French-Canadian singer/songwriter Lynda Lemay rose to prominence in her home province of Quebec beginning in the early 1990s while simultaneously building a substantial audience across Europe, where listeners responded to the compassionate, literate, and frequently humorous perspective that infuses her playful yet poignant songs about everyday existence. Her compositions reveal a novelist’s attention to precise detail together with an engaging knack for gently mocking her personal anxieties, and the melodic pieces—almost invariably performed in French—have quickly attained the status of Canadian standards; her appeal in France rests on a deep familiarity with the chanson tradition.
Born July 25, 1966, Lemay spent her childhood in Portneuf beside the St. Lawrence River outside Quebec City. She displayed an early talent for writing and poetry, completing her first song at the age of nine. During adolescence she took up the guitar and, at eighteen, captured first prize in the Quebec en Chansons Song Competition. After finishing high school she devoted herself to various literary projects, among them a novel, before returning to music in the late 1980s and becoming a fixture on Quebec’s “bars à chansons” circuit. Label attention followed her 1989 victory in the Granby Song Contest, where she received the Best Singer/Songwriter award for “La Veilleuse.” Her debut album, Nos Reves, appeared in 1991. The follow-up, Y, issued in 1994 with arrangements by Marc Perusse, achieved massive success and earned double-platinum certification.
In 1995 Lemay married Franco-Canadian comedian Patrick Huard. She embarked on a European tour the next year and issued the mostly live EP La Viste. Her third studio album, titled Lynda Lemay, arrived in 1998, succeeded by a full-length live recording in 1999. Du Cog à l’Ame came out in 2000, and the second live collection, Les Lettres Rouges, followed in 2002. The seventh studio album, Les Secrets des Oiseaux, was released in 2003. Demonstrating her range as a writer, Lemay also created the folk opera Un Eternel Hiver, which received its French staging in 2005—the same year her eighth album, Un Paradis Quelque Part, appeared.
Two projects surfaced in 2006: the studio album Ma Signature and the recorded version of Un Eternel Hiver. In 2007 she performed a series of sold-out concerts at Paris’s Olympia theater; those shows were captured for the live release 40/40. Subsequent studio albums included Allo C’est Moi in 2008 and Blessée in 2010, after which her first career-spanning Best Of compilation was issued in 2011.
