Patrick Watson

25:12And so you play there and you can make a living playing there. And then all the people show up to listen to crazy music. It's an example of like what subsidy into the arts can do. But you're going against America. America is your neighbor and you speak French. Like can you imagine trying to keep your language, six to eight million people beside that giant? The other way to look at it is that it's easier to keep your culture than it would be for English Canadians. Well, you know, I love Canada. I mean, Canada's my country, and obviously I would never speak ill will, but they just do what the Americans do.

25:44In a way, that's, I find, depressing. I feel like they're a bad version of America now. Like, you go to, like, look at their music scene, and it's like, oh, okay, well, it's like, here's a Canadian version of this American thing. I'm like, guys, like, do your own thing. Right. And I don't even be harsh, and that's, it's not my intention. But I do think if I look at the most successful artistic Canadian projects that actually matter, it's like Kids in the Hall. It's like the Trailer Park Boys. Trailer Park Boys, most people think are stupid, right? But when you actually watch it, it's brilliant.

26:16It's also way before the office with the fourth wall and the cameraman. They invented something. Whenever Canada does something original and kind of crazy, that's when it works. Every time it's like a cheap knockoff of American culture, I don't see the point. You know what I mean? And then all they do is move, like, you know, Drake's Canadian. He's moved to the U.S. And Justin Bieber's also Canadian. So there's this cross like that as well. But it's complicated. Celine Dion's Canadian. Shania Twain. Shania, yeah. Sarah McLachlan. These are big, big American stars in a lot of way, you know. Yeah.

26:47Although a lot of Canadians knew Celine Dion originally because she sang French-Canadian folk songs before she was. Celine's amazing, though. She's incredible, Celine. Yeah. What you realize about Celine Dion is like, when I say the Cameragas, I feel like heart and like the heart of the sleeves and passion. When Celine Dion bangs her chest when she sings, that's what I'm talking about. Like they have this passion that's a remarkable passion that has carried my, inside of my career, I carry that passion. Even if I'm an Anglophone, I grew up with Francophones and they're my family and I speak French fluently.

27:24and now my biggest song I've ever done is in French, funny enough. Did you speak English at home growing up or French? I spoke English. My parents were English and then I had asked my mom in grade one to switch me to French school for some odd reason. And then I went there and I'm really happy I did. Right. That's before you knew your dad was Top Gun. Yeah, this is true. But my first memory of why I think I wanted to go there so badly, I went to a dinner at my first French family and they were doing that thing of the fondue where if it drops, you have to kiss the person beside you. I've never heard that.

27:57It's a French thing. And then the mom was very pretty. And then I dropped it. And then I had to kiss the mom on the cheek. And she was like, this place is amazing. I'm never hanging out with English people again. Yeah. Then you dropped five more. Yeah, on purpose, totally. But I mean, I don't know. Yeah, that's where my heart's at, you know. With this album, because you went into it, not sure how much you were going to contribute. But you said you literally traveled around with your laptop. two mics and two mics first of all what were the mics they're chefs they're pretty fancy the cool thing about chefs is like you're in that room it sounds like you're in the room it's they're incredibly articulate and incredibly lovely sounding and i didn't even have fancy preamps i literally had my apollo preamps which are very kind of transparent preamps so like like take a song like the wandering that whole like song is one take the the structure is still structured take with two mics so you hear the guitar and a bit of the drums so we would do like a structural live take so at least the bassist had some real dynamics in life that we could build on but almost every song was like that i'd make a really like real bass track that's live so all the dynamics we weren't trying to like automate them in they would just be there and then we would build on the natural autumn natural ebb and flows so you would have a band in the room with you Well, me and Mishka did Silencio all by ourselves and Nova with two mics.

29:19I was just playing piano and he was playing guitar. And then we did all the whole form. And then that one, I added a little bit of drums post. And then the last one, Olivier came and helped us. But the initial take through the whole song was a live take. Wow. And the vocal beginning is still a live take too. Like the whole thing's very live. Were any of these improvised or semi-improvised? Did you always have a track that you were working with with the singers? No, but me and Mishka wrote the chord progression like 30 minutes before she showed up. The sea, land, two. And it was because that's what that room felt like.

29:54And we were just trying to match how nice the room felt. Then we wrote it. In the room, were you going into studios? No, never studios. It's just always weird. I've been mixing the engineering records since I was younger, and the evolution of recording has been dramatically different. So instead of spending my own studio, we rented this insane 19th century painter studio above Montmartre for the same budget, but then we were in this most magical place you can see with two mics and a laptop. I often try to record moments and not recordings. Most of the songs of mine that have, you know, if I think about To Build a Home or Je te laissez-de-moi, they're not great recordings.

