Musician Richard Laviolette, who passed away in 2023. A posthumous album by Laviolette, All Wild Things Are Shy, is out Sept. 6.Matt Horseman/The Globe and Mail
On Sept. 5, 2023, sophia bartholomew held songwriter Richard Laviolette’s hand as he was injected with a dose of the sedative midazolam to begin the process of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID). As it took effect, he turned his eyes to the nurse and doctor administering the drugs. “Oh, that’s really nice,” he said. “Did you bring enough for everybody?” He used his last breaths to thank the medical professionals and tell his family and friends alongside him that he loved them, and soon slipped into a coma before receiving a final injection that shut down each of his organs until his heart stopped.
“I’m so glad that he was so surrounded by love and family and friends until the end,” bartholomew says. “And celebrated. He got his flowers, you know?”
Ever since bartholomew, Richard’s partner during the last year and a half of his life, told me this some weeks ago, I’ve been unable to come to terms with one detail. It’s not that I don’t understand the process, or that Richard is no longer, physically, here. It’s that the end result – his heart stopped – still seems unthinkable.
Richard’s music supports my disbelief. Scrappy poignancy permeates his early folk-rock record A Little Less Like A Rock, A Little More Like Home; his beloved country singalong Funeral Song emphatically foregrounds community and life in the face of death; and on the posthumous, All Wild Things Are Shy (Sept. 6, You’ve Changed Records), he meets his impending curtain call with clear eyes and stark honesty. As his voice, among a chorus of others, rings out on the latter album’s Florence and Delilah, I can hear it, rendered in the timbre of a snare drum: a heartbeat, indomitable.
“One of our last times together, he was talking about watching this archeology show, and that he realized his role in life, ultimately, was to be an archeologist of the human heart,” one of Richard’s closest friends, Sonia Waraich, says. “I think his music spoke so much to that and the way he loved. He had a very special quality of being able to love the whole person, the beauty and the ragged edges, just a complete acceptance of people and where they were at, at any moment in time. I think that is really beautiful and rare.”
On All Wild Things Are Shy, haunted roots rock blurs beauty and ragged edges to form a vision of truth. Death hovers like a spectre over the record, though no nihilistic sense of doom pervades it. Richard’s understanding that his days were numbered amplifies the power behind lyrics that tell about love, resilience and joy, but his pain isn’t glossed over, either. It has the effect of a dear friend looking you directly in the eyes and telling you, in no uncertain terms, what’s coming.
Steven Lambke of You've Changed Records, sings "Carter and Cash" from Richard Laviolette's posthumous record, All Wild Things Are Shy, at Sappyfest in Sackville, N.B., in August 2024.Matt Horseman/Supplied
Richard and I moved to Sackville, N.B., around the same time in 2017, shortly after he had released Taking The Long Way Home, a deeply moving country record that reckons with feelings about family and home. He was my neighbour. Over the ensuing year or so, he became much more: a friend, a drinking buddy, a formidable cribbage opponent, a partner-in-crime. We spent a yuletide blizzard together with a few other snowbound friends. We played trivia at our local, Thunder & Lightning, where I also watched him sing. He gifted me a guitar. I was heartsick and wrestling with addiction, and felt, frequently, like a wretch. During that extended blue period, Richard gave me the two most profound gifts human beings can give to one another: attention and time.
Judging by conversations with his loved ones and by the stories they’ve told, Richard’s ability to bestow those gifts was staggeringly prolific, and the sphere of souls on the receiving end seemingly boundless. Steven Lambke, the head of You’ve Changed Records, emphasized his ability to dive deeply and generously into intimacy. That capacity became a bedrock on which he built a body of work, including concert experiences where he could confront, compassionately and in community, universal topics such as loss and grief – but also rage explicitly against the colonial and capitalist forces that keep us in unnecessary pain and isolation.
“That commitment and belief is so present in the music that it’s still incredibly moving to hear those songs now,” Lambke says.
“The thing I loved about Richard’s music and Richard as a person is that the music and the person were of a piece,” he adds. “The way he made music, and the things that he prioritized in his music, were the same things he prioritized in his life.”
For a good chunk of that life, Richard was acutely aware of the kind of fate he might face. He dealt with myriad chronic and complex health issues, and those experiences suffused his music and writing with a sense of immediacy it is impossible to manufacture. He found out in his early 20s that he had inherited Huntington’s disease, an incurable neurodegenerative condition, from his mother, Marie – ”It’s a disease that takes everything and never gets better,” bartholomew says. He opted for MAID after his symptoms rapidly worsened. But it was also his mother’s side of the family that nurtured an ethos of community and communion.
Richard’s brother, Matt Laviolette, describes a typical holiday family scene growing up: a single room “vibrating with music” at their grandparents’ place in Port Colborne, Ont., as their mother and her seven siblings all collected around an upright piano with instruments in hand, playing country gospel tunes such as I Saw the Light and Will the Circle Be Unbroken?. One can easily trace a thread from these gatherings forward through Richard’s live shows and many of his recordings, where it’s clear he had a deep-rooted understanding that music is capable of healing and connecting people, through the simple act of singing together. The voices of friends and family members have a heavy presence throughout All Wild Things Are Shy, testifying to this idea.
“You’re on the same frequency as somebody else when you’re playing and singing with them,” Matt Laviolette says. “You’re sharing something, or bringing something to life.”
This past August at Sappyfest, Sackville’s annual music and arts festival, the musicians who helped make All Wild Things Are Shy paid tribute to Richard by sharing a live performance of the album, while a rotating cast of friends sang his parts. Richard filled the record with opportunities for communal singing, and the concerts the band has put on have offered people the chance to come together in this particular, generative way. As Ariel Sharratt and Mathias Kom of the Burning Hell sang Constant Love, an ode to Marie that is the album’s final song, I found myself wholly overwhelmed, weeping, struck by the weight of Richard’s gratitude for his mother and his simple message – when we love someone completely, our love can outlive us. It can grow well beyond the physical boundaries of our bodies. And Richard, who knew how to love widely in this total kind of way, was able to offer that love up, on record, with his voice.
When I listen to that song, I still can’t help but think: How could it possibly be that this heart no longer beats? I can hear it clear as a bell. I can still feel it.