Inductee Diane Tell Reflects on Writing Since Age 12, Owning Her Publishing, and “Choosing” French 

by Karen Bliss | October 28, 2024

Francophone artist Diane Tell, who sat on the board of SOCAN for five years until 2023, was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in September. One of Québec’s pioneering female singer-songwriters, she started writing songs at age 12 and released her first self-titled album in 1977 while still a teenager. Perhaps her most famous song, “Si j’étais un homme” — inducted into the CSHF in 2017 — is found on her third album, 1980’s En fleche; she was only 21. In 1980 and 1981, not yet 25, she won six Félix Awards: Best Singer-songwriter (twice), Best New Artist, Best Song, Best Album, and Best Female Artist.

Living in Europe since she was 25 and in Switzerland for the past decade, the 64-year-old has released over a dozen albums, her latest collection of originals in 2019, called Haïku (on Propagande). She performed about 40 concerts in 2021-2022.  In 2023, she was named Chevalier des arts et lettres de France.

Tell spoke to the CSHF about the induction, writing at a young age, how the business has changed, and what she sees as the difference between French and English songwriting.  

You’ve received other awards before.  How do you feel being honoured for your body of work as a songwriter?

That one is special. It’s quite different because you’re not going to a ceremony not knowing if you’ll win [laughs], like the Oscars or the Junos. You prepare for it quite a bit in advance. It’s a different concept.  I also had a very nice recognition in France, Chevalier des arts et lettres de France. It’s like the equivalent in Canada from the Governor General for the arts. I got that also from France a year ago. I guess this is the time in my life where people are looking at the whole picture (laughs).

Absolutely. You tour a lot still. Are you writing as well?  Will we see a new album from you soon?

Oh, yes, I am always working on a new album. I’m also performing and administrating, taking care of the catalogue since I’ve got my own business. So, there’s a lot of work, but I don’t know when the new or future album will be coming out. It’s all a question of financing.

You know, the business has changed a lot. It’s no longer you record, you come out with the album, do the tour, and then back in your room to write new songs. It’s more diffused because of the online presence of the music. It’s no longer a business that is run by a business company in a particular territory; it’s now become worldwide. It’s a different way to handle it. Like, for instance, you could probably come out with a single every three months rather than an album.

You own your catalogue and manage your own publishing. A lot of younger artists, one of the first things they want is a publishing deal.  I want a record deal. I want a publishing deal. Why it was important for you to own your catalogue?

I do own all my catalogue for a long time now [her company is Tuta Music Inc.]. I own the publishing and I also own the phonogramme. I have a distributor. I made that choice about 12, 13 years ago to go with one distributor for the world for digital.

You see, the physical record deals used to be territorial. A company that’s very well in place in Canada doesn’t necessarily have what it needs to take care of a content in Germany or in France or wherever. Even multinationals. Like, if you sign with Sony Canada, it doesn’t mean that Sony France is going to take care of business. So, the physical business, the way it was before, is very much tied to territorial.

Same with the author-composer rights. It used to be that you sang in a particular country and you get airplay in a particular country and organizations like SOCAN, they will manage these rights for you. They will administrate these rights for you. But today, with the streaming, it’s completely scattered. And when I get my administration documents every month from the distributor, it’s like “in Russia on the 14th of March, 2024, a guy that is connected with Spotify Premium listened to that song from that album.” There you go [laughs]. It’s like thousands and thousands and millions and millions. It’s very fractured.

So, it’s very different. And it’s different also for the organizations like SOCAN. You can imagine now that they have to handle trillions of pieces of data. And before, it was just territorial. That’s the thing that is very difficult for the older organizations to manage. And then the new people arriving, they don’t know about this old way to do things.

A lot of accomplished songwriters as you are selling their catalogs or a portion of. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Sarah McLachlan. Would you ever do that? 

Well, first of all, what we hear is not very precise. Like, what exactly are they selling? Are they selling their author-composer rights? Are they selling the publishing? Are they selling the synchronization rights or the phonogramme rights? Besides, they don’t own all their rights because the artists that you’re naming have deals already with big national companies. So, when you speak about these deals, or when you read about these deals in the newspaper, I’m not sure what information we’re getting. It’s like when I read one play on a platform pays 0.0001.5, it’s not information that’s reliable. So, I don’t know.

My questioning about that is, there’s a few things, but, to speak simple, let’s say you sell the whole thing, whatever you own, to one organization. The first question is, what are you going to do with it? [laughs] so a song doesn’t end up on a commercial with some awful products that oh my God. You want to know what they’re going to do with it.  Because you still have many years to go as a living individual.

The second question is, “What do you want to do with the rest of your life?” If you just want to buy a farm and raise chickens, then fine, it doesn’t matter what they do with it.

