Hailing from Clare, Nova Scotia, Acadian musician P’tit Belliveau is taking us on a journey spanning a lifetime within the 3 minutes and 45 seconds of his newest single. “L’eau entre mes doigts” and its accompanying video hook us, reel us in and make us consider just how quickly life passes us by.
While comparing the speed of life’s passing to water that slips through your fingers, the track’s lyrics relate directly to P’tit Belliveau’s life. With mentions of being between the ages of wanting to grow up and wanting to maintain youthfulness as well as watching time slip by while working on construction sites, the track captures how it feels to realize that adulthood might not be all it was cracked up to be when we were younger and that time gets ahead of us before we know it.
“The song is simply about how fast time goes by,” says P’tit Belliveau. “When I wrote it, all the people in my high school graduating class were graduating from university or having kids and moving away. Where I come from is very small, so I knew everyone in my class personally (and their parents too, haha). So seeing everyone start their own lives and leave mine got me thinking about time and how I had just been working my ass off, building houses, while everything was just whooshing by.”
The video follows a character who leaves his home and sets sail. His journey takes him on many ups and downs, including a being overtaken by a storm, finding love, getting married, having a child and enduring the death of his partner. In the end, the video leaves us with the feeling that he lived a full life, but that it slipped past him in the blink of an eye.
Created by Vincent Bilodeau, the video has an animation style reminiscent of early-2000s videogame graphics and is just obscure enough to lock viewers in until the end. It is not something that you can simply watch once.
“The reason I picked Vincent Bilodeau,” continues P’tit Belliveau, “is that I find he has a way of giving personality and emotion to extremely and intentionally empty characters. I find it really beautiful. It’s like he uses the emptiness of the digital world to tell a story of real substance.
“It’s uncanny but also kind of nostalgic for those of us who grew up with N64 or PS1 graphics and characters.”
While the video and the track are each well made on their own, they complement each other and together form something greater than their separate parts. The alt-folk sound of P’tit Belliveau pairs perfectly with the retro graphic style of Bilodeau, and the result is nearly mesmerizing.