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The profile · researched 2 October 2026
From a correctional officer's unpaid leave to the Beanfield: Francis Degrandpré's third record lands
The Berthierville singer-songwriter has spent four years turning French-language new country from a commercial risk into a full touring career. His third album, Si j'avais su, came out on 2 October 2026, the morning after he opened its tour in Montreal.
Berthierville, and the job he took leave from
Francis Degrandpré comes from Berthierville, in the Lanaudière region north-east of Montreal, and he arrived in music late and sideways. Before any of it he worked as a firefighter and then as a correctional officer, and the singing was the thing he did at the end of the night with a guitar and people he already knew. He had never performed on a stage when he auditioned for La Voix, the Quebec version of the singing contest format, in 2020 — he has since described the nerves of that first televised appearance plainly, as the problem of someone with no stage hours at all.
The show gave him a name, and he treated it as a window rather than a result. Rather than resign outright, he took unpaid leave from the correctional service to find out whether music would hold. It did. By April 2023 he was working through a run of roughly forty dates across the province and had a radio single behind him, and the leave had become the old life.
His reference points are American and recent — Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen, Brett Young — which matters, because what he does is not the fiddle-and-waltz country that Quebec audiences inherited from Willie Lamothe. It is the loud, hook-first, drum-forward strain of the genre, sung in French.
Soir de quai and the French-language gamble
The first album, Soir de quai, arrived in 2022. He has admitted hesitating over whether to record this kind of country in French at all, worrying it would land as quaint, and went ahead anyway. The gamble is the reason the record matters more than its sales: it established that the contemporary Nashville sound could carry Québécois lyrics without translating itself into something apologetic.
The singles did the work. Colorado, his first to radio, came in 2021 and remains the song most people found him through. Bang Bang followed, and Lève ton verre arrived as a single on 22 September 2023 — a song he had written roughly two years earlier with Richard Turcotte and Samuel Busque, then held back because he judged it wasn't ready for the debut.
The awards followed within about eighteen months. Soir de quai took the ADISQ Félix for country album of the year in 2023, along with multiple trophies at the Gala Country in Montreal, where he had been nominated six times across contemporary country album, song of the year for Bang Bang, songwriter, male performer, discovery and live performance. He has twice been named songwriter of the year at that gala in consecutive years.
Se laisser aller, and a collective called Grande Ourse
The second album, Se laisser aller, came out on 6 September 2024 and was premiered live the same week at the Festival Western de Saint-Tite, the biggest western festival in the province and the natural room for it. Michel Francoeur produced; Luc Tellier mixed. Degrandpré wrote or co-wrote most of it, having said before the sessions that he wanted to stop reaching for outside collaborators and write under his own steam.
The subject matter is narrow on purpose: hunting and fishing, friendships that have lasted, time passing, his partner, and his daughter Billie. He has made no attempt to widen it, and the specificity is what gets quoted back at him from the floor.
The same autumn he appeared on Grande Ourse, a collective project launched on 12 September 2024 at Saint-Tite alongside Guillaume Lafond, Vince Lemire, Fred Dionne, Phil G Smith, Brittany Kennell and Andie Therio. It won song of the year at the Gala Country. Between the two albums he played the Festival Shérif in Montreal on 21 September 2024 and went to the Gala Country at MTelus on 24 October 2024 with three nominations, taking three Willie trophies including contemporary album of the year.
Ninety-five shows and a second look from the industry
By November 2024 he had played more than 120 shows in two years, and that month he crossed into New Brunswick for the first time, at the Salle multifonctionnelle Denis-Richard in Petit-Rocher on 17 November. The volume is the career: more than 20 million streams and over six million video views inside three years, accumulated without a crossover hit in English.
2025 was the year the apparatus caught up. He played more than 95 shows off the back of Se laisser aller. Quand j'pars reached the Mediabase top three, with three further tracks from the record in the top ten, and a duet with Kevin Parent charted at 16. He also recorded with France D'Amour. ADISQ nominated the album for country album of the year, the Canadian Country Music Association nominated him as francophone artist of the year, and he was given the Artiste Lumière prize at the Rencontres ADISQ. He performed at the 47th ADISQ gala.
That CCMA nomination is the one worth noting, because it puts a French-language act from Lanaudière on a national ballot in a genre whose Canadian centre of gravity sits in Alberta and Ontario.
Si j'avais su
The third album is called Si j'avais su, and it was released on 2 October 2026 — ten tracks, issued under Production Véronique Labbé, with no guest credits listed. It has been described as country with rock in it, which is the direction he signalled as early as 2023 when he said the follow-up to Soir de quai was moving towards country rock.
The title track went out as the first single on 8 June 2026 and sits deliberately across country, pop and rock. Its subject is time passing and worrying about the wrong things, and it is built around a chorus written to be sung back rather than listened to — a structural habit at this point rather than a one-off.
The record was announced while he was still in the studio; a teaser clip posted to social media passed 100,000 views within days, which is roughly the scale of audience he now reaches without radio doing the lifting.
The rooms he plays now
The venue graph tells the story better than the streaming figures. Through early 2026 he worked a conventional Quebec theatre and hall circuit — the Carnaval de Québec on 6 February, L'Avenir on the 7th, Saint-Eustache on the 20th, Pointe-aux-Trembles on the 21st, Lavaltrie on 7 March, La Baie on the 14th, Saint-Lin-des-Laurentides on the 21st, Cowansville on the 28th, Country Storm in Bellechasse on 4 April, two nights in Sorel on 11 and 18 April, and the Cabaret BMO in Sainte-Thérèse on the 24th. Summer took him to Les Grandes Fêtes TELUS at Parc Beauséjour in Rimouski between 29 July and 2 August.
Then the step up: the Théâtre Beanfield in Montreal on 1 October 2026 to launch the new album, and the Théâtre Capitole in Quebec City on 15 October. Tickets for the Capitole date went on presale to newsletter subscribers on 18 December 2025 and to the general public the following day — nine and a half months of lead time for a room he had not previously headlined.
Earlier dates sold out quickly on their own terms. Ahead of a 8 February 2025 show at the Cabaret-Théâtre du Vieux-Saint-Jean, his first in Saint-Jean, he noted it was close to full before he had played a note there.
The show, now
The current run is the Si j'avais su launch tour, which opened at the Théâtre Beanfield in Montreal on 1 October 2026, doors at 7pm for an 8pm start, all ages, presented by LASSO Montréal, with Gab Forest opening; the Théâtre Capitole in Quebec City follows on 15 October. The format is a band show rather than an acoustic one, and the shape of the set has been consistent since 2024: material drawn across Soir de quai and Se laisser aller, now with the new record folded in, interleaved with the American country songs he cites as his own starting point. Staging varies with the room — some dates have been sold standing, others as reserved seating, and earlier theatre runs have used local support, including Doug St-Louis at the Centre des arts Juliette-Lassonde in Saint-Hyacinthe. Reports from recent shows describe raw, high-energy performance and a campfire-adjacent singalong dynamic that he has kept deliberately as the rooms have grown; the choruses, including the new single's, are written to be sung back. No official running time has been published for the autumn dates.
Researched from acadienouvelle.com · lanauweb.info · lanauweb.info · artsetculture.ca · artsetculture.ca · montreal.rythmefm.com · music.apple.com · evenko.ca
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