How did the band Patrick Watson come together?

Well it really wasn’t supposed to be a band. I was doing more compositions for media and stuff, multimedia shows where we would do absurd shit in Montreal—because it’s Montreal. We could do anything, it’s so cheap. So we would do shows where we would play in giant inflatable bubbles with projections, and we’d do all this stuff with an artist called Bridget Henry. Then people started really liking what we did, but we realized we could never tour it. We brought it once to New York, back in the old days, with all our shit, and we went in debt by like twenty grand. So we’re like, we can’t do that. And it’s not a show you can even begin to explain to anybody anyway. So we said what if we just become a band for a while, then go back to that later? Then we tried to come up with a name, but we already started something with the name [Patrick Watson]. So we tried to find a good name and nobody could agree on anything, so that’s why we kind of ended up with my silly name as the band, which I have to pay for every day. It’s the wrong thing, in the way that it’s not a singer/songwriter project. It doesn’t really help us out.

Do you write most of the music, or is more of a collaborative thing?

I don’t know if I write most of the music. I definitely write a lot in the project, but, like, Mishka [Stein] brings in a lot of ideas. Like “Hearts”—he brought in the first ostinato chord progression, and then I just sand and wrote lyrics over it. And stuff like “Love Songs [for Robots],” [“Turn Into the Noise” from] Walking Dead “In Circles,” those kind of tunes which are a bit more compositional, those are the ones I’ll bring in kind of written. Then stuff like “Grace,” we just kind of came up with it. So it’s a mixed bag of different ways. The end of the line is whatever’s the best song wins. That’s it. So we bring in a bunch of ideas, and whatever songs works for everybody the most, that’s what we keep. So if everybody wrote stuff that was better than mine, I would take that.

How long has this current iteration been together?

I mean, me, Mishka and Robbie [Kuster], it’s fifteen years. And Joe [Grass] is new, but he was playing on others records as a pedal steel player sometimes, as a guest. And Montreal is really incestuous, right. I mean, almost every band in Montreal, we’ve probably all played together at least on one stage, for fun improv sessions and stuff. So it feels more like one giant, stupid band than anything else. Like even with the Barr Brothers or any of those other bands, we’ve played so many times on the same stage, just having fun. Like I could show up to the gig, and the drummer from the other band will be onstage, and I’m like, oh that’s fun. Pretty incestuous scene, though.

And who was the fifth guy on stage at the show?

Oh, Mathieu [Charbonneau]. He’s actually the keyboard player from Timber Timbre. See? It’s like a big fucking orgy. It’s terrible. We recorded with another keyboard player called Frank. Everybody was really busy, so we just kind of alternate who wants to come with us, and it’s kind of fun. It will always be different.

Speaking of that, there were a lot of instruments onstage. Everyone seemed to have multiple instruments around them.

The record’s live like that, and we played the record live, so I guess we just brought what we did in the studio to the stage, pretty much verbatim. What you saw onstage is what we did in the studio. And we did one or two overdubs. We did a really cool process on this record that I should’ve done since I was young, but no one taught me to do this. You get one really shitty mic, put it in the middle of the room, and you work on the arrangement till it sounds good in it, and once it sounds good in that, you bring it to the studio and it sounds incredible. And if you do that, your arrangements get totally honed in. Nobody overplays. The other thing is that sometimes in the modern recording, you could do a quadrillion overdubs to make something big, which could get you interesting things for sure, but it kills the songwriting, right, because you’re codependent on the sound design. So this way, if the sound arrangement sucks or the song sucks, it sucks. And there’s no one can save you, because there’s one mic. So that was our terribly good lesson for this record.

Does that help you see the big picture of the song?

It helps everybody find their home in the song. Like, you know, when you hear an album that sounds good, it’s not because necessarily it’s a great engineer, it’s because of the arrangements. Everybody had their place, so when it comes out of the speaker, everybody’s got a home. That’s what makes a record go pow out of your speakers. But I never had a producer—he would’ve taught us that really young if I had. Probably would’ve been a good fucking idea. Whatever. It was fun to learn. And we did it at Capitol [Studios], too, which is a joke—that’s like a museum of recording, especially that 1950s-60s Hollywood. It has that old, rich, weird, spooky thing to it. It was awesome.

Was the songwriting and/or recording process different besides that?

