That Eric Alper

Martin Larose and Anaïs Vanessa today release “Breathe In Breathe Out,” the luminous and searching new single from their forthcoming collaborative album ‘The Solivagant Tales,’ both out now. Where their partnership has already demonstrated its capacity for politically charged progressive rock, this new track turns the lens inward – a visceral, emotionally precise meditation on anxiety, the need for stillness, and the courage it takes to find space in an overwhelming world.

The song arrives as both a musical statement and an act of permission. “Inhale the fear, exhale the pain / The only door that still remains / Is deep inside a quiet space / Where I can breathe and find my place,” Vanessa sings in the opening lines, establishing at once the track’s emotional terrain and its central invitation: to turn toward discomfort rather than away from it. Her lyrics have always carried what admirers describe as a therapeutic quality, and “Breathe In Breathe Out” distils that gift into something urgent and immediate – the kind of song that feels like it was written specifically for the moment you needed it most.

Vanessa’s writing on the track is unflinching in its honesty. “The race goes on I can’t keep pace / They call it life I call it chase,” she reflects, before arriving at the song’s galvanising core: “Breathe in the ache / Breathe out the sin / The only way out / Is deeper in.” It is a lyrical turn of genuine force – reframing the instinct to escape as an invitation to descend, to trust the interior landscape rather than flee it. The daughter of a chansonnier who grew up filling notebooks with poems before she ever called herself a songwriter, Vanessa brings that lifelong intimacy with language to every line.

For Larose, the track presented a compositional challenge that suited his instincts perfectly: building a soundscape capacious enough to hold Vanessa’s emotional range while retaining the progressive architecture and guitar-driven depth that have defined his eight-album catalogue. Trained at the Chicoutimi Conservatory and recognised by Guitar World in the early 1990s, Larose has long been drawn to music that rewards patient listening. The multi-layered production of “Breathe In Breathe Out,” recorded and mixed at his state-of-the-art Le Studio Septentrio in Saguenay, is no exception – it breathes with the song, expanding and contracting alongside Vanessa’s vocal, as though the music itself is practising what the lyrics preach.

The single is the second to be drawn from ‘The Solivagant Tales’ – a title Larose chose to reflect his long-held sense of occupying an unusual position in the Canadian and Québec music landscape: prolific, distinctive, and deliberately his own. The album, co-written almost entirely by Larose and Vanessa, represents the full flowering of a creative relationship that began more than two decades ago, when Vanessa was his student. “At 15, she delivered a rendition of The Cranberries’ ‘Zombie’ in front of a packed audience,” Larose has recalled, “and I was completely floored.” That early astonishment has matured into one of the most compelling partnerships in contemporary Québec rock.

Vanessa’s own path to this moment has been as unconventional as it is inspiring. She spent years as a backing vocalist and performer across various projects, worked as a counsellor at a drug addiction treatment centre, and at 31 made the bold decision to enrol at the École nationale de la chanson – presenting her original compositions that same year on the stage of the Festival de la Chanson de Saint-Ambroise. Her short bio puts it well: “the road may be winding – but don’t worry… she’s used to crossing the lines.” “Breathe In Breathe Out” is, in many ways, the most nakedly personal expression of that resilience to date.

‘The Solivagant Tales’ features the duo’s cover of The Cranberries’ “Zombie” – a song both artists feel carries renewed and urgent relevance – as well as a bonus track, Bob Dylan’s “Down in the Flood,” which Larose describes as concluding the album “in a fun yet darker mood.” Together, these choices signal a project alive to history, to the weight of the present moment, and to the enduring power of a song to say what ordinary language cannot.