Quebecois crooner Pierre Lapointe has spent much of his career traipsing through different styles of French chanson, dabbling in jazz, classical and punk rock along the way. But in late 2020, he finally fulfilled a long-standing musical fantasy - to record an album of holiday songs, Chansons hivernales. That said, Chansons hivernales is hardly your typical yuletide fare. In true subversive Lapointe fashion, the album traffics in uncomfortable scenarios and emotions - drunken relatives making a spectacle at family gatherings, plus holiday breakups and loneliness - that resonate long after the Christmas decorations have come down. But Lapointe delivers even the saddest seasonal songs with his trademark flamboyant flair, making them natural additions to his regular concert repertoire any time of year.

Pierre Lapointe Background

Years before he released his first album, Pierre Lapointe was already a decorated singer-songwriter. In 1999, at the age of 19, the Gatineau, Quebec, native came in first place in the music category of a regional talent show, Tout nouveau, tout show, followed by a three-prize victory at the esteemed Festival international de la chanson de Granby in 2001. So when he finally released his self-titled debut album in 2004, his stardom felt like an inevitability - Lapointe’s irreverent contemporary spin on classic French chanson would win him awards for best pop album and newcomer of the year at the Félix Awards (aka Quebec’s answer to the Grammys). But with his 2006 follow-up, La forêt des mal-aimés, Lapointe graduated from being a strictly Quebecois sensation to an international hot commodity - the record went to No. 1 on the Canadian album charts, while laying the groundwork for his ongoing success in France. Since then, Lapointe has proven to be one of Quebec’s most unpredictably chameleonic creative minds, as captivating in melancholic solo-piano mode (2011’s Seul au piano) as when playing the mischievous art-folk experimentalist (2013’s Punkt) and the garage-rock provocateur (2018’s Ton corps est déjà froid).