30:29I'm the engineer. I mean, I engineered To Build a Home. I was like, what, like maybe one or two years of experience throwing mics up and what you hear is a moment. So I often put more energy into the moment. And then with the modern technology, you can be kind of, you know, if it doesn't sound good, you can be kind of crazy with it and kind of make it sound cool. You know, I'm very flexible and you just try to make things work. But the moment for me is still what I'm capturing before the sound. Like I hate sitting around for a kick mic. I hate it. With engineers diddling around for like three hours by the time we get there, the drummer doesn't want to play it.

31:01It's like, what's the point? Right. But it's also easy to say in a place where you have a dynamic EQ, like EQs and the plugins have made it so I can compensate for that crappy micing fairly easy. It is a new thing that you could have that flexibility to this extent. So you can do it all in post, you're not... Yeah, but my post would be like, you know, there's this thing called FabFilter and it's just like the difference being it's a dynamic EQ. They've existed for a long time, but that one is so useful that, you know, if I'm missing a bit of kick and I see the peak and I put, every time that thing moves, jump that up five degrees, I can make it sound like an 808 if I wanted to, but it's still a live take with the live room attached to it.

31:41So it's quite lovely and very surreal, you know. Did you ever feel when you were producing that you were changing the room in a sense? Or were you always trying to preserve what you were hearing at the time? I think what I do is both. I want the things to sound real and then super surreal at the same time that you can't believe it's real. You know, like if you look at Peter and the Wolf, it's completely surreal kind of mixing. But yet you still have the room tone. I think Silencio, it's the way the drums and the guitar interact in that room. and you hear the room. I really love the sound of that recording.

32:13I think it's one of the best mixes I've ever made. You know, the cool thing about modern music is that when you record like a piano, you're recording a room. When you record an electronic instrument, you're removing the room and now the room you're listening into becomes the room. So you have this like vacuum effect. A great example of like that vacuum effect hitting pop music would be Billie Eilish's first record. It's a vacuum, which is coming from obviously a hip hop tradition and electronic. So when she did like folk songs inside that tradition of mixing it was like holy moly and her voice sits in this vacuum where you just you and the narrator all by yourselves it's a lovely thing you know so i think you know the evolution of mixing and proximity i like i like to play with all the different you know just like the depth of feels so some moments are incredibly electronic some moments are very room i don't think i have a i just follow the story you know the album to me felt very cinematic so often the the mix between say your voice and any of your wonderful collaborators sometimes you were singing together sometimes you were singing you were arguing as you do in your song with with Martha Wainwright but there are times it sounded as though one person was in a different room in a house that's what it felt like to me it felt like it wasn't just ones in the background it was like one's somewhere else someone's around a corner does that make any sense yeah i mean like look at like salan like salan which is sava that french song i wanted to record the first verse on a telephone i think it's probably one of the microphones of the most research ever been put into it but there's this thing that when you hear that microphone it feels like someone's talking to you so the first the first part of that the first verse and that's recorded on telephone on a mic stand and not in a fancy mic so so let me back up it's like so imagine you have two mics and And the mics are in the room.

34:06They're picking up a bit of Mishka's guitar, a bit of my piano. And I put a telephone recording kind of synced to my Pro Tools. And I use my telephone for the vocal. Because it's not about, I don't mix to make a song sound good. I mix it to make it tell a story. You know what I mean? And I come from the tradition of a good example of that, historically speaking, would be like, Debussy is a classical guy. And he probably broke more rules than since Bach. you know up to up from bach to debussy everybody kind of expanded on bach but when debussy comes he breaks like crazy new rules like new voicings new harmonic structures new ideas of arranging and partly because he's like oh i wish the music like did what those waves are doing stop thinking about music and thought about the narration or whatever like the physical effect of it and drop like oh what chord is it and then he broke all these rules by accident and then when you listen to it it sounds like pop music it sounds very lovely it's breaking all the rules at the same time and you don't even know that but you change you change music what kind of rules are you talking about well like you know like usually when you do a symphonic structure you have like you have your theme it develops like much like a pop song or uh like you know quarterly speaking uh like when i said that so what those voicings in force he like modulates in tritones he's breaking all these like he invented a scale the you know the which is from the gamelan inspiration so he invented like what is tell me what that scale is that's a whole tone scale it's very open right so i mean what he's doing is like traditionally in music you have like

35:46like all the chords make you want to go back to that chord right so he's making structures that like the home is now not important you have no pull to the home you're just being led to these new homes you know and and that is a that is a dramatic distance from bach you know also the whole tone scale you hear that a lot in jazz yeah they use it i mean they use all sorts of tricks they do half whole half jazz is lovely because i mean it's the greatest language to learn to learn like a like a language where you can communicate with others playing music you know what i mean it's the fastest language to learn and be like hey dude let's jam later in my older years i had to go back and learn a lot of classical rules to unlearn some of the jazz rules for certain things where i find jazz you look really look at a vertical you get a chord you're like how am i vertical you're going to decorate this to get to the next chord where classical you're like you're looking at like a like six bars from now the note you played will matter as a suspension You know, it's a much more longer play.

