Arts
Lucie Blue Tremblay:
Folk Concert Benefits Pride
Queerly Pursuing the Wiccan Path
Rocking and Writing Against Depression
Navel Gazing Author Predicts the 'End of Gay'
Lucie Blue Tremblay
Folk Concert Benefits Pride
by E. Lynne Lemont
It was a classic women’s music concert – a benefit (for Pride Vermont), put together on short notice, held in a church hall (First Congregational Church in Burlington), running on dyke time (half an hour late), and framed by announcements and pleas for volunteers. And it was warm, intimate, political and personal, everything I’ve come to expect of a women’s music concert. Veteran Canadian folksinger and songwriter Lucie Blue Tremblay did not disappoint.
Where else would you hear the aftermath of a monumental break-up in “Letting You Go,” complete with the backstory of a 4-month depression and given a little humor by the pantomime of housecleaning – vacuuming, sweeping, making beds, those things we do compulsively just to keep moving?
Followed by the glorious light of a new relationship begun in “She Sings in a Chorus,” with the story of meeting her new lover at a concert where, yes, she sang in the chorus and was delegated to take Lucie to the airport the next day. “I saw her in the chorus, and it was like the parting of the waters,” Tremblay told us.
And then there was the story of her new lover’s mother’s email asking her intentions and whether selling both women’s houses after a mere two weeks wasn’t just a bit premature, introducing “Mrs. Klein,” a declaration of the common ground of loving this special person.
Apparently Mrs. Klein has been won over: while looking for info on the internet, I found a site listed as “About Lucie Blue Tremblay” (www.mjaitken.com/lbt/about.htm). The text gave some brief musical history, then went on to rave about the music. The last paragraph gave me a laugh: “As her mother-in-law I know I’m biased, but you should [know] that this woman not only writes great music, but she’s also a powerful, funny, gutsy, romantic, sexy performer. She comes onstage relaxed, at ease, and ready for fun. Seeing her in concert is a MUST! – Mrs. Klein”
I’m a sucker for good stories. But that doesn’t mean I’ll overlook bad music – there wasn’t any here. Lucie Blue Tremblay is there in the music, giving every lyric the full benefit of a rich, complex voice showing every nuance of pain and love and humor and compassion, soaring with a bell-like clarity or husky and smoky as a nightclub. When you see her in person, she sounds like no one else. She’s a powerful woman who takes up space and fills the room with her sound and her personality, whether she’s behind the grand piano or out front with her electrified acoustic guitar.
When you listen to her latest CD, Because of You (Maggie & Shanti Musique, Inc., her own company – Maggie and Shanti being the names of her dogs), you’ll hear echoes of early Cris Williamson, with just an occasional hint of jazzy rocker Terry Garthwait.
The politics were there, too, both in the benefit for Pride Vermont and in her stories of 9/11 and its aftermath. She and her partner drove to New York soon after the attack on the two towers because, as Lucie said, “[newscaster] Peter Jennings was talking to the children and he said, ‘Music heals.’”
They ended up in Union Square (already there were too many volunteers at ground zero, and this was the alternate gathering spot), where there’s a large statue of George Washington on a horse. The statue was soon covered with graffiti reading “Love, love, love, love,” Tremblay said. “And the horse’s rump became a big purple peace sign.”
Tremblay spoke of being allowed into the prayer circles of “Christians, the kind of people who wouldn’t usually have let me in.” And she connected with a man playing flute, whose cousin was a firefighter, missing in the rubble. He invited her to plug into his battery-powered amplifier and they played together for three hours.
“Oprah had a great show on after that,” she said, “asking, ‘What do we do now?’ And she had some powerful women on – Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou, Marianne Williamson. Marianne Williamson said, ‘They tell us there are terrorist cells all over the world. What we must do is build cells of love.’ And that was my cue.”
Tremblay swung into her single “Cells of Love.” She doesn’t sell it any more, except when there’s a nonprofit organization involved in her concert to receive the funds. Pride Vermont received the funds from sales of the single at this concert.
She got a well-deserved standing ovation and came back with two encores.
Tremblay’s lover lives in Burlington (having moved from Atlanta to be closer to Tremblay’s Montreal home), so the singer-songwriter expects to be here often. If you see her on the street, she said, don’t hesitate to come up and introduce yourself and say hello. She’s planning to produce a women’s music and comedy event featuring national talent this fall – in the lineup so far is lesbian comedian Vicki Shaw. You heard it here first!
This night was vintage women’s music, a woman sharing and shaping the world by singing out of her own emotional and political experience. It was well worth the price of admission.
E. Lynn Lemont lives and writes in Franklin County.