Song Spotlight: Bette & Wallet, "Squeegees" (2008)

AND NOW it’s time for a lesser-known song to see some daylight. The song is none other than Bette & Wallet’s franco-Canadian folk masterpiece “Squeegees”:

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Mary Beth Carty is a singer/guitarist/accordionist from… Antigonish NS I think… and her partner in this duo is Gabriel Ouellette from Portneuf County, Québec. Lookit ‘em. They’re so cute:

Or they were in 2009 anyway. Weren’t we all.

“Squeegees” was SO important to us on tour. We put it on in the van countless times while on tour in Europe, because in spite of our wanderlusting cosmopolitan worldcore hearts, we always missed Canada, a little bit. And there is simply no song that is more Canadian than “Squeegees”, because instead of just begrudgingly acknowledging that we are a multi-lingual nation, B&W walked the walk. Their song was a major influence on our song “Poutine” , because it probably never would have occurred to us to sing in both languages, or indeed to just write about a feature of ordinary Canadian life. Remember: we’re in a genre full of bands pretending to be Irish, the pressure to just write songs like “Oim drenking whesssshky, lets have a foight” is very strong.

So, “Squeegees” features a character that would occasionally show up at our gigs at Foufones Electroniqiues in Montreal: the Squeegee Punk, the crusty mohawked French guy with an attitude who squeegees your car whether you want him to or not, and who has notorious difficulty keeping that insane mohawk going in the winter.

If you listen to Into the North you’ll find that on all of the up-tempo songs we tried to recreate the shoe-tapping background rhythm that is in this song, and that is so characteristic of French-Canadian folk music. We cranked it on “Pique La Baleine”.

Bette et Wallet only released two albums, which is sad, but they were truly an underground Canadian folk duo for the ages.