by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Travelling isn’t just about discovery, but also rediscovery. That’s the message which permeates Adieu Tristesse, the most recent album by superior French musician Arthur H.

“I talk a lot about leaving a place where one has experienced hardships—that’s in a lot of songs—and going towards someplace where everything is possible,” says H over the phone from his home, Paris. “It’s sort of a dream. It’s not really an escape, but rather about passing to another level, and also the acceptance of losing oneself to find oneself.

“I love feeling lost in a foreign place, feeling like I’m not a European and that I’m not shut in by my habits and routines. As a result, my perception isn’t idle, it’s awakened, because when you go elsewhere, there’s always potential danger in what you don’t know. So I like being in Montreal—on one hand, I feel lost, on the other, I feel very good. It’s a peaceful wandering.”

By now, H knows our town well, having performed here countless times. But Adieu Tristesse cements the bond. H and his constant collaborator, guitarist Nicolas Repac, holed up over the winter of 2004 in the studio of producer Jean Massicotte, who brought the same gentle, organic elegance he’d applied to The Living Road by Lhasa de Sela (who’ll join H on stage at les FrancoFolies de Montreal this year, hopefully to reprise their magnificent duet “Indiana Lullaby,” from his earlier album Pour Madame X).

“When we were in our little, luminous grotto with Jean Massicotte, and it was snowing outside,” recalls H, “it was as though time didn’t exist anymore.”

That’s a quality present throughout the Arthur H catalogue, an artful, intuitive blending of then and now, of the classic and the current. It’s certainly present on the three duets he conducted on Adieu Tristesse, with Toronto singer Feist, with Mathieu Chédid (aka French pop goblin M), and with his own dad.

H calls Feist “a truly great singer—I wanted to take the risk of mixing my voice with hers.” Of Chédid, he says, “He’s truly atomic—he can explode like that, he’s a great liberator of energy.” But the session with the elder H, Jacques Higelin (a Franco-pop star of one generation back), was the most intense. “The poetry allowed me to tell him very personal things that I wouldn’t have been able to say otherwise. If you have a normal conversation with someone, you can say certain things, but if you decide to write him a big poem, it’s certain that you’ll go to the heart of things, the heart of the problems. This song really allowed us to see each other face to face, and to rediscover each other.”

With guests Lhasa de Sela and Ariane Moffatt at le Spectrum on Saturday, June 17 (sold out) and Sunday, June 18, 7 p.m., $36.50

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