Page 94 of His Sound
Shayla pulls the door open, and the cheering gets even louder. We each hand the bouncer ten bucks and start clearing our way through the crowd towards the group from Metro Records. The going is slow; it takes at least a minute just to get to the merch table a couple metres ahead.
I spare a glance at the table’s contents while the hype man on stage gets the crowd even more riled up. The guy playing must be a pretty big deal. Most of the merch table is taken up by pamphlets for an organization that supports people living with ADHD, but there’s a stack of CDs for sale in the corner.
I catch sight of the cover art and freeze.
I know that drawing.
It’smydrawing.
“Okay,mesdames et messieurs, the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Performing for you tonight, for the very first time as a solo act, please welcome Sherbrooke Station’s very own...JP Bouchard-Guindon!”
I whirl around to face the stage as JP gallops on to the sound of whoops, whistles and thunderous applause. He grabs the mic from the hype man and starts shouting an unintelligible mix of French and English that’s full of such blatant excitement and passion it makes the audience go nuts all over again. He’s wearing a typical JP-esque ensemble: skinny jeans, a Hawaiian shirt, and a black velvet bow tie. He bounces around the stage, slapping the hands of people in the front row and busting out all kinds of retro dance moves. He looks so fuckinghappythat for a few moments, I forget to be anything but happy too.
All I can do is watch and smile as he tries to say something to the crowd. At this point they’re too loud for him to get an actual message across, so he circles around to the back of the keyboard and starts to play. The cheering dies down enough for his music to fill the room.
The stage is filled with a variety of instruments, and at first I wonder if any backing musicians will come on, but when the few bars’ worth of notes he chimes on the piano continue repeating after he moves over to the drums, I realize he’s using a looper. He’s going to play everything himself.
The effect is breathtaking. He single-handedly builds a wall of sound piece by piece. It’s a complex structure, filled with intricate, overlapping patterns that somehow all come together to form a powerful whole. The music is traditional and unique all at once, a mix of Québécois roots with synth sounds and rock elements all blending together. The first few minutes are just instrumental, and then JP leans towards the microphone and begins to sing.
His voice is deeper than when he speaks, a little rougher around the edges. He sings in French, a mix of drawling vowels and harsh, snappy consonants you can’t help but nod your head to. He gets to the chorus, and I realize this is one of the songs whose titles he gave me to put on the album cover: ‘Have You Ever Wondered What Fish Dream About?’
I don’t know what any of the other words mean, but he sings them with a mix of desperate urgency and haunting honesty that makes me feel like my chest is splitting in half.
I glance at Shayla and find her watching me, a question written on her face. I just shake my head in wonder as JP winds the song down and gets swallowed up by applause once more. He waves and shouts the crowd down until we can finally hear him speak.
“Merci, merci! Merci mille fois!”
A guy’s voice shouts, “You’re sexy!” and I follow the sound to find Ace and the whole Sherbrooke Station crew taking up the front row.
JP lifts his shirt up to show off his stomach.
“And I know it,” he deadpans.
It takes another minute for him to quiet the crowd back down after that.
“Okay, motherfuckers, calm down for five seconds. I have something to say.” He takes a deep breath. “So, I know you all came here to get a piece of this sexiness tonight”—he gestures up and down his body—“but you’re also here to support a good cause. An important cause. One that matters a lot to me personally. I...I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was eight.”
The room goes still. My hand flies to my mouth.
“I always got to told to hide it, to keep it to myself. Even my brothers and sisters didn’t know. In this world, we feel so much pressure to be just like everybody else. We are told to hide anything that could make us seem too different. We’re supposed to be unique, but nottoounique. We want to be special, but not thebadkind of special. So we give ourselves a role to play. We give ourselves boundaries to stay inside, where we know we’ll be safe, where we know we’ll be normal.”
He walks out from behind the piano and sits right down on the edge of the stage, like this is his living room and he’s chatting with a few friends.
“Different than doesn’t mean less than. Not everybody fits inside the same boundaries, and if you try to squish yourself into a box that wasn’t built for you, either it will break, or you will. Trust me; I know. So I’m here tonight to tell you that Iamdifferent. I don’t learn the way other people do. I don’t think the same way. Stuff that should be easy is hard for me. Sometimes I need help or extra time, but...but I’m not going to let that stop me.”
He stands up. The crowd cheers.
“I’m not going to let it stop me from making my own music.”
More cheering.
“I’m not going to let it stop me from doinganything.”
People start stamping their feet.
“I’m not going to let it stop me from telling someone very special, unique, and different in all the best ways that I was scared and I was wrong, but I’m ready now. I’m ready for me. I’m ready for her. I’m ready for us. I’m ready for everything.”
I make a strangled noise in the back of my throat. I’ve never felt this many things at once. It’s like I’m burning and freezing, floating and falling, imploding and exploding with the sheer force of this moment. The room is almost shaking with sound now, and I don’t realize Dario and Patrick from Metro are beside me until they’re making a chair with their arms and scooping me up inside.
