Patrick Watson has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket sold will go to local organizations working to fight hunger and food insecurity in their communities.

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.