We recently connected with Marie-Jeanne Paquet and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Marie-Jeanne, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
The ‘La Session’ podcast is by far one of the most interesting creative endeavors I have worked on! With this project, I’m creating a series of long form video interviews with notable figures of the Montreal music scene. I want to highlight the beautiful talent we have in the city. I also wish to spark dialogue about what we can do to improve musicians’ experience building careers here. I find so much fulfillment in showcasing the viewpoints of people whose work I admire as well as sharing their wealth of knowledge with music lovers and musicians alike.
Growing up a musician in Montreal, I was always surrounded by so much beautiful live music, but I always felt that there were barriers in place that kept artists from connecting and understanding each other. The ‘franco’ scene, composed mainly of french-speaking musicians and the ‘anglo’ scene were never really mixing and mingling. Neither were the professional musicians who had formal musical training and those who didn’t. The truth is I never fully knew where I wanted to situate myself, but after I got accepted into music school and spent years studying Jazz Voice at Vanier College and then at McGill University, I found myself in the ‘anglo’, formally trained category.
Wanting to break out of that box, I set out to meet as many musicians from as many scenes as I could. As time went on, I encountered knowledgeable musicians, talented composers, wonderful educators and successful venue owners and I wished I could have recorded the beautiful insightful conversations I got to have with them. And so the seed of the ‘La Session’ podcast was planted.
It all really cemented itself in my mind when I first visited the Sud-Ouest Recording Service in Verdun, to book a recording session for my first single with my band ‘Vagabonde’. There, I met William Poulin, the co-owner of the studio and saw the space for the first time. I immediately knew there was room for my project to grow there. We made an arrangement for me to start filming episodes in the studio and I have been producing, hosting, researching, editing and marketing the interviews ever since. I truly believe in this project and am convinced that these conversations have the potential to feed the souls of both musicians and music fans. I hope to one day partner with a larger entity in order to distribute La Session to its audience, and collaborate with festivals or companies who also believe in my vision. There truly is something special about the music we have here, and I am extremely grateful to be able to witness it and give it a place to live online!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Marie-Jeanne Paquet, and I am Vagabonde, a 23 year old self-produced artist, podcast host, jazz vocalist, vocal coach and small business owner. I’ve got a bad case of the ‘how hard could it be’ gene, meaning I’m willing to learn almost anything if it can be used to accomplish a goal I have. Fortunately for me, I am also multi-passionate, which has led me to throwing myself into a plethora of different artistic adventures.
I first started thinking of myself as someone who creates art when I started writing music as a teen. It wasn’t good at first, but I got a taste of what it was like to reflect somewhere in the outside world what was going on in my inside world. Ten years later, Vagabonde is now my main endeavour, through which I aim to express my identity as a woman growing up in the 21st century, with all the beautiful and ugly things that come with it. I write music about my journey with self-acceptance, feminism, eco-anxiety and healing, all the while striving to create a space to celebrate with my audiences the beauty of sharing music together. Although I still struggle to pinpoint the exact genre of the music I compose, I credit the black American musical tradition with creating all the sounds that inspire my writing. I believe that all modern popular music descends to some extent from Jazz, RnB, Soul and Gospel, and so I currently call my music Soul-pop.
I became a jazz vocalist through years of formal vocal and musical training, and developed a deep love for the black American musical tradition by listening to Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, Muddy Waters and Etta James, to name a few. The musicians I met and the connections I made during my post-secondary education helped establish my love for interpreting mine and other people’s music both on stage and in the studio. Being a jazz musician has shaped me in many ways, one of which is my tendency to favour live, organic and improvised arrangements. With my years of experience performing came the urge to empower other singers to do the same, and so I started growing my studio of private students in 2021.
During the pandemic, I turned to another endeavour to satisfy my need for learning: with a good friend of mine, I purchased a retired mini school bus and completely renovated it into a camper. Being a twenty year-old with limited mechanics and home-improvement knowledge, I quickly learned to scour the internet to find forums and videos that could teach me the necessary skills to complete my project! Fast-forward a couple years later, and Kyrie the Bus (@kyriethebus on instagram) has visited Florida, Halifax, Vermont and Gaspésie and is travelling the roads of Canada with renters all summer! The bus is currently being rented for the 2024 and 2025 seasons on Outdoorsy and RVezy, and the link to our listing will be included in my social links.
As mentioned earlier, I now also produce and host a music podcast named La Session. With this project, I hope to better understand the current musical landscape and uplift the talented musicians, entrepreneurs, venue owners and educators that I am surrounded with and constantly amazed by. This endeavor is for now an investment and a labor of love that allows me to cultivate connections.
I believe that in 2024, with the music market being as saturated as it is and the streaming platforms’ business models, the time has come to reimagine the Hollywood pop star dream for most musicians. I actively am trying to create a new, more diverse and sustainable dream for myself, a universe where I can create music that reaches a dedicated audience while also maintaining both my mental and financial health without sacrificing my integrity. Being an artist now requires cultivating multiple skills, keeping multiple pots boiling, envisioning multiple ways to achieve success. If you or someone you know is on that same journey, feel free to reach out to me any time, I would love nothing more than to find better solutions to this conundrum!
