Cory Dupuis

In his bedroom in Lyon Mountain, Cory Dupuis recorded his debut album, “Pills, Powders and Potions: The Idiot's Ode,” which drops on Valentine's Day on Bandcamp and streaming platforms.

The day before, Dupuis turns 41, and this album very much glances backwards and forward.

Within the nine-track disc, mastered in Nashville by Dan Emery of Black Matter Mastering, Dupuis' poetics articulate struggles, fragile and fierce, of the everyday, identity, sobriety and addiction.

His vocals and steel picking are clean and lean distilling lyrics raw and illuminating flaws of self and us all.

Dupuis posted content on his socials, and his followers asked when he was going to release an album.

“I went down and recorded one down in New Orleans,” he said.

“When I got back, I said I would record my own here. I'm trying to get four albums out.”

“Pills, Powders and Potions: The Idiot's Ode” encapsulates a recent past when he was kicking hardcore drinking, wrestling with accompanying physical and mental turmoil, and rocky relationships in the whorl of addiction.

Track 1, “Delirium,” leaves no mystery about one “born a curse.”

It's not a pretty tale, metaphorically and literally, but it's all too real in the North Country and beyond.

Dupuis' dualities, yin/yang, continue on Track 2, “My Body, My Jail.”

“Being trapped in your body,” he said.

“Getting older. Having done damage and not being what you used to be. It's just a drag. My body is ravaged from years of abuse. Even when I was young and spry, I was still trapped in my body, so you got limitations and all that stuff.”

Track 3, “Idiot's Ode,” chronicles long-term love gone awry, which Dupuis wrote for a friend.

“He's like 65 or something,” he said.

“He lives in California. He was with his woman like 20 years or something like that. She made him sleep out in a tent, kicked him out and stuff. I just kind of wrote him a song. I told him I put it on the album for him.

“My buddy, the one that I wrote about, he's doing good now. He's moved on. He lives in another state now. Living in a house. From my analytics, it's the least liked one on the album. It's the most skipped one.”

Track 4, “Pastel and Water” is a dark fairy tale of temporality and the pain of regrets.

Track 5, “Pills, Powder and Potions,” reveals a character who seeks solace in nature to resist addictive monkeys.

“It's that f*****g struggle that everybody is going through whether you're an addict or not,” he said.

“It's just the relationship thing.”

Track 6, “Phantoms in the Pain” veils a beauty/beast mystique doused with reconciliation and forgiveness.

“It's music, so it's open to interpretation from the listener,” Dupuis said.

Track 7, “Road” is a love song of having a partner's back through on-your-knees spit, snot and tears.

Track 8, “Hand and Hand in the Rain,” is another love song of everlasting love beyond breath.

Track 9, “Wrapped in Retrograde” is a mirror, a reflection of choices and cosmic fates.

Throughout this disc, Dupuis' themes are Rs:

Reconciliation: self and others, asking for forgiveness and forgiving.

Resilience: “sobriety and day to day life in general,” he said. “Everybody gets depressed and sad and hopeless and what-not.

Relationships: – self, friends and significant others.

Recovery: “All part of the process, unless you're like some savant of getting sober or something, you're going to slip and you're going to run in other troubles that come with it,” he said.

Redemption: “If you made it to the end, that's pretty much how the album ends is 'I'm wrapped up in retrograde and not the man I wanna be,'" he said. "If you put the album on repeat, it goes back to 'Delirium.' So it's like that cyclical problem.”

Pre-pandemic, Dupuis did a trio of open mic nights at his buddy Michael Hart's Pouring Lights Studio in Malone.

“But other than that, I don't really play out,” he said.

“I want to promote my work better. I'm not really a performer. I get nervous. I consider myself more of a poet. I'm definitely a poet before a musician.

“Poetry doesn't really sell. I got some spoken word poetry out there, but it doesn't get any love. I got a pretty decent following of people that I've gathered through the internet, so I figure maybe now it's time to take it out into the world.”

Email Robin Caudell: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter:@RobinCaudell - press republican