And then the other question that is very important is what happens after you die? Because this catalogue will bring money in if it’s well-managed for 50, 60, 70 years after you die. And so, how is that going to be handled? I mean, you’re dead, you don’t care, but if you have children.

When you look at the older artists, like, let’s say you take Nina Simone, or you take Billie Holiday, just to give two examples, two ladies that died in la pauvreté complete [complete poverty], they were very poor; they had debts, and they were in very bad financial situation when they died. And today, their catalogue is bringing a lot of money to whoever owns these rights.

So, I think the fact that I own all of my rights at this time of my life is quite a unique thing.

Now, selling your rights is an intellectual idea, but you still have to have somebody that comes in and say, “I want to buy them.”  It’s like your house is worth half a million dollars until you sell it.

Do you still write your blog where you explain the inner workings of the music industry to up-and-comers and what is important for them to know?

Well, I do write. I don’t write very often, but when I write, I write quickly because I have this idea or something happened in the industry or something collapsed or something is new or there is a subject that really interests me, and if I don’t write about it, I can’t sleep at night. I have to empty my head.

But what is important depends on who you are and what you want. You need to, first of all, look at who you are, look at your heart, look at your situation and who are you? What do you want? What do you want to do? You want to be famous? You want to be rich? Or you just want to write great songs? Or you want to please your boyfriend [laughs] with the singing? When I started writing songs, I was in school, I was 12 years old, and all I wanted was to be nice to my friends and entertain them.  I had no idea, absolutely, that I was going to become an international songwriter later on. Absolutely not.

It’s pretty incredible that your most famous song, “Si j’étais un homme,” was written for a contest and you were so young.

It came out on my third album when I was maybe 21 or 22. Before I recorded my first album, I had written about 50 songs from the age of 12. I was going to music school. My instrument is guitar so that’s what I studied. So right away, I started to write songs. My first album was recorded when I was 18. Second album was 19,20. But once you record, then you already writing the third one. I wrote “Si j’étais un homme” when I was 19,20 and recorded before I was 21.

What happened is that at the time my second album was out, and Radio Canada asked me to represent Canada in an international contest called the Festival International de la Chanson de Spa [Spa Royal Festival] in Belgium. It’s not like Eurovision — Eurovision, it’s the vocal, it’s the artist that’s performing, that is in competition. Anyone can have written the song, and the song can already be a single. In this particular context, back then, the song was in competition, not the singer. So I wrote “si j’étais un homme” to participate. I wrote it for my third album, but I also wrote it specifically to participate for Canada in that contest. And I lost the contest, of course, but when I came back home, I recorded the song for the third album — and then I won [laughs].

Some francophone artists also make English language albums. Have you considered that? 

When I first started to write songs, I would write in French and in English. But at the time, in the late 70s, when I went for my first interview with a record company person, they said you have to choose because in those days in Quebec, the population was very into politics. And there were some pretty strong movements that wanted to protect the French language.

I’m putting it simply, but it was very political. So you couldn’t do it both ways. You had to choose. So I chose the French language for sure.

Have your songs been covered in other languages? 

My songs have never been covered. If they had been, I would know because they would need permission. But a lot of people have sung them in French, but not in English.

I’ve recorded maybe 15 albums now. Only when I was recording in London, at the time I was with Sony, I recorded four English songs. It was a lot of fun because I was in London and I enjoyed writing in English. And I’ll tell you why: writing in French, and mixing those lyrics to a music that’s fundamentally Anglo-Saxon — I’ve been singing jazz, pop, folk, progressive, name it. It’s all Anglo-Saxon originated music — and the English language and the French language are very different in terms of rhythm. The accent in English is very often on the first syllable. In French, it’s the opposite. If you say, “I’m traveling to Paris,” in French, you will say, “je voyage à Paris.” So when you compose the music that is Anglo-Saxon origin and try to put French lyrics to that, it’s tricky.

Another thing that is tricky is that the level of quality in the French language is, generally speaking, a higher level than in the English community. I’m not saying that there are not great writers in English. We have many in the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame — Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, et cetera, et cetera — And we have, of course, Bob Dylan, and we have many, many. But if you look at the old songs of, let’s say, all the songs that have been written in the last hundred years,  like if you take [the group] America [“A Horse With No Name”], “on the first part of the journey, I was looking at all the… whatever, and the desert is dry, and the rain is wet [laughs], if you translate that into French, it sounds a bit childish.

So, in France, where in all of the history of songwriting, lyrics have always been extremely important, not so much the music. You have some artists that have been extremely popular, that have very basic musical melodies and stuff, but the lyrics are poetry, total poetry. And in English, you have these incredibly sophisticated musical melodies, and harmonies, and rhythms, and exploring all kinds of different styles. And sometimes the lyrics, it’s quite basic. So that’s different. It’s a cultural choice for me to stay with the French language.