Musicien

Primarily a bassist, and a bit of a singer, I'm also proficient with synthesizers and can play guitar. I currently play with two cover bands as a bassist and second vocalist (I do a lot of backing vocals and sing a small portion of our songs as lead). I also make homemade audio/video recordings of covers and original compositions, which I post on my channel: YouTube.com/marc-andre-decoste.

Here's a brief history of my musical career in reverse chronological order.

Back to song writing

My songs are available on these streaming sites:

In 2023, after making around thirty cover videos since the start of the 2020 pandemic, I decided to make videos for original songs. My first two videos are for songs in English with a techno-pop sound that I had never experimented with before. The first explores the universal question, "Who am I?" and is therefore titled "Who am I?" The other, titled "Imperfections," deals with accepting our own imperfections. Having retired from my IT career at the end of 2023, I have more time to dedicate to this aspect of my artistic career. After my first two techno-pop songs, I released four more videos for original songs, this time in French.

The first one I released is titled "À chacun sa couleur" (To each their own color), which speaks of diversity and inclusion. I play this song live with one of my cover bands (Toolshed).

The second song (although it was the first one I started working on, it took me longer to complete) is titled "Qu'est-ce que j'fais avec mon temps?" (What am I doing with my time?) and attempts to answer that question, which is the only one worth asking. :-)

The third is called "Chanter" (Sing), and has a different style from the other two. The lyrics are inspired by my passion for music, composition, and singing. I was experimenting with an unusual rhythm for me on the piano, which then spread to the guitar, bass, and finally the drums. When I asked my friends Norm and Marc-André to redo the guitar and drum tracks respectively, they surprised me with this special swing that makes this song quite different from anything I've done before...

And the fourth French pop song is a ballad I wrote for my wife called "Danse avec moi" (Dance with me).

And if you'd like to download the MP3 versions of these songs, they're available on Google Drive in the PopRock Franco and TechnoPop folders.

Two of my songs will soon be used in a feature-length film. More details later, but in the meantime, you can visit my IMDb page.

2 Valises Rouges

A cover band consisting of a singer, a guitarist, a keyboardist, a drummer, and myself on bass and vocals. We specialize in 70s and 80s pop-rock, primarily in English, but with a fairly broad Quebec repertoire, allowing us to perform nearly two-hour shows dedicated exclusively to Quebec music for events like the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations.

In the fall of 2015, I went to see the band of my musician friend and former Softimage colleague, Norman Miller, and a few months later he asked me to audition to replace the bassist who had just left the group. We quickly clicked with the rest of the band, and almost a decade later, we still have a blast playing together, whether in bars, at private parties, or any other type of event.

You can follow our Facebook page or our YouTube channel for more details.

Toolshed

Another cover band, this time composed of a singer, two guitarists, a drummer, and myself on bass and vocals. We mainly play pop-rock songs from the '70s and '80s, but also hits from the '90s and 2000s, sometimes transforming them into a more rock-oriented version, without synthesizers.

In the spring of 2018, I was invited to participate in an event at Cégep André Laurendeau where employees were performing to raise funds for the college's foundation. Since my girlfriend works at the college, I was considered part of the event. We quickly clicked with the rest of the band, and we continued to play together, whether in bars, at private parties, or any other type of event.

You can follow our Facebook page or our YouTube playlist for more details.

Covers videos

In April 2020, we planned to do a kind of "talent show" with colleagues from Google. For obvious reasons, this project couldn't happen in person, but we decided to do it anyway, virtually (as a YouTube playlist).

It inspired me to make lots of other cover videos, with colleagues, other musicians I'd played with, my daughters, or even on my own. This YouTube playlist, titled "MAD Music," contains about thirty of these videos, and more. One of these videos was about COVID, translating The Police's song "Don't Stand So Close to Me." I even dared to send my "Tiens toi pas proche de moi" video to the TV show Infoman, and they played an excerpt!

Continuum Khrônos

In 1993, just before starting my career in IT, I recorded and produced a progressive rock album called Khrônos with two other musicians in the band Continuum. I was the bassist, singer, keyboardist, and main songwriter. I also did the album artwork. It's also available on YouTube.

Looking for Marck

After leaving the cover band Chess and dropping out of engineering school at Polytechnique Montréal to pursue a career in original music, I joined the band Human Factor, and later Looking for Marck.

With Looking for Marck, we won the band competition on the TVA show Pop Express (excerpt available on YouTube), and were able to produce an album. Unfortunately, my own compositions weren't presented to the producers, and a disagreement with the guitarist meant I only played bass on the few songs written solely by the singer. The drummer who played with us on Pop Express didn't participate in the album at all, and Looking for Marck became a duo.

Chess

The cover band I played with the most in the '80s. We also got together in 2017, 2018, and 2019 for reunion parties at Chez Maurice in Saint-Lazare.

You can find some clips of our performances from those reunion nights on YouTube.

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