We worked out asses off on the arrangements. We played them live—we’d go play a little show, come back to the drawing board. Because sometimes you’ll do stuff in the studio, you’ll go play it live, and it’s like a million times better than your record. It’s frustrating. So we tried to do something where we wrote the songs, brought them to the stage a couple times, back and forth, to get the right feeling and to see what would happen on a stage. Because people always like our live shows better, so we were a bit conscious of that. We wanted to solve that problem a bit. We succeeded in a lot of places. Not all the songs, but that idea really worked for this record. What happened was the opposite: we had such good takes in the studio that we went to play live, and since it was just live with these instruments, we had no fucking excuses. We can’t be like, “Oh we don’t have the strings,” or anything. So to get a really great take onstage was a whole different challenge for us.

What was the inspiration for the album title?

I’m a science fiction lover and a science lover more than arts at this point, in terms of the contemporary times. If I want to be inspired, I go read science journals, because it’s so crazy and so weird. Like more challenging than any film and music put on this planet, right now as it is. So there’s that aspect of it. Also, all my records have been really woody and very kind of—not organic, but a bit more not-science fiction. More folk than science fiction. It’s kind of silly. I mean, if I love that, then I should do a record like that, so I decided to do a record where I had a bit of that tone. But at the same time, I wanted it to be more like _Blade Runne_r, where you don’t think about technology ever. I wanted something that was extremely sensual. Good science fiction for me is about people, anyway. Just a way of removing them from a context.

What kind of science fiction do you read?

Well Dune was one of my favorites. And you have the Foundation series. And I love the Twilight Zone. It’s very people-orientated, right, a bit more grounded. I’ll always remember the episode where the guy loves reading books. That episode—when his glasses fall and break—it’s so smart, the writing. And the music is Bernard Hermann, which I didn’t know. The music is so cool that you don’t pay attention. I’ve been freaking out over Bernard Hermann over the last month because I’m working on a suspense/thriller/drama film, and I’ve never done that. So I went to listen to some Bernard Herman—which is maybe a bit of overkill for this film, but whatever. [Laughs] I’m still a Trekkie, too, by the nature of it. And not because of the outfits. I like the idea that in the 1960s, you would have your first interracial kiss on television, you’d have a Russian on board, during the Cold War—and a farmer in the fucking Midwest, with his feet up on the chair watching this shit, who hates all of that and doesn’t even think about it. Because it’s in space. Like, “It’s in space, I don’t give a shit, it’s cool.” I love that. Most of the stuff I read now, it’s more real stuff. I love reading about quantum mechanics. I mean, that stuff’s weirder than anything anyways. I find that really inspiring. And I don’t claim to understand it, because I’m just a musician. I just like reading about it. I saw this one quote— this guy says that everybody looks at math like this cold, human invention to try to make explanations of how things work. And he’s like, what if it’s actually the purest and the most beautiful language, and actually is the language of the universe? I think people are little bit naive about how powerful math is. Everybody says it’s not emotional. But if you listen to anything on your iPod, it’s zeros and ones. Zeroes and ones capture my feelings, and you cried listening to zeroes and ones. It’s math, and math is relaying emotions to you, and you’re crying. It’s as simple as that. People underestimate algorithms. I think it’s gonna be challenging for people with this future that’s coming toward them, because it’s gonna really freak them out. It’s gonna be pretty funny watching it freak people out, though. [Laughs] I got front-row tickets.

And when you do compositions for television and movies, is it just you, or do you work with the band as well?

Sometimes, but it is kind of like my spoiled little thing that I get to do alone, where there’s not as much compromise—because the band is all about compromise. So I do like doing it by myself, just to take a break. It also lets me get out of my head and not be Patrick Watson when I’m writing.

How is it different from writing for the band?

Totally different. It’s a technical activity where you see something, and the director will be like, “I need it to feel like this.” Because you can make something feel a million different ways. I can look at it and score it twenty different ways, so ultimately you have to be good at listening to the director and trying to pinpoint how you feel something. So you kind of get out of your box, and since you’re not trying to be what you are, you’ll start finding great things because of it. Because you’re not paying attention. It’s not like writing a song, where I have to think about lyrics or what am I trying to say. “Into Giants” from the last record was originally from a score. “Turn Into the Noise” was kind of scoring. So many songs I’ve written came from that anyways. So it’s R&D for me. Like on this film, there’s two or three [themes] that I’ll probably steal after to write songs with. Because with an hour-and-a-half of music, for sure you’re gonna find something there. Because every time someone picks up [something], it’s like da da da dah! I’m like really? You want me to fucking orchestrate him picking up a coffee mug, are you crazy? [Laughs] It’s really funny.

