The Montreal Victoire’s director of business operations Marie-Christine Boucher and French Canadian star Roch Voisine go way back. Boucher’s father Michel was Voisine’s head coach when the singer played hockey at the University of Ottawa.
Hockey is what brought them back together for a one-of-a-kind collaboration. The team and Voisine recorded a song called “Pour La Victoire”, a re-written version of Voisine’s song “Pour Une Victoire”. The song was officially released on Saturday ahead of the team’s game against the New York Sirens.
It was Boucher who came up with the idea once she knew what the team name would be. Her and Voisine are neighbours, and in Voisine’s re-telling of the origin story, he says Boucher kept the secret well under wraps.
The original version of the song had its roots in hockey. It was written by Voisine for a television special on Mario Lemieux.
“It’s proof that a song can have several lives,” Voisine said. “We changed the song so that it could be played in an arena. It wasn’t done to play on the radio necessarily.”
The New Brunswick native said that he had seen the team play before, and was on board with the idea.
“I love it. I love the atmosphere,” he said of the PWHL. “You feel [the passion] and they let you feel it. In music, it’s our job to evoke feelings to thousands and thousands of people. It’s perhaps easier to do with a microphone when you look them in the eye but when you play hockey, to evoke emotions and feelings, it’s not obvious but they’re proof that it can happen.”
“Plus,” Voisine jokes, “since they’ve been in studio to record the song they don’t lose anymore.”
The team recorded the song ahead of their PWHL Takeover Tour trip to Seattle and since then are 7-1-1. On the season, they are 12-1-2 and sit comfortably in first place in the PWHL.
Although it is unlikely that any of the Victoire players in studio have a new career waiting for them, head coach Kori Cheverie had three players stand out in the recording session: forward Gabrielle David, defender Dominika Lásková, and captain Marie-Philip Poulin.
“I won’t say that anyone was too talented,” said Victoire goaltender Ann-Renée Desbiens, who said she’d keep her singing for when she’s at home. “We were warned a few times for missing notes, so it was pretty funny to be coached in that way. We had a lot of fun.”
Of course, Cheverie also took the opportunity to make the team bonding activity a learning opportunity and coachable moment.
“It’s an uncomfortable space to be in,” Cheverie said. “I loved it because it showed another profession and the level of detail it takes to get something right. That’s something that we shared with Roch, that if we weren’t performing correctly, if we weren’t singing the right lines, if we didn’t have the steps down we were doing it again. It’s the same as trying to run a hockey practice or trying to get it right in a game.”
Cheverie said that everyone on the team bought in, and some looks behind the scenes showed that.
The 61-year-old Voisine joined the Victoire on the ice at practice last week, and although many of the players were not born at the height of his popularity, there was a group of players that attended one of his concerts so they had met him before they started recording.
“I won’t say that I know all of his songs,” said Desbiens. “But it was fun to get to know him over the last few weeks.”
Voisine says he doesn’t expect to write a sequel if the team’s season ends with a championship.
“We’ll just hope that by the time that happens the fans know the song by heart and they can sing it themselves.”
The Victoire look to extend their six-game winning streak at Place Bell on Tuesday night against the Minnesota Frost, who sit in a tie for second-place. The game will be broadcast in French and in English on Amazon Prime in Canada, or on YouTube internationally.
