Huguette Lavigne weaves a hypnotic spell with a shimmering dose of Pixie Dust in her new single and animated video — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
A wholly instrumental piano piece from her latest album Jazzed Up Dreams, Pixie Dust manages to be both bright and haunting at the same time, evoking both optimism and an ache for bygone days. When she wrote it, Lavigne imagined an enchanted forest, a mental or spiritual place to retreat from the many difficult demands on our time, resources, and attention in today’s increasingly difficult epoch.
“First, you find yourself on a mysterious path as you enter a strange, lush, and hypnotic green forest,” Lavigne invites us to imagine. “Then, you let yourself slip into enchantment, illusion, and the supernatural. With a sprinkling of golden, glitter-like fairy dust, you are mesmerized. Keep your eyes open for the green-goddess fairy at the end, you may even think that anything is possible.”
Lavigne came to the song via her usual improvisational process, sitting at her piano and just playfully experimenting until the entire work unfolded rather quickly. Lavigne does not fully write down her music; rather, she relies on shorthand to summon her memory recall for future performances. The final piece is then stored in her head and fingers. Once her composition is recorded, she moves onto the next score.
“Given the world’s seemingly precarious future, the social challenges, and other dire predictions, I’m happy to have created a theme that digs in to find the child in us, and the video delivers this to us splendidly,” she says. “Beautiful ethereal scenes unfold. The child escapes to a world of fairies and golden-sprinkled pixie dust.”
Lavigne was brought up in a milieu of three Canadian cultures — Franco Ontarian, Quebecois and English Canadian. She recorded three albums prior to Jazzed Up Dreams: Five O’Clock Somewhere, Yin and Yang and Free and Easy. Her music is influenced by elements of neo-classicism, neo-romanticism, minimalism, jazz, folk, and classical music from India. In effect, she creates a modern fusion of styles.
Watch the video for Pixie Dust above, listen to Jazzed Up Dreams below, and find Huguette Lavigne at her website, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok.
