this was originally published on march 12, 2026 as a video on my youtube channel. see video below.
my old band actually got started kind of by happenstance.
at the beginning of this music journey, i didn’t really want to play with other people. i was only getting started writing songs and singing, and i had a really bad case of imposter syndrome.
i figured ‘i’ll just stay all by myself and write songs and that’ll be it’.
but my next-door neighbor just happened to be a pretty good guitarist, and he just happened to have a rehearsal space.
and the guy i hired to do construction at my house happened to also be a really good drummer.
and then, well, my husband sébastien was a bassist, as well as being a guitarist.
at this point, it seemed like fate. so i asked them all if they’d like to play just a couple of times, just to see how it felt.
and i fell in love with singing with a band.
hearing a song that you created out of thin air, by yourself in your little head, come to life with the band is exhilarating.
this happenstance band and i worked on five songs, all of them original songs i’d composed with sébastien, and we did a gig in my village last spring.
and i fell in love with playing on stage.
i never thought i would. i really didn’t expect to. but man, i really do. i love the energy and i love the support that comes from having a live band with you.
(i vlogged my first gig if you want to watch that by the way.)
last summer, we moved to montpellier, which is a pretty big city in the south of france. i took my husband with me, but i had to leave behind my guitar player and my drummer.
one of the first things i did when i got to montpellier was to put ads on websites and on facebook groups so that we could find musicians to play with.
i think the fact that we already had a studio recording of one of my songs maybe gave the project credibility, i don’t know. or maybe there were a lot of musicians looking to play in a band at that time. in any case, we had a lot of musicians respond to our ads, which was great.
we had choices.
we did several rounds of auditions. each time we’d pair a drummer with a bass player or a drummer with a guitar player. we were really looking for good musicians that were also nice people, because the idea was to rehearse once a week and then do gigs, and i didn’t want to do that with jerks. i wanted somebody that, you know, i’d want to hang out with regularly.
also, since my imposter syndrome is never very far away, i wanted people that were comfortable and confident enough to make suggestions and participate in the creation process, but i didn’t want people that would take over the whole project and try to take control of things just because they had more experience.
i didn’t want to feel like i’d have to fight to get my vision across. this was my project, these are my songs. i’m not conflict-averse, but i definitely don’t enjoy conflict. so nice confident people was a basic requirement.
and i definitely didn’t want any mansplainers. that was another one of my requirements.
seems crazy, but we actually did filter quite a bunch of people just from that criteria alone. one guy showed up like half-drunk, and when he realized that my lyrics are sometimes a little on the feminist side, he looked so appalled, it was almost funny. so he was out, and several others were out just on personality.
side note: i would have loved to have a female guitarist or a female drum player, but out of the maybe 20 musicians that we auditioned, there was not one woman. we didn’t get any responses from women. which was too bad. i would have loved that.
sébastien plays both guitar and bass (and keyboard, too, actually) and didn’t know what he wanted to play. so we auditioned both guitarists and bass players. we also considered having two guitars at one point, but in the end, mathieu, our new guitarist, is really good. and since the bassline is so important in our songs, sébastien decided to stay on bass.
and there you go. that’s how we found mathieu, our guitarist, and didier, who’s a really good drum player as well. both of them are really nice and it’s been really a pleasure working with them on all my new songs.
right now, we’re maybe halfway in the process of putting together a full set to do gigs. i’ve started looking for venues to play in the coming months.
more coming on that soon!