We first featured Dominique Fricot on our blog as one of our #musicmonday artists in June. A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to chat with the Vancouver singer-songwriting about his first full-length album Sweet Little Fantasy and got to know the person behind the music.
Fricot is currently on tour in support of Sweet Little Fantasy, playing Regina, SK tonight and wrapping up on July 18th at Armstrong’s ‘Music In The Park’. Sweet Little Fantasy is available now.
asapmusicblog.ca: What was the first song in your memory that inspired you to become a musician?
Dominique Fricot: I just remember probably the first time I ever really wanted to make music myself was… my neighbour had an electric guitar and I’d never really experienced or witnessed an electric guitar in the flesh. He was playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and I think that was the first time I was ever really caught by the buzz, you know?
A: Talking about the new record, you had a campaign through PledgeMusic and it kind of had the usual music and merch offers, but there were also some unique ones like the drunk-dialing one. How did you come up with the incentives for the campaign?
DF: Me and my manager Jan – or Janager, as I call him – were sitting around brainstorming and I think we just kind of wanted to give unique or fun options because a lot of them, we could really take a chance on them because if nobody wanted a drunk dial, it’s not like we paid to have them made and then they’re just sitting in our storage – we came up with those as random ideas that we were just spitballing. I think with the other ones, the ‘Break-Up Package’, the ‘Social Media Significant Other’, we saw my album – a lot of my music is a lot about relationships and about breaking up, so we kind of figured that would lump in well with my brand, I guess you could say. We were just throwing out hilarious ideas and every once in awhile we’d be like, “Yeah! Let’s just do it, that sounds like fun!” and people could get behind it.
A: Sweet Little Fantasy will be released tomorrow. Was there anything that came out of the writing and production process that was particularly rewarding for you for this record?
DF: I think working with Warne Livesay, who was my producer, and a lot of the artists and musicians that played on it. The whole process was just basically a month or a month and a half of spending time in the studio with great people and watching my songs that I’ve written over the last five or six years kind come to life. I think my favourite things is that there are certain songs like “The Saddest Day” or “I Miss The 80’s” – songs that I had a little bit of a different idea of starting out with, kind of going in a different direction and becoming something that I totally… you know, it was a pleasant surprise, “Oh, I didn’t expect it to go here, this is really exciting and awesome!” I think just all of that is just always really rewarding in the studio.
A: You wrote on your PledgeMusic campaign page that “I Miss the 80’s” was actually one of the last songs that was written for the record. Where did the inspiration come from for that track?
DF: Well what happened was, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and I ended up quoting the movie Dirty Dancing – I ended up saying, ‘Nobody puts baby in the corner.’ For some reason, I was just struck with this thought of the actress in the movie, Jennifer Grey, and how she basically got a nose job shortly after that movie. A few years later, what had happened was her career had just completely stopped and making movies for quite some time after that. It’d always been kind of a strange, sad story to me – I had always been a really big fan of hers, in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as well.
I all of the sudden was watching these YouTube videos and things from the 80’s, I caught myself thinking about that time and really just missing the 80’s, you know, my life at that time. I sort of stopped myself as I was longing for this time and wishing I could go back to that time and realizing… I didn’t even really experience that time, I was a little bit too young. So I kind of caught myself at this sort of sad moment and laughed at myself for basically missing something that I didn’t ever truly know or experience, and that’s what the song came out of.
A: You’ve recently had one of your songs “Out of the Scenery” was featured on Beauty & The Beast on The CW and it received a positive response from the fans of the show. What was the experience like hearing one of your songs on TV and then having fans of the show being drawn to your music because of that?
DF: Really amazing. It’s probably one of the most impactful sort of moments that’s sort of happened in my career because the response was so intense and so powerful from so many people. I think that the one day that CW, or whatever the entertainment group – Instinct Entertainment Group – when they tweeted that my song was going to be on the show, I went up like a hundred or two hundred Twitter followers that day. To me, even just having this small subculture of fans now, or people who support who support my music across the globe – Germany and Portugal and Brazil. I can tweet things now with #beautyandbeast or whatever and 40 people will retweet it. It’s been pretty cool to find new listeners that quickly.
A: If you could narrow down a single message that you would want your music to convey, what might that be?
DF: I think in one of my songs, “Strange Lady”, the centerpiece of the song is just to love your loved ones and be loved by your loved ones – that’s a lyric in the song, “just love” and “be loved”. I think my music is a lot about loving the people around you, the people you miss. I think a lot of [the songs] are sad, but often when we’re sad in music, we’re sad because we miss something and because something was really important to us. I guess that’s kind of the message I want to convey is to cherish the things that are important to you and to make the most of life.
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For more information on Dominique Fricot, please head over to: http://dominiquefricot.com.
