Singer-songwriter Elliot Maginot stakes out new territory on Easy Morning, an album resulting from a creative retreat in the woods.

“Writing an album during the pandemic is a unique undertaking,” he explains, “because you do it not knowing when you’ll be able to perform your songs before an audience.”

With this new opus, Elliot makes an acoustic turn, carried along by diverse instrumentation and richly textured orchestrations, his pop coloured by classical influences and West African sounds – music that transcends borders and defies labelling.

Strings, horns, percussion, guitars and flutes carry on a captivating and inventive dialogue. From the opening notes of “Emilio (Any Day Now)”, we enter a universe of rich tones that is at once disorienting and familiar. The songs, sung in a confessional tone, are about letting go, renunciation and forgiveness of oneself and others.

Elliot plays with atmospheres and intensities and designs a multi-nuanced sound landscape, at times distilling gentle melancholy, on “Holy Water”, “True Love Might Not Find You in the End” and the interlude “While You Were Feeling the Water”, stepping up the cadence on “Dead Church” and “Dead Men Walking”. Antoine Gratton’s string quartet arrangements lift up “Holy Father” and “Easy Morning”, the latter piece illuminated by the kora.

City noises and country sounds punctuate the listening experience, stakeholders in the creative process. Closing out the offering, the moving “You Are Free” leaves us on a note of lucid hope as the final guitar chords resonate.

Easy Morning is produced by Elliot Maginot and his sound brother, Connor Seidel. Elliot Maginot (voices, acoustic guitar, piano, organ, charango, banjo, mandolin, Wurlitzer, percussion) is accompanied by Émile Farley (bass), Mathieu Le Guerrier (drums), Robbie Kuster (balafon, marimba, glockenspiel, musical saw, xylophone), Élage Diouf (percussion), Connor Seidel (percussion), Salif Sanou (Peule flutes, kora), Alex Francoeur (flute, clarinet, saxophone), Rémi Cormier (bugle, trumpet, French horn), Odette Hélie (accordion), Camille Paquette-Roy (cello), Edith Fitzgerald (violon), Sarah Martineau (alto), Amélie Lamontagne (violon) and Marie-Christine Depestre, Franck Julien and Karine Pion (backing vocals).