his parents, Campagne will spend festival season traversing long stretches of highway. During his childhood, summer vacations often meant hitting folk fests across the country.
“I got to see how people react to my parents’ concerts, and how they describe their experiences,” he says. “You can see how important of an event it is for these people—you know, it’s not just entertainment. So if I can try to do that myself, what a great career to have.” 
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