Up for a Melancholic Swim, Anyone?

Before The PepTides were nine people on a stage, they were one person in a room with a laptop and a microphone.

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Claude MarQuis had spent thirteen years building a painting career — exhibitions in Québec, Ontario, and the United States, a critically acclaimed show at Galerie Montcalm, and a reputation as one of Ottawa’s most distinctive visual voices. Then he stopped. As he told Ottawa Magazine: “I sold my tiny house in Hull and played a gambit: I bought some home recording gear and founded a new music project.” He later explained to Xtra Magazine why the leap was harder than it looked: “After thirteen odd years and numerous exhibits, I had grown accustomed to the painting life, so I had to reprogram my brain, which initially was wary of change and fearful of investigating music.”

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He had been quietly amassing songs since his awkward pre-teen years in Québec City — over one hundred of them, crinkled in personal journals, never heard by anyone. In 2006, he decided to bring them to life. Solo, armed only with a laptop and a microphone, I’m A Spy was the result: thirteen original tracks floating confidently somewhere between folk and pop.

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Vocalist Pam Kapoor appears throughout in harmonies — that signature dreamy pairing of voices listeners would come to describe as “sheer heaven.” Musical peers described the album’s emotional gravity as “the power to simultaneously break and fill a heart.”​

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"Far Away from the Maddening Crowd" opens the album with a literary courtship — every verse hiding a Thomas Hardy novel title in plain sight: Far from the Madding Crowd, Life's Little Ironies, Desperate Remedies, A Pair of Blue Eyes. The narrator deploys Hardy's entire catalogue like a series of increasingly desperate calling cards. Centuries of courting human beings, and still just asking: let me in.

"I'll Show You" moves through four states of unraveling — haunted, drunk, betrayed, and finally sleepless.

The narrator is losing, leaving, laying, longing — and through it all, a different kind of empty. 

"Each Day I Pray" is an atheist's anthem built entirely from the wreckage of childhood TV innocence — Sesame Street's "Can you tell me how to get" twisted into an escape plea, Gilligan's Island's castaways recast as a stranded heart, the Partridge Family's come on get happy inverted into "come on get down and dig a hole to lie in," and Barney's "I love you" met with the coldest possible response: but you don't love me.

All conscripted into a meditation on unanswered prayer and unrequited love.

"On Your Worst Day" closes the album in slow motion. The sun burns and fades. Faith bends then breaks — reckoning with betrayal that doesn't end in anger but in exhaustion.

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I’m A Spy is the first volume of the MarQuis SongBook — a forthcoming remastered collection bringing together all three solo folk recordings into a single archival release.