After more than 13 years of existence, 5 albums released and many tours through North America and Europe, this week Elephant Stone will release their first music in French: Le Voyage de M. Lonely dans la Lune which is scheduled to be released on February 18th 2022.
The Montreal psych-pop band led by Rishi Dhir has long woven stories of loss and grief, existential crisis and rebirth, and a world withering away all set to elegant, intense droning music. According to Dhir, this new EP is a love letter sent to Montreal, to Quebec and to all the French-speaking people in the world.
“I built this storyline about a hermit named M. Lonely who is very content in his solitary world until a world event happens that causes everyone else to stay home as well… sound familiar?” Dhir says. “He sees this as a mockery of him and his choices, deciding instead to build a rocket ship to the moon to be left alone.” Unravelling over the course of four songs with raucous hooks and voltaic synths on the first two tracks, and lonely, soft melodies on the last two, M. Lonely, Dhir says, “ultimately realizes he was happier back on imperfect Earth with all of its imperfect people.”
Rishi Dhir was born in Montreal and has always maintained a strong bond with his French-speaking friends and fans. Dhir was inspired by the repeated pandemic lockdowns to create his character Mr. Lonely, a hermit who is happy in his lonely world. He worked alongside Felix Dyotte to compose the EP and recorded it with his longtime bandmates Miles Dupire (drums), Robbie MacArthur (guitar) and Jason Kent (keyboard/guitar). So why did Rishi decide now was the time to record in French?
“Miles, my drummer, and I have been talking about it for a while,” Rishi tells us over Zoom. “You know, he’s Francophone. And at one point the majority of the band was Francophone, except me. I’m like the one Anglophone. So it’s always been on my radar that we should one day just try doing it in French. We did one song off of Ship Of Fools back in 2016. But with COVID yeah, I was willing to take more chances, I guess, the fact that I wasn’t touring and I had more time to just develop things and I’m always working on new songs and it just happened that when I was working on this new batch of songs, usually how I write songs is I come up with the chord progression or riff and the melody and the lyrics. And the melody usually has these jibberish lyrics but with these songs, somebody who doesn’t know French, they may think that this is what French sounds like so I was like, oh, that sounds like French. Maybe I should try this.“
Singing in French, he admits, was a new discipline and made him focus in a different way.
“When it comes to French music, the words matter,” he says. “It’s like a language of romance, right? So I really had to make sure I had to put a lot of focus this time on my vocals, which in the long run, it was a great thing because it just made me really dissect my singing a lot more than on past records.”
“I intentionally put this out for our French fans. Like that was my thinking, like, why not give something that shows how much I appreciate where we come from and where we’ve been. I mean, it’s not like it’s a political statement at all by any means, but it’s something to show that, you know, everything matters and everything’s part of it. And you don’t just have to just follow one path on what you’re doing. It was a challenge and I enjoyed it.”
Dhir admits it’s been a prolific time recently and has some major plans for the next few months.
“We’re going to be releasing a movie. I put together this animated short film based on Hollow, our last record. So I rescored the first six songs so it’s like this 10-minute long soundtrack with orchestral arrangements. And I worked with an animator in Montreal and we put this film together. So that’s going to come out, I think after South By Southwest. So we have that and the May tour is going to happen and then I just wrote and demoed a whole new record over the holidays. So I booked studio time in June to start the new album and then we’re going to go to Europe in September.”
Watch the full interview with Rishi Dhir below:
Le Voyage de M. Lonely dans la Lune is released on February 18th 2022
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