It’s no coincidence that there’s a particularly sensual quality to the crunchy, bluesy, ’80s-inspired rock of Montreal duo Miels. Its two founding members, Quebec’s Jean-François Lussier and Georgia’s Paige Barlow, are also romantic partners who’ve been inseparable since meeting in the Nevada desert on individual solo tours. But even after several trips throughout the US, an EP (Quarantaine blues) and a single (“Remplacer le printemps”) in 2020, the duo’s first LP, Prends-moi comme la mort (translation: “take me like death”), wasn’t a given. “We didn’t really know each other when we started composing together,” Lussier tells Apple Music. “We never thought we’d form a band, let alone release an album. But when Paige moved to Montreal and started learning French, we began writing together and things became more serious.” They still yearn for the freedom of open road—which eventually brought them together—and that void of being unable to travel during the pandemic does inform the album, but it’s also inspired them to write material for a second one. In the meantime, they reminisce, track by track, about how Prends-moi comme la mort came to be.
Intro Paige Barlow: “We wanted to set the tone for the album with this short intro. You can hear cicadas and you get a real feel for the place I come from, the Southern US. It also illustrates that desire to travel without a map, which is at the heart of our project.”
Prends-moi comme la mort PB: “It’s a kind of tribute to when we first met. I wanted to evoke the intensity and excitement I felt at that time.” Jean-François Lussier: “Paige loves French expressions, and she’d just learned that we call an orgasm ‘la petite mort’ [the little death], so she had to use it!” PB: “But not only that! I was also thinking of another French expression I love, ‘à la vie, à la mort’ [for better, for worse]. I find that so romantic.” J-FL: “We were looking for a somewhat spacey tone for the guitar, with lots of delay, almost hypnotic. We wanted to evoke the desert, because that’s where we met; it also explains that touch of Americana you can hear in the song.”
À notre manière (Gimme Love) PB: “I wrote this song once I was back home, in Atlanta, after we met and went on our first road trip. I’d gone back to my boring job in marketing, and I realised I couldn’t go on like that. I had projects outside of work, but what I really wanted was love and intensity, not a normal life.” J-FL: “After the magic of our first encounter, it was really weird to find ourselves back in our own homes, thousands of kilometers apart. We started to work on tracks, each on our own, without necessarily thinking we were going to form a band or anything like that.”
cœur vaudou PB: “It’s directly inspired by the time we spent in and around New Orleans. We were there for a week, and the song talks of those hot nights spent in the middle of a swamp. We’d rented a little house right in the bayou and there were mosquitos everywhere.” J-FL: “It was the second time we’d met up to take off on a road trip together. Paige was becoming more and more interested in the French language, and it was fun to be in the city in the United States where the francophone heritage is the most present.” PB: “I like the fact that we’re passing the buck, that it’s a real discussion between the two of us and that the tension builds throughout the song.”
Le diable au corps J-FL: “Once again, it’s Paige’s radar that gave us the title of this track. She’s especially drawn to expressions that have a sexy and carnal side to them.” PB: “There are so many expressions that have no equivalent in English! This is one of them that I really like. I’ve tried to write in the third person, from the perspective of someone older looking back on their wild youth. I think we were somewhere in the Appalachians when I started writing it.” J-FL: “When we met, I felt as though I was reliving my teenage years. I’d leave my job to go travelling with Paige again and my friends would lecture me, telling me I should be a bit more sensible.”
Fais tout ce que tu veux de moi J-FL: “Part of this comes from a song intended for a solo project, and I ended up merging it with something Paige had written on her own. It’s a succession of words that conjure up the atmosphere of our trips: motels, cockroaches and so on. And there’s a little hats-off to The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. It’s a song that’s been with me for years, and it played on the radio while we were driving across the Nevada desert. We looked each other straight in the eye and something magical happened. We didn’t even know each other’s last names at the time, but we decided to trust one another.” PB: “We’d jokingly say to each other, ‘You’re not going to kill me, I hope!' But we surrendered ourselves to the moment. It was a real leap of faith, a dive into the void!”
De la boue dans le veines PB: “It talks about my life, about growing up in the swamps of Georgia. But it also talks of J-F’s childhood because he also grew up in the country. My rural heritage is something I’ll carry with me all my life.” J-FL: “I’m from Napierville [in Montérégie], which is nothing like the swamps of the American South, but I find that our personal experiences have a lot in common. It’s Paige who came up with the title, and I love it. It reminds me of Muddy Waters.”
Et si? J-FL: “This one is more from my standpoint; it’s a sort of variation on the theme explored in ‘Prends-moi comme la mort’. It’s pretty straightforward and refers to the Las Vegas period of our trip.” PB: “It also talks about the dreams you can have, without necessarily knowing what’s going to happen.”
Pour l’amour du ciel PB: “I think we wrote it when we’d just come up with a name for the band. In the song, I say, ‘tout va comme le miel’ [everything’s going like honey], and it’s our way of saying that we’re going to devote ourselves entirely to the project.” J-FL: “It’s the first single we released. It’s another one of those French expressions that Paige adores—in fact, just like the word ‘miel’ [honey]. We really like the contrast between the sweetness of the word and the type of heavier rock we do.”
Sur le radar PB: “This one’s from Clarksdale, Mississippi, the location of the famous Devil’s Crossroads, where Robert Johnson seemingly sold his soul to the Devil.” J-FL: “It was one of my childhood dreams to go there. I have to admit, the place itself is pretty disappointing, but we found the ambiance we were looking for in an old wooden cabin that we rented right in the middle of a cotton field. There was an old upright piano that I used. I think it was the first time I’d played a song for Paige.” PB: “We started out with bits of songs by J-F, and then I added verses which I’d written in Atlanta. What’s funny is that we’d chosen the same themes: vice and sex.”
Faites-moi perdre le nord PB: “This track is about separation and long-distance romance; I wrote it when J-F was at his place in the North and me in my house in the South. There’s that idea of geography, of territory, but the phrase ‘faites-moi perdre le nord’ [make me lose my bearings] is mainly a reference that is, in fact, more...sexual.”