36:46It's a linear. But I'll give you an example why that's interesting. So if you take like Adagio for strings, like the one of the saddest string quartets ever, string pieces in the world, the chord you cry on is B major, which is like pretty bright. It's like the brightest chord in music you can do, like even worse than C major. And that's where you cry, but that's because when you play this chord, you're hearing E flat minor. And that's because he's setting up a long structure structure so that when you play this, you're really hearing this. And that's where the long playing classical music can do something in jazz cant, and jazz can do something in classical cant.

37:25They're two different languages. Now, explain what you mean in jazz, how you're decorating the chord up top. Well, you know, I mean, I'm not like I'm a jazz expert. I studied around as a kid. So usually, let's say you're here, like you're in C minor, right? And you want to get to there. so what you would do traditionally is like a 2-5-1 so I'm in C minor, I'm like, okay I'm going to do this chord

37:50so it makes you really want to hear that which sets up the next chord and why that's important in jazz so if I'm in 1 here, I'm going like to get to the F minor, I could do like

38:08so it gives you these like acrobatic ways of sewing around notes to make these really lovely improvisations but it's very vertical i see it as a much more vertical structure and they're not chord tones they're they're chord tones but they're helping you get to the f minor but they're all little short battles where classical is like over it's the longer battles for a different kind of result you know right and so but in jazz it's using an 11th or a 13th well it's it's you're using it just to to find the most interesting way to get there. You know what I mean? You're like, hey, I'm here and I've got to go there.

38:41What is the funnest possible way I can get there? And then that's why these substitute chords or these two five ones are there. So if you're playing, if you're just going like... It's kind of boring, but if I'm like...

38:58Yeah. It's just a nice long way to get there. It's quite lovely, you know? So that's what's lovely about jazz. And the tension is always like, what if he doesn't get home? in jazz yeah what if it doesn't come back it's it's amazing it's an incredible language like it's it's magical and it's a great language to learn i think first because i think it's a good communication basis for playing with other people and you know what i mean and i think that that's a really good thing to have i think both are really good but you know i'll tell you one thing recently during covid i went back to a bach because a lot of the classical music that i do really like really depends on this very subtle voice leading, you know, and not to be too nerdy or nothing, but, you know, voice leading just means, like, when you have, like, chords, your top note and your bottom note, how you get to the next chord, they made these rules that if you follow them, the music just feels like it moves better, where, like, instead of just jumping to, like, you would have to be, like, closer, and when you follow those rules, it just, the music sounds like it has more depth, and if I take like modern neoclassical music that is really lovely and it sounds a bit more pop and then I listen to the same amount of notes but it's avopart avopart makes me feel like I'm at church in a way that the other ones don't it's mainly because he has a deep knowledge of voice leading another great example is Ritchie Sakamoto Ritchie Sakamoto's solo piano work is outstanding because his voice leading is outstanding it's very difficult to do well it's the most difficult thing to do a good example of someone who I think has great voice leading and does contemporary classical is Carolyn Shaw she's one of my favorite arrangers in the modern day she does her voice leading and her string quartets are magical to listen to part of pop music though is making those big jumps right the Beatles voice leading is outstanding George Martin does a reason why you remember all their songs is that right?

40:53yeah because they're constantly conscious of they have a third in the bass or the fifth in the bass I think the Beatles are the greatest example because as you get older and you see that and you actually read the charts and you're seeing what's at the bottom and the voice leading going on, you realize that Paul McCartney and George Martin really knew what they were doing. And it came to voice leading and it's actually a great example of like how important it is. How do you, because if you know these languages, you know classical theory, where does your music fit in? How much jazz is in what you're doing?

41:22How much classical? How much pop? I don't know where that line starts or begins. I know that if I'm doing research, and I want to introduce elements into my music, I'll do like, for example, there's like the way I mix or the way that my vocals sit, I was very inspired by people like Little Sims and Kendrick Lamar, but obviously I don't do hip hop. But that would mean that I would have done like secretly like 25 demos of that style of music to learn what I need to learn. So only two to 4 % would show up in my, naturally inside of me for real. And you wouldn't hear me like immolating them. you just hear that they had an intrinsic, internal, structurally difference.

42:00So when I do it, you don't hear it. I constantly, once a month, take a classical piece apart. I had a great piano teacher. He just said, improvising is a lot like talking. So if anything I remember from my jazz lessons, it's like have a conversation, have commas, have a sentence, leave space for the person to respond. It's an organization of how you communicate. So where the jazz line ends and begins is that tradition of communication. So when the drummer says something, I listen to what he said and I answer him and respond to him as a communication. And when you watch us on stage, the one talent we have as a band is we're great listeners.

