About Jean Leloup
Hometown
Sainte-Foy, Quebec, Canada
Born
May 14, 1961
Genre
French Pop
Part Dylanesque busker, part Bowie-styled dandy, part Gainsbourgian provocateur, Jean Leloup has forged a singular path through Québécois rock since the late ’80s. Born Jean Leclerc in Sainte-Foy in 1961, he spent his childhood in Togo and Algiers before returning to Quebec as a teen in 1976—a harbinger of the wandering spirit he would embody as a recording artist. After honing his theatrical bonafides in the musical Starmania in the mid-’80s, Leclerc adopted the stage surname Leloup (French for “the wolf”) and made his first big splash with the house-inspired jam “1990,” a sort of francophone counterpart to Dee-Lite’s “Groove is in the Heart” steeped in ironic geopolitical critique. But on 1996’s Le Dôme, Leloup mastered a fluid fusion of folk, grunge, and rap-inspired flows, while alternating between French verses and English chorus hooks on his signature serenade “I Lost My Baby.” Over several albums and decades, Leloup keeps following his madcap muse wherever it leads him—and when he strips it all down, as on the outdoor acoustic field recordings of 2019’s L’etrange pays, his eccentric personality and incisive storytelling resound all the more loudly.
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