I just saw the virtual reality video you were in. How did you get involved with that?

I was working with two directors called Chris [Lavis] and Maciek [Szczerbowski], these guys who have Clyde Henry [Productions], and we were doing music video ideas. And these guys are one crazy Polish guy and one brainy guy, and they make like a two-headed dragon. They had heard about their friends Felix [Lajeunesse] and Paul [Raphael], who had been working on this camera. And they were like, “We should go see it.” And I’m like, no way, it’s gonna be super stupid. I had 3D films, I hate gizmos. They’re like, “Let’s go check it out.” Their first demo was you’re sitting beside a lady in a church, and it was so powerful. I had no idea it would be like that. So then we’re like, “Let’s do a weird demo.” So it’s just a demo, because they were still working on the camera at the time—it was all duct-taped and shit. And we sat in the apartment, and they brought a dog—which was not my dog—and they made it really messy. We found like four or five rules about virtual reality, which is interesting. It’s got to be really chill, because you want your brain to actually believe that you could be there. You need something interactive—so you have a dog that interacts with you, and me that every once and a while looks over. But it’s subtle, and your brain believes that you could be in this scenario—so it’s possible. Then you’ll see their body hunch down. So everybody’s gonna make this mistake where they’re gonna make stuff that’s completely absurd that could never be there, and it’ll be just fun. But when you make stuff that you could actually be at, you have this out of body experience a bit. Like it freaks people out. So they brought that demo to Oculus, and it ended up being this huge hit at South by Southwest, the technology thing. And it was a demo, just showing them that the camera worked. So then it became Oculus’s demo, and there’s Scorcese looking around my house going, “Fuck it’s messy.” And they made it messier—my place is messy, but not that messy. I mean, it’s going to change the world. It’s going to change everything. Imagine a sports game. It’s not going to be just the goggles—you can put your phone in the goggles now, so you can be anywhere you want. It’s going to be intense when it works. And Facebook bought it, right, so obviously it’s going to be a method of Skype as well. Like, you can put the goggles on a be somewhere else and film what you see, and your friend can watch. All these stupid things that you can do with it that’ll be really fun.

You mentioned your kids at the concert. I’m interested how you balance that work/family dynamic with your music career.

Well, a lot of that balance falls on my partner’s shoulders, right, because I go away a lot. So I think she takes the brunt of it. Kids are filled with imagination—they’re super creative, kind of crazy. So it goes well with being a musician. I think a lot of people are worried that it’s going to be all straight and not creative. I don’t understand where that whole thing came from. A lot of artists will be like, “I can’t have kids,” because what does it do to your creativity? Which is a bit absurd. I mean, I kind of had those fears too a bit, because I didn’t know what it was, but once they came out it was like super ridiculous. And it gives you this strange feeling, because you feel time pass, which is really interesting. Time ticks when you have kids. There’s constant markers of time. I think if I didn’t have kids I’d feel like I was 27 still—I wouldn’t even know the difference. Also, you can’t go wrong with love, right? How could you go wrong with having someone you love?

What are your plans for the future, with Patrick Watson the band and Patrick Watson the person?

I mean, it’s one day at a time. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I’m not a huge fan of the music business, so I always wait for that moment when we can kind of get outside of it and just do crazy shit, you know what I mean? That would be my ultimate dream, just to live outside of the music business. I just think that when people go to clubs and shows, it’s just that ritual that puts people onto a certain way that they accept music. Where if you take them outside of the box and play the same music, they’re like a quadrillion times more touched. So I think we have to get to a certain level, get a certain fanbase, and then I can start getting creative and have fun.

Was that part of your encore performance in the middle of the crowd—literally changing the perspective of the crowd?

It’s also for me, too. Like, sitting on a stage and people clapping—that’s not really what music’s about, you know? If you play a party at three o’clock in the morning—which are my favorite shows—and everybody’s drunk and having a good time, it’s kind of a collective feeling, not like I’m onstage. So I like feeling that way, not really for the audience. I like how it gets people out of the bubble. I’ve done that for the last eight, nine years, going into the audience and playing. Even big rooms, like three thousand people—that’s the best. This place in Paradiso, it’s like three thousand, you can go in the middle and since it’s all vertical and really close to you, you can totally do it a cappella. And that’s incredible—that’s the best feeling.

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