Born on 12 December 1972 in Greenfield Park, Quebec, award-winning bilingual Canadian folk artist Kevin Parent picked up an electric guitar at 13 and started writing his own music three years later. He grew up in the Baie des Chaleur region in Gaspésie and in 1993 participated in the Le Pouvoir de la Chanson competition with his composition “Nomade sédentaire,” which led to a recording contract and provided the springboard for his first album. He found a national audience with his first four LPs, Pigeon d'Argile (1995), Grand Parleur, Petit Faiseur (1998)—for which he won the Felix Award for Rock Album of the Year (later going on to win a succession of Felix Awards)—Les Vents Ont Changé (2001), and live album Retrouvailles (2003), with Les Vents Ont Changé winning the Juno Award for Best Selling Francophone Album of 2002. After establishing himself as a Francophone artist across a raft of multi-platinum albums, he turned to English for his fifth album, Fangless Wolf Facing Winter, which was released in 2007. He branched out into the world of film and television, co-starring in 2011 movie Café de Flore with Vanessa Paradis, as well as appearing in the television series Tout la Vérité, and subsequent films and documentaries La Maison du Pêcheur (2013), The Calling (2014 ) and Gulf Gold (2015). He released another English album, Kanji, in 2016 and in 2020 was forced to apologise following allegations of sexual misconduct, with Agence Preste severing all ties. He returned in 2022 with a new EP, D'une rive à l'autre.
