Jaclyn Lizzi has been posting her songs on YouTube and says 70 per cent of her audience now is from Quebec.
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When Les Cowboys Fringants lead singer Karl Tremblay died just over a year ago, many English Montrealers were surprised by the incredible outpouring of grief from franco Quebecers, underlining that many anglos had no idea just how huge this Québécois band was.
Meanwhile, there’s a singer in Houston, Tex., named Jaclyn Lizzi who has been a big Cowboys Fringants fan for years, and she has been doing her best to get the group better known outside of Quebec. Lizzi is a passionate francophile, and for a few years now she has been translating French-language songs and posting videos of her renditions, always shot in her apartments, on YouTube.
At first she was mostly covering songs from France, but then she stumbled across Les Cowboys’ classic L’Amérique pleure and she was blown away by it, particularly by the lyrics penned from the point of view of a Québécois trucker on the road in the U.S. mulling over just how mucked up our world has become today.
Tremblay sings: “Pis que j’park mon vieux camion/J’vois toute l’Amérique qui pleure/Dans mon rétroviseur.” (Then I park my old truck/And I see all of America crying/In my rear-view mirror.) The song, one of Les Cowboys’ best, is the perfect example of the band’s formula — smart socially-conscious down-to-earth lyrics backed by an old-school rootsy style of rock.
Lizzi released a video of her translation/cover in 2020. It didn’t take off right away, but it just downright exploded a year ago after the death of Tremblay in November 2023 from prostate cancer at the age of 47.
Lizzi’s video of L’Amérique pleure has so far been viewed 174,000 times. She also did a rendition of Sur mon épaule, which has been streamed 24,000 times. Two weeks ago, the singer released a video of La fin du show, a song from the most recent Cowboys Fringants album, Pub Royal, the soundtrack to the musical of the same name. That video has already been viewed 74,000 times.
In a recent phone interview from her home in Houston, Lizzi said 70 per cent of her audience now is from Quebec.
“I had no idea how popular they were when I did L’Amérique pleure,” Lizzi said. “I just liked the song. And for the most part everyone (on YouTube) has been super generous, very, very kind.”
Lizzi says she thinks Quebecers just love the fact that she’s helping bring their culture to a new audience across North America.
“I think there’s definitely an aspect of just wanting to be seen,” Lizzi said. “On the global stage, people don’t really think about Quebec or French-speaking Canada. It doesn’t have a huge presence outside of Canada or even outside of Quebec in Canada. At least that’s the way it seems to me as a foreigner who lives a fair distance away.
“I do think I accidentally touched something with a large group of people who are very proud of what they have to offer but which isn’t really seen on a global stage very much.”
Lizzi took French courses in high school in Houston and she just kept working away at the language, even though it was quite the unusual thing to be doing in Texas.
“I speak Spanish very well, I’m fluent,” said Lizzi, who works as an electrician on movie and TV productions. “My parents are very practical people. Everything has to be done for a reason, and they really pushed me into Spanish because it was the practical thing to do. And I did very well in Spanish and I got jobs because of it.
“But there is something very special about learning something impractical because you want to. There was no practical reason to learn French. I don’t think I had any French-speaking friends here. But I just wanted to learn it for no particular reason.”
Then she started getting into French-language musicals, notably the big hits co-written by Quebec songwriter Luc Plamondon, Starmania and Notre Dame de Paris.
Years later, she appreciates the irony that the biggest part of the YouTube audience for her English-language translations of French songs are francophone Quebecers.
“I do think it is really funny,” Lizzi said. “I think that touches on the desire to be seen. I get a lot of comments with people saying ‘Thanks for making this more accessible’ because there are a lot more people who understand English than understand French, even within Canada.”
She also thinks her success has something to do with the fact that there are so many people in Quebec who understand both languages.
“So a lot of people in Quebec can understand the adaptations,” Lizzi said.
It was the lyrics — which are mostly written by the band’s guitarist Jean-François Pauzé — that first drew Lizzi to Les Cowboys.
“As far as lyrics go, they’re very, very smart,” Lizzi said. “I grew up on country music, and they do have that country rock vibe and I like that kind of music generally.
“When I first saw the music video for L’Amérique pleure, I didn’t understand the words really well because I wasn’t used to the accent. It’s pretty fast in some parts. It was the video that first caught my eye because it’s line dancing in a country bar and the main dude has a cowboy hat on, so I’m like, ‘OK, this is so strange because I know this bar, I know this dude, I’ve been here before, but I don’t understand a word he’s saying.’ Then I looked up the lyrics afterwards out of curiosity and I was like ‘Wow, this is heavy.’ But it’s heavy in a way that I really like. It’s very thoughtful but not in a way that’s pretentious.”
She was in Quebec for the first time this past summer and did a couple of small shows and says she’d love to come back to connect with all the people here who are watching her videos on YouTube.