Patrick Watson

A Montreal-based pianist, songwriter, and film composer, Patrick Watson crafts adventurous chamber pop through his similarly named ensemble, merging lean indie textures, electronic explorations, sweeping orchestral arrangements, and an introspective mood. His ensemble’s 2006 release Close to Paradise earned the Polaris Prize. Following early work on short-film scores, Watson delivered his first feature soundtrack for It’s Not Me, I Swear! in 2008. Love Songs for Robots, issued in 2015, marked the group’s fourth consecutive Canadian Top Ten entry, while the sixth album, Wave, arrived to similar notice in 2019. After the decade-old single “Je Te Laisserai des Mots” accumulated hundreds of millions of streams online, Watson returned in 2022 with Better in the Shade, an album shaped by literary sources.

Although born in California, Watson grew up in Hudson, Quebec, just beyond Montreal. As a child he performed in neighborhood church choirs; during high school he joined the ska outfit Gangster Politics on vocals and keyboards, resulting in their self-titled Stomp Records LP in 1998. Upon graduation he exited the group and turned toward electronica and ambient music, later enrolling at Vanier College in Montreal to study jazz and classical piano performance, composition, and arranging. In 2001 he issued the experimental Waterproof9, created as accompaniment to Brigitte Henry’s photo book Waterproof. Two years later he assembled a four-piece chamber-pop unit, recruiting bassist Mishka Stein and drummer Robbie Kuster—both university acquaintances—alongside former Gangster Politics guitarist Simon Angell. Initially still framed as a solo endeavor with supporting musicians, the collective issued Just Another Ordinary Day and began touring Canada. Their appearance at the 2005 Pop Montreal Festival prompted the creation of Secret City Records, which released the follow-up Close to Paradise (again featuring the same core band) the next year. Reaching number four on the Canadian album chart and also appearing in France and the Netherlands, the record received the 2007 Polaris Prize.

Around the same period Watson started scoring short films such as 2006’s Gravity Boy and 2007’s Neuf, then moved to features with It’s Not Me, I Swear! and Hidden Diary in 2008 and 2009. His third studio album, Wooden Arms, appeared in 2009, earned a Polaris Music Prize shortlist slot, and peaked at number six in Canada. The more intimate Adventures in Your Own Backyard followed in 2012, climbing to number two, while the atmospheric Love Songs for Robots, featuring guitarist Joe Grass in place of Angell, reached number three upon release in 2015.

Watson maintained a parallel career composing for shorts, documentaries, and features; his score for the 2016 thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax was issued by Varèse Sarabande that September. He surfaced again in 2017 with the standalone single “Broken,” which later surfaced on series including Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Doctor. That same year he participated in Montreal’s Tower of Songs tribute to Leonard Cohen alongside Elvis Costello, Philip Glass, and Lana Del Rey. Mid-2018 brought another single, “Melody Noir,” followed by the French-language “Mélancholie” with Quebecois vocalist Safia Nolin, released by Secret City Records to coincide with a European tour. A year afterward he delivered his sixth long-player, the reflective Wave.

Early in the 2020s the elegant 2010 chamber ballad “Je Te Laisserai des Mots” spread rapidly across social platforms, generating hundreds of millions of streams. Concurrently Watson assembled a new studio set whose lyrics drew from writers such as Virginia Woolf, Denis Johnson, and Samanta Schweblin; the resulting Better in the Shade appeared on Secret City in 2022.