Patrick Watson Gets Real Human with ‘Love Songs For Robots’

Photo By Mathieu Parisien

Sitting outside on a sunny day in downtown Toronto, despite getting a solid seven-hour rest (the most sleep he’s had in "about three months"), Patrick Watson has the look of someone tired. His outfit is fairly utilitarian, his beard is scruffy, his hair more pepper than salt, and he’s wearing a brace around his wrist. He looks like someone fully immersed in a constant cycle of destruction and creation—which he is. On top of finishing and now promoting his masterful new record, Love Songs For Robots, he’s also working on the score for a film starring “Jesse from Breaking Bad." But he’s not really tired at all. In fact, he proves to be completely inexhaustible.

It's an impressive feat to plod on beyond the need for rest. Just the night before at the Drake Hotel’s small basement venue, he and his band put on a gorgeous show as a live preview of the new record, complete with some old favorites. The stage was filled to a bursting point with five hairy dudes; giant, smoking light bulbs; and a truly astonishing number of instruments. Watson started things easy, cross-legged at the piano, but quickly got up and moving, bouncing around the stage and even across the venue to sing “Into Giants” from the bar at the back of the room. The most special thing about the show, though, was a noticeable lack of glowing screens in the crowd. Seeing Patrick Watson live is very much an experience. “A show should be like a moment, singing should be like a moment,” Watson says. “You go to a place. I just do whatever I can to get to that place. Other than trying to give myself goosebumps, it's like looking for that drug when you play music and you get into that special moment with the band at a show, kinda feeling like you're high in a way. And in a natural and better than any drug way. We just do whatever we can to always feel that. So I guess that's kind of the steering wheel. It's a bit like a drug addiction: you chase it, once you've had it.”

Watson shares another aspect of his personality with addicts: focus. Over half an hour, he smokes three cigarettes. It certainly doesn’t seem to be anxiety or anything like that, but maybe because if he doesn’t have something to keep his hands busy or an activity outside of his thoughts to ground him, he might explode. He speaks passionately and lightning quick, but not very clearly, by his own admission. You get the feeling that his mouth can’t keep up with his mind. That all seems to wash away in his music, both live and recorded. It feels relaxed and free from tension in a way that signals he is in his natural environment. Leading up to Love Songs For Robots, he thought about not touring, but makes it sound inescapable.

“Because I've done like eight years of playing shows, I get adrenaline rushes anyways now,” Watson says. “Like the chemistry in my body is meant to have these really fucking huge moments, and get emotional. It's been in that cycle now for so long that when I don't do it, I still get the [same feelings] but it ruins my normal life. I get these big, kind of swelling feelings that come from having to do a show every night.” The Montreal musician’s dedication to his craft is deep. Instead of going through the motions, he stepped back during the beginning process of the new record and started making “really, really left-field arrangements” and employing “really obnoxious, stupid” singing styles just to break up his phrasing and build a new approach to his songwriting. This pushed the band to react differently than they would normally, which results in a much more visceral, grounded record than Watson’s previous efforts. “It’s got a lot more guts to it,” he explains. That might be a bit of an understatement. While Love Songs For Robots is big and ambitious, the songs are filled with blood, and very human, strangely. That’s because Watson wanted to make sure that despite the obvious science fiction angle, the record felt deeply organic. “I really wanted to achieve it how Vangelis did back in the day, like you don't even know they’re synths,” he says “There are a lot of electronic tones that are there without you ever even asking the question.”

Watson is a major science geek, and over the course of the conversation brings up body chemistry, emotional mechanics, and the direction of big tech, among other things, all in relation to the music he’s making. It’s maybe this being in a constant state of wonder about things that makes his music so life-affirming. Watson and his studio were also the subject of a virtual reality film experience named Strangers, and has mentioned in other interviews how interesting it will be for his children to be able to put on a headset in the future and watch him at work in this way. His music, though, is also extremely cinematic—he associates most of his songs with specific visuals, like walking through Hollywood and seeing a certain lady on the street—and could have a similar effect. “It's a pretty weird thing thinking about my kids listening to my music,” Watson says. “Being a dad is such a different role than being a songwriter. It's hard for me to mix the two together. It makes me feel shy thinking of my kids listening to me when they're older. I don't know how much of that you're supposed to share with your dad. It's a weird thing for me. I think my kids will know such a different part of me than anybody will know. I have such a strong bond with my two boys. I don't know how they'll listen to my music. Maybe they'll make fun of my music. They'll probably do that more than anything.”

I mention that Frances Bean Cobain had recently talked about how she doesn’t like Nirvana, and how funny it is that people were shocked: the music is from a completely different generation and movement than her own experience. He laughs for a second but comes up with a pretty poignant insight. “Probably Nirvana's lyrics are not necessarily a good reflection of Kurt Cobain as a dad. I suspect he was a very caring and generous dad with a lot of love. And her memory of her dad probably has a much bigger, more beautiful depth as a person more than his lyrics would. They're great, but they're emotional reactions. It's not like a diary of how someone actually is. It has nothing to do with how she probably remembers him.” Writing cinematic love songs means that people associate his art with things like weddings, funerals, children being born. Watson is hyper-aware of this, and notes that he once made a joke about “To Build a Home” to someone who had played it at their wedding, and it “really broke their heart a bit.” He is very clear that he believes he has a responsibility as an artist and performer to respect these things, as well as the live experience, a lesson that was drilled into him during his time with rock legend, James Brown.

Photo By Matt Williams

“I think people in rock 'n' roll a lot of the time forget about the responsibility of being someone who goes into the ears of people. It's such an honour to be on a stage, and I feel sometimes they take that for granted a little bit. I learned it from James Brown. They can think they're as cool as they think they are, but none of them are as cool as fuckin' James Brown. James Brown went on stage and it's like, going to church. When he went on stage, he had a deep respect for it. There'd be 20-minute prayers, thinking this is going to be the best show we've ever done. So if someone thinks they're too cool for that, I'd argue that they're probably not as cool as James Brown, so they should probably smarten up.”

That’s the sort of thing that robots would probably find difficult. But with technological advances rapidly increasing all the time, maybe we’re not so far off from robots actually creating music that would contain the kind of humanity that Watson’s new record does. “It's a very complicated equation that makes us what we are, but nonetheless it's numbers punching in a graph. And it's such a complicated graph that makes it magical, but nonetheless it's still that. Just like a love song. Love songs have characteristics about them. I mean, what makes a love song different is just [the singer's] interpretation. But it's so unique.” He gets derailed talking about quantum computers and bio-engineering, insisting it sounds kind of silly when he talks about it. But he’s also making a lot of sense. “If we're planting these type of seeds and we're mapping the brain and we're getting algorithms that become more and more complex, why couldn't one of these things write a love song?” Before getting into some serious talk about Elon Musk, Watson makes one last thing clear. Maybe the next evolution of love songs won’t be human, or robot, but something else. “Right now we're too fascinated by trying to recreate a human. I think that's stupid. I think they'll be different. If they ever awake,” he laughs.

Matt Williams is a writer living in Toronto - @MattGeeWilliams