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
The best thing that can be done to help support creatives is to democratize access to information on how to sustainably make art! I think that education is the best tool to enable people to reach their goals, especially when it comes to building a business or a brand. Could we potentially include basic financial literacy and business management courses in high school education curricula? Even things like enabling emerging artists to put on medium-scale shows for free, paying live entertainment workers a liveable wage, or teaching art appreciation in early education will go an incredibly long way in terms of building a society where art is respected, protected and expected from its members.
The more I interact with artists I look up to, the more my daydream about getting signed to a label who would manage my booking, recording, touring and finances seems to fade. Most of the money being made in the music industry now comes from live performances and merchandise sales, meaning that no matter how much an artist’s discography is being listened to on streaming platforms, they may never get the recognition they deserve and the check that comes with it. I believe in funding artists directly, and allowing them to build teams with people they trust. Moreover, labels are sadly some of the institutions which historically have the least amount of transparency with their roster when it comes to finances, which definitely contributes to keeping artists in the dark in terms of what it takes to make a living from their art.
If we’re being specific to the city I am based in (Montréal), I believe we severely lack medium-scale venues that are accessible to emergent artists and small-scale festivals. Venues like Turbo Haus, Casa Del Popolo, Mai/Son, Quai des Brumes and Casa Obscura are the beating heart of the DIY music scene in this city, but there are too many of us! Multiple beautiful art-forward spaces like Café Résonance and l’Escalier had to close down in the midst of the pandemic, leaving us with way too much amazing talent, and not enough places to host it. We need more spaces to make live DIY Montreal music happen, and fast!
If making art is accessible and friendly, more people are able to stick their hands in and start to make something, which is good for everyone! People that make art enjoy art, and people that enjoy art support art, and people that support art help create a world where communities thrive and human wellbeing is improved. Contact with any type of art can make someone feel something, and if feeling something is not the absolute core of the human experience then I don’t know what is!
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Although I always knew I loved the arts, I haven’t always had the confidence to follow my aspirations and make a career out of being an artist. A lot of people will tell you that they always knew they wanted to be an artist, that there was never a plan B or that they knew they were going to be famous. Truth is, I had a plan B and it tempted every logical rational fiber of my being every time things got tough or complicated with my art. After attending a very competitive highschool, I had settled on the alternate dream of becoming a doctor. I told myself that music was the selfish route, and that becoming a doctor would allow me to actually help others in tangible ways. Was I wrong? Not necessarily, but my life experience has now led me to nuance this thought.
After high school, I went on to attend Vanier College and McGill University in Montreal and complete an undergraduate degree in Jazz Vocal Performance. I thought that I would feel like a legitimate professional musician when I got that diploma, but when it came, I still didn’t have the confidence to throw myself into a music career. This is when I started applying to medical schools in the area. Luckily, I had always maintained a good GPA and was able to secure a spot at Université de Montréal for the 2023-2024 school year. It felt bittersweet to start something that wasn’t music, but I thought it was for the best, and that I would be able to keep my music career going on the backburner in my free time.
As the first months of medical school went by, reality started to settle in. No matter how good my work ethic was, no matter how well I managed my time, I couldn’t be both a singer and a doctor at the same time because there was a conflict of identity there. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere anymore. I would show up to class at 8am with bags under my eyes, still humming to the beat of the music I had sung the night before. I would bring my anatomy books to shows, and study as I listened, trying to take in both the art and the knowledge at the same time. My medical school friends would ask why I would ever jeopardize my success as a medical professional to go to a show, and my music friends wondered why we never played together anymore. Halfway through the winter semester, I started getting burnt out. I had made a point of never turning down a gig or a musical opportunity, as they were less frequent now that I was a medical student. Finally, I hit my breaking point during spring break of this year. I could not bring myself to lead both lives anymore. As difficult as it was to admit, I knew I was passionate about medicine but that it was a way to avoid doing the scarier, more difficult thing: putting my 100% into an arts career.
So I pivoted. I immediately started writing new compositions, emails, and project pitches. I reached out to anyone I knew who I thought could help guide me. I met up with many of my old professors, friends of friends I looked up to and colleagues who had connections which could help me get started. I started learning how to properly use Logic Pro, how to produce and edit quality video content and how to arrange for three vocals. Getting to the point of making the call to drop the med program was the hardest part, but once I wrote my resignation letter, I never once looked back. Thankfully, things got going pretty fast. I’m doing multiple recurring live music entertainment gigs around Montreal, I was able to play my first festival with Vagabonde, I recorded and released four pilot episodes of my podcast La Session and recorded in studio several of my original songs. It hasn’t been that long, but I already know for a fact that I made the right decision and I am now growing at a speed I never thought I could reach before. So don’t be scared to pivot, if you feel it in your gut, it might be the best decision you ever make!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mariejeannepaquet.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vagabonde.mj/?hl=fr
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vagabondequebec/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LaSessionPodcast
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/vagabondequebec
- Other: https://www.outdoorsy.com/rv-rental/pointe-claire_qc_ca/2005_ford_e-350-superduty_334346-listing
https://open.spotify.com/show/7bVt8vyubGlTSJnTgDvNQW?si=70eba4fd4f064c0f
Image Credits
Josh Kirschner
Brad Hurley
Hadi Amouzegar