Longueuil, Quebec's Marilou had an early career as a singer when she was a teenager: She released two albums and played the role of Fleur-de-Lys in the musical Notre-Dame de Paris. “Then, for a number of reasons, for my mental well-being and because I didn’t know myself as an artist, I needed a period of silence,” she tells Apple Music. “For five years, I didn’t make music, I didn’t listen to music, I truly cut myself off from my first love.” She had new adventures to keep her busy: the launch of the Trois fois par jour food blog and motherhood. Shortly after the birth of her first daughter, however, she was gradually drawn back to music after buying a piano on Kijiji. “The more things I experienced, the more confidence I gained, and the more I felt the need to express my feelings creatively through music,” she says. Traits d’union—her first album since 2013’s Au milieu de mon écart—“is a bridge between my silence and the present”, she says. “But there are also bridges between me and other people.” The songs, written over the past six years, address breakups and revelations: her relationship with her brother, an unwanted pregnancy, the social media mirage, the mourning of a grandparent and, of course, love. Marilou made Traits d’union in close collaboration with musician/producers Guillaume Doiron and Fred St-Gelais. Here she talks through its tracks. "Les artifices" “When you’re young, you’ll sometimes split up with somebody and never hear about them again. But when you have kids, the relationship needs to evolve; it’s no longer a clean break, it’s more of a transition. ‘Les artifices’ talks about a relationship that you choose at one point, but that slowly changes and that you have no other choice but to maintain. I think there are a lot of parents and children who will be able to identify with all that.” "Le temps de rentrer" “I was inspired by how sometimes you get the impression of coming home when you’re with another person. You hope and expect so much from that person, you feel like touching them, profoundly moving them, but there comes a time when you understand that you can’t really feel at home until you’ve actually met yourself.” "Trop grand ici" “It’s the first melody I wrote on my piano, which I bought on Kijiji. My daughter Jeanne came over and stood next to me and said: ‘You’re good, Mommy.' At that instant, I thought to myself that if I had talent, however humble it may be, I needed to let others benefit from it. ‘Trop grand ici’ is the first bridge on the album.” "Ta lettre" “When I was younger, I wanted to be coherent, musically speaking—to have my own style—but I’ve now come to terms with the fact that I like all kinds of things and what lends coherence to the album is my voice. When I wrote this one, I was going through a pretty dark period. I went out and bought myself a ukulele and the song just came to me in two minutes. It’s a mixture of profound despondency and the pleasure of discovering a new, very cheerful instrument.” "Ce vent de septembre" “You’re supposed to get a sense of renewal in the spring, but for me it’s at the end of the summer, maybe because I was born in September. While taking a walk outside on one of those first chilly evenings, I realised there are things you don’t feel like talking about, and that’s perfectly all right. It’s something so precious that you don’t want people to know about it, you don’t want to lay it all out on social media, in an age where we’re so eager to flaunt everything that’s going well in our lives.” "Trait d’union" “It talks about my childhood and my relationship with my brother. I draw a parallel between me and him and my two daughters. What they’re going through is a bit like what I went through. My brother was the common denominator at both my homes; he was also there at school. When you’re young, you’re a little self-centred. I’d go off on tour for months at a time, my parents would accompany me, and I realised that I’d never stopped to think about what it was like for them. We had a grandfather who was very much a part of our lives, we loved him dearly, and he’d always listen to country music in the car when he gave us a lift. I wanted the tune to have a bit of a country ring to it as a tribute to him.” "Le tour de toi" “It’s highly regarded, socially, to have travelled the world, to have material objects, to buy stuff, to do loads of things. To set about exploring who you really are deep down—what I’m about to say is corny, but what the heck—that’s the longest journey you’ll make, and it should be the one that’s most valued. While you’re doing it and afterwards, it becomes difficult to connect with people who remain somewhat superficial. On the surface, they seem to have experienced loads of stuff, but if you dig deeper, they don’t know themselves. The song talks about that kind of discrepancy.” "Le cœur des pommes" “It’s about the biggest loss I’ve suffered up to now in my life, the death of my grandfather. He’d never say the words ‘I love you’, even though he showed it a lot in his actions. When I was little, every time he came to our house, I’d always tell him, ‘I love you, Grandpa.’ On his deathbed, he took my hand and said, ‘I love you,’ and I’m the only person he’s ever said those words to in his entire life.” "La protagoniste" “For this one, I was inspired by Instagram, by the way everyone becomes the main character in the films they post. When I first wrote it, I’d put myself above all that, but after a lot of soul-searching, I said to myself that I still hadn’t finished dealing with that desire to put myself on display. So I flipped it around to the first person, in the hope that I’ll continue to break free from that role.” "La fumée des bougies" “It talks about the abuse of power, about emotional dependency, about men who don’t realise the impact their behaviour can have on young women, about desire, about lack of education. It’s talks of a relationship between a man who’s too old and a girl who’s too young. Ever since the #MeToo movement, I’d been trying to address the subject in a less accusing, more introspective way, to talk about how it can feel when it happens to us.” "À la même adresse" “It’s a song I wrote to my ego, about four years ago. Now I smile when I talk about it, because I can see the headway I’ve made. There are times when you get the impression that your ego speaks louder than you do. I often allowed it to make decisions for me even when I knew I was getting myself into trouble. Talking to it as though it were a parasite did me good.” "J’en ai parlé/J’en ai parlé (moi aussi)" “It always fascinates me when two people are involved in a situation and they have completely different versions of what happened. So I wrote two songs that show two different points of view on a breakup. We’ll never really know the true story, like in real life.” "L’amphithéâtre" “It talks about when you have a friend who lives in their own little world, someone with a strong ego who gets themselves into trouble. Sometimes the person has moments of lucidity, but they always fall back into the same pattern. I could clearly picture myself on the balcony watching them onstage at the theatre and telling them: ‘Look, I want to get you out of here, to take you outside with me, but is that what you really want?’” "Rose pâle" “It’s about that moment when a woman who doesn’t want children sees those two faint pink lines on a pregnancy test. I wanted to write about everything that goes on in that split second. It happened to me when I found out I was pregnant with Rose, my youngest daughter. I felt like I lacked options. To lose her or to lose myself seemed to be the only two possibilities. I decided to lose myself and, like I say in the song, to love her later on.” "Rosie" “I wanted to come full circle. It’s a declaration of love to the child I didn’t initially want but who I learned to look forward to bringing into the world. Now I love her so much; I wanted to tell her. I feel profoundly happy at the moment, after years of inner conflict and working on myself. Happiness isn’t instantaneous, even though it seems everything needs to be in this day and age.”