Opener: La Force
Patrick Watson composes, performs, and records his albums with his long-time bandmate and collaborator and multi-instrumentalists Mishka Stein and Olivier Fairfield. The Canadian artist reached gold and platinum status in over multiple countries (including five certified gold albums in Canada), and his shows sell out around the world. Over the course of his career, Patrick has retained the uncanny ability to coexist in mainstream pop-culture spaces and on the avant-garde fringes. Patrick’s songs have been featured in primetime crowd-pleasers like Grey’s Anatomy and This Is Us, as well as in multiple arthouse films from Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique), Wim Wenders (Perfect Days) ,and Philippe Falardeau (C’est pas moi, je le jure!) and more. He’s an artist who’s as comfortable performing impromptu pop-up shows on the train tracks in a Quebec mining town as he is leading the BBC Orchestra at London’s prestigious Barbican. He’s an in-demand composer with over 15 film scores under his belt. He was awarded the prestigious inaugural Impact Award at the 2024 Canadian Sync Awards. Watson’s viral single “Je te laisserai des mots” became the first French song to accumulate 1 billion streams on Spotify.
But whether you discovered Patrick Watson through your local indie record shop, a movie soundtrack, a social-media video, a European music festival, his hit collaboration with Cinematic Orchestra (2007’s “To Build a Home”), or through his appearance alongside Patti Smith and Michael Stipe at the 2021 Pathway to Paris all-star benefit concert, his music has a similar effect on all who enter his kaleidoscopic sound-world. The songs of Patrick Watson transform your everyday surroundings into your own imaginary wonderland, translating stress and sorrow into joy, and helping you find peace within the chaos of modern life.
About Uh Oh album
What is life but an endless series of “uh oh”s? From our earliest childhood accidents to our most overwhelming adult anxieties, it’s a little phrase that looms large throughout our existence. En route to making his new album, Montreal indie-pop maestro Patrick Watson was faced with the biggest “uh oh” a professional singer could endure.
One morning in the winter of 2023, Patrick woke up to discover that his voice—the angelic instrument that propelled 2006’s carnivalesque art-rock opus Close to Paradise to the Polaris Music Prize winner’s podium and turned his piano lullaby “Je te laisserai des mots” into the first Francophone track ever to surpass a billion streams on Spotify—had gone completely kaputt.
“Obviously, I like singing for people, but I was really enjoying my Modular [synth] and diving into instrumental music”—a natural inclination for Patrick, who’s composed over 15 film scores to date. “But then I was like, ‘Oh, it’d be cool to write songs for all these different singers that I really want to hear sing—I’ll find my way out of this situation that way.’ Because my voice wasn’t supposed to come back. And when it did, I just thought having all these other singers featured was still a cooler idea for a record than me singing alone.
