L’emprunt(e) volume 3: Live Recording – Prairie Comeau

Collection of songs revisited with as much warmth as ease by Prairie Comeau, made up of Anique Granger and Benoit Archambault, two artists deeply committed to passing on our song heritage, L’emprunt(e) volume 3 – Enregistrement public (Live Recording) was recorded in front of an audience following a residency at the Centre de création Boisbriand, on October 3, 2025.

Prairie Comeau stands out for its drive to breathe new life into the traditional French-Canadian repertoire. After making a name for themselves with the EP L’emprunt(e) vol. 1 (2024) — a refreshing introduction followed by L’emprunt(e) vol. 2 the following year — the duo returns today with six new songs recorded live in front of an audience. With this bold offering, Prairie Comeau gives us a moment suspended in time, one of direct musical transmission, human to human, where it feels good to come together.

Made up of Fransaskoise Anique Granger and Québécois Benoit Archambault (Mes Aïeux), the project is dedicated to rearranging, revisiting, and performing pieces from the songbook La bonne chanson that are rarely explored within the trad music scene. Deliberately drawing on the colours of traditional music and folk-Americana influences, the duo redirects the spotlight onto these pieces of heritage, making them accessible to a wider audience while respecting their essence. Some stories are timeless, simply waiting to be brought back to life on this side of modernity.

It’s precisely in the way Prairie Comeau brings past and present into dialogue that L’emprunt(e) volume 3 – Enregistrement public truly shines, thanks to the nature of its format. The magic that emanates from the banter between songs, the interactions with an engaged audience, the shared bursts of laughter, and the applause simply cannot be manufactured. It has to be lived, it has to be captured. Plain and simple.

The new EP brings together the tracks Partir, Plaisir d’amour, Élégie, Ici-bas, Tout le long de mon pays, and Le tricot de laine — the latter composed by Théodore Botrel and published in 1903 — a tribute to homemade, handmade things, to all the love they can hold, and to the passing down of ancestral knowledge.

A couple of notes: I kept song and book titles in French (as usual for your bilingual deliverables), and rendered “Enregistrement public” as “Live Recording” on first mention since it functions as a subtitle, while keeping it in French within the body text where it reads more as part of the title itself. Let me know if you’d rather it stay untranslated throughout.