IN CONCERT
What: Coeur de Pirate with Hanorah
Where: Royal Theatre
When: Sunday, March 3, 7 p.m.
Tickets: $29.50-$45.50 in person at the Royal McPherson box office, by phone at 250-386-6121, or online at rmts.bc.ca
A slow and steady approach has served Béatrice Martin’s career well.
The Quebec singer who performs as Coeur de pirate — translated as “Her Pirate Heart” — began her career 15 years ago, dabbling in a variety of genres before settling in as one of the foremost practitioners of French pop.
Martin has reached the level of only a few of her Canadian contemporaries — Feist, to name one — with album sales over the one-million mark, one million followers on Facebook and an immense profile overseas. She arrived there by taking a measured, carefully considered approach to her craft.
“You evolve and you want people to follow along,” Martin, who studied at the Conservatoire de Musique du Québec as a child, told Cosmopolitan in an interview.
“But whenever you release something, you think: ‘Are people actually going to like this?’ I just want to have a project that means something to people. If I couldn’t reach out to anyone, I wouldn’t be doing this.”
In 2008 — when Martin was just 21 — her self-titled debut hit No. 2 on the sales charts in France, propelled to the top spot by the single Ensemble. The four records that followed, including her most recent effort, En cas de tempête, ce jardin sera fermé, all cracked the top five in Canada, while achieving similar heights in France and Belgium.
Her music has been embraced by a wide swath of the music-buying populace, to be sure. But with that rise in popularity has come a degree of unwanted attention. The subject of tabloid talk in France, she has struggled to maintain her composure in the public eye, given that her every move is headline news in Quebec and abroad.
Martin, who sings primarily in French, comes across as cosmopolitan, but she’s actually much more reserved, which has caused her to retreat slightly from the media in recent years. “It’s important to disconnect from problematic media and recharge your batteries,” she said in a post on her Instagram page.
Her reputation for giving inspiring concerts keeps Martin booked on the road for long stretches when there’s a new record to promote. Her tour to support the 2015 album Roses included 150 sold-out concerts in more than 10 countries, including North America, Spain, Italy, England, France and Germany.
Martin has said that she turned to alcohol to ease the pressure, before eventually giving it up.
“Everything came rushing back,” Martin told the Canadian Press. “All the emotions that I had repressed, all the experiences, everything. I was just like, wow, a lot of stuff went down and I didn’t talk about it.”
Martin came out as “pansexual” in 2016 — following a divorce from her husband of four years, Alex Peyrat, she entered into a relationship with transgender singer Laura Jane Grace from the punk band Against Me!
Grace and Martin are no longer a couple, but the fallout from the public relationship left a mark on Martin.
The six-time Juno Award nominee spoke of her struggles in a post on her Instagram page, revealing that she suffers from body dysmorphic disorder — an obsessive focus on perceived defects in personal appearance — and encouraged others with similar mental-health issues to get help.
“We’ve talked a lot about mental health these days and I know I’m not alone,” she wrote.
Her new effort (which translates as “In case of a storm, this garden will be closed”) carries a heavy emotional weight. Rape is discussed from a first-person perspective on the song Je veux rentrer, with Martin singing: “The warmth of our violence, this intense pain that keeps hurting/And I keep our secret that’s eating my soul away, that’s feeding my vices.”
While the songs on the album are in French, the emotional impact translates easily to Anglophone listeners. “I think it’s important to move on from traumatic experiences if you can to re-appropriate the events that happened to you, which is what I’m doing with this album,” Martin said in an interview with the Montreal Gazette.
“I have been through trauma and things that are not cool, but they don’t own me. So the way the music is so upbeat is my way of saying ‘f— you’ to whatever happened to me.”
