2. En esta oscuridad (In This Dark)
4. Amantes de este mundo (Lovers of the World)
5. Enviando las fotos (Sending the Photographs)
6. No era él (The Wrong Guy)
If you didn’t discover Julie Doiron’s music through such an improbable fact as the inclusion of one of her songs (“The Life of Dreams”) in the popular iPhone commercial, you will already know that the distinguished ex-bassist of psychedelic noise-pop band Eric’s Trip, has been publishing her solo works since 1996 which have driven her to a home-loving and intimate folk close to Hope Sandoval or Kristin Hersh.
With twelve albums (one of them awarded with the Best Alternative Album in the Canadian Juno Awards), Julie Doiron has become established as one of the most expressive and thrilling songwriters of her generation, thanks also to multiple collaborations with Mount Eerie (in the outstanding and emotional “Lost Wisdom”), Okkervil River or Herman Düne.
Spiced up with her prolific live curriculum participating in important Spanish festivals such as Primavera Sound or Tanned Tin, her last LP, “So Many Days” (2012), goes in even deeper into stories with an intimate weight and extreme sensitivity, just as if she was singing by your side, just as if she was whispering her songs into our ears. With the firm hand of Will Oldham in her songwriting and the ability to find treasures in simplicity like Nick Drake, Julie Doiron weaves bittersweet melodies which reveal sober tenderness and direct emotions.
After releasing a limited edition 7” in 2015 with “Swan Pond” and “Yer Kids”, “Julie Doiron Canta en Español Vol. II” (Acuarela Discos, 2017) is the second in a series of upcoming albums of adaptations into Spanish of some of Julie’s best songs.
As a homage to those 60’s and 70’s vinyls in which well-known English and American artists dared to present their repertoire in a broken Spanish, in this beautiful Mini-LP we find 7 songs of Julie Doiron’s setlist recorded again for the occasion and adapted into Spanish by Jesús Llorente, translator of Philip Larkin, Raymond Carver and Dennis Cooper, occasional lyricist for Migala or The Wave Pictures and author of three books of poems. The objective of these adaptations was to escape the word-for-word translation and to figure out how would have Julie expressed her lyrics without writing in French or English, saying the same thing but with different words, without betraying her essence.
With this in mind and based on diverse references such as the Antonio Machado who paraphrases Whitman in “The Open Road” or on iconic popular Spanish phrases sang by flamenco masters such as El Torta, in “Julie Doiron Canta en Español Vol. II” we face the (re)interpretation of six songs: “Homeless”, “In This Dark”, “Lovers of the World”, Sending the Photographs”, “The Wrong Guy” and “Dance Me”; and an ad hoc text entitled “Brumario” (arranged with the original music of “Le Piano” from her 2001 album “Desormais”), all of this performed by Julie Doiron with charm, feeling, audacity and skill.
