North Hero is named after the island in Lake Champlain, Vermont where MarQuis recorded — first in a remote cabin, then refined back in Ottawa — North Hero is the intimate counterpart to the grand theatrical experiment of For Those Who Hate Human Interaction. Both were released in the same summer of 2010: forty songs at once. Where that album was a concept record designed to trick you into humming along to humanity’s demise, North Hero is something quieter.

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Vocalist Pam Kapoor — a collaborator whose harmonies and occasional leads carry through all three MarQuis SongBook recordings — appears throughout, her voice weaving around MarQuis’s with an intimacy that suits the material perfectly.

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Among the originals, "Maybe a Fire" stands out — a love song framed as a weather warning:
“Darling I’m afraid I’m the one who’s been calling out in a warning / Why? ’cause there may be a fire.”
The narrator suspects he is the source of the danger. MarQuis and Kapoor’s intertwined voices lift the song beyond its quiet dread — two voices transforming confession into something unexpectedly beautiful.

"I Can't Say" is a quiet devastation — a love that didn't fail so much as exhaust itself. The narrator can't say his heart is on fire, can't say they wasted time, can only say goodbye. By the final line he's already looking for his shoes.

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The album includes four covers, each taken somewhere the original never went. “Fallen Leaves” by Billy Talent is reinterpreted so distinctly that the song’s composer praised the version online as completely unique.

“Silver Dagger” — a traditional folk song long associated with the female voice — is sung here by a man, shifting its meaning. And the traditional hymn “Amazing Grace” is transformed altogether — not as a song about being found, but about the quest to be found. The search, not the salvation. “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult rounds out the covers, stripped back and reshaped in MarQuis’s own image.

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North Hero is the third volume of the MarQuis SongBook — a forthcoming remastered collection bringing together all three solo folk recordings into a single archival release.