42:36You know, great musicians, great listeners. I'm constantly responding to my bass player, Mishka, constantly responding to my drummer. So that part of the tradition of jazz is very, very evident in our live shows. But that doesn't mean we swing or play sevens on everything. It just means that we found a way to be influenced without trying to immolate something. After a break, we'll be back with Patrick Watson.

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46:39Oh, I know. It's so funny. I realized that after. I mean, I had worked a lot with, I had worked on a Leonard record on top of, I produced a song for his Make It Darker called The Hills and he's just constantly floats in my life from Montreal and I had spent the last eight years reading a lot more than I used to. So my lyrics dramatically got better in the last eight years because of that. And it's, I don't, it didn't cross my mind until much later on the song. I'm like, oh my god that sounds so much like how was it to work on that song with him well i was far away and it was interesting my mom was like a huge leonard cohen fan like she loved leonard like you know she would have left my dad and probably would be a good idea i'm even but at that point but the date leonard and i grew up from a sonic like a more of a sonic place when i was a kid right so leonard cohen i didn't really understand when i was younger and here's a coincidence the first time I heard my voice was right before I produced that song.

47:35And when I did that song, I wanted to do that song for my mom more than for Leonard to, to do this thing for her to make her, you know, and she had passed away already. Yeah. So I'd heard my voice and then I had his vocals isolated. I don't know how much, how much fun it is to have, like to have Leonard's voice all by itself is a very special moment. And then when you listen to that, you're like, the only thing I can do is kind of ruin this. and then underneath i had his like midi saxophones on the casio arrangement that was originally intended for the song right which was the reason why i could never connect with him but then before he loved he loved that like cheap casio sound yeah well then i understood why and you know it's in hindsight you know i have mixed feelings about how i used to think about it but so he was like i don't want to ruin my words if i put like good music it makes me think of the saint augustine quote you know what that is no no so right in the church when they invented polyphony this monk lost her mind because like everybody's coming to church because the polyphony is stronger than what we're talking about and we need to ban it and inside the council of trent when the protestants and the calsics were separating the church there was two composers on that panel that saved polyphony because one of the arguments was that singing two notes at once make it makes jesus seem small like it was people were only going for that and leonard cohen's argument for the casio was the same argument he's like if i make the music any more powerful you're just not going to hear my words and so when i arranged the hills i decided not to pay attention to that as to run the experiment of like to try to let the music be as powerful the words just for the experiment at all i don't know if i would do it the same way now in my in my in my wiser years but i did try for fun and it probably drove him crazy because i know when adam brought it to him he's like that's a very strong lots of where's the cashier he's like he's like i'm sure it drove a bit crazy but I mean I was running an experiment you know that's what music for me I don't get too crazy about it you just run an experiment sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't I've always thought one of the great missed opportunities you know there are all these Leonard Cohen tribute albums country music should do a Leonard Cohen he lived in Nashville for a while he was very conscious of how the lyrics were pushing it forward at the same time and you know one of the best covers of Leonard Cohen is a Trisha Yearwood cover.

49:53Well. Coming back to you, which is fabulous. I think Country would be, yeah, that's a great idea. I mean, I tried to even like put, I tried to shift the pocket to be in somewhat a modern R &B, slightly more R &B on the hills. That's what I was kind of trying to do. To see if I could make it feel like it kind of hit like on that modern edge of where the snare sits and the kicks. And it was running an experiment. I'll tell you a funny one that I did that with, you know, Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie by Bob Dylan. you ever listen to that i mean i was not a bob dylan fan until i heard that once again because of music and then when i heard last thoughts on woody guthrie it blew my mind and i ran it when i was like studying how to mix hip-hop as a educational thing and just to learn what i could learn i did like a strange hip-hop version of last thoughts on woody guthrie just to run the course and i in a kind of a double time you know like when husk stops and you really fast it worked like effortlessly uh i was gonna say with inquiring the wires though it does have this slight Leonard Cohen vibe, if I can say that.

50:54But then it's got this beautiful brass, you take the brass figure that's behind the lyrics and then you bring it out. So it's an actual interlude in the piece. That trumpet player is one of the best trumpet players in Mexico. He's the one who plays in all the Pixar films. He's one of the best mariachi players in Mexico, which I always forget his name and I got to start to memorize it. And that choir had showed up by accident because I was running an audition because I didn't know if La Fox would be able to join us on the next tour. So I was going to audition a couple of singers to see if anybody want to come sing.

51:28And they all showed up at the same time. So it was incredibly uncomfortable. So I just told Mishka, I was like, dude, you go in the other room with Olivier, write something like this. I'm going to work on lyrics with them. And we wrote that on the spot. So we started off with all the Spanish words and we had conversations about, I always felt when I was in Mexico city, when you look at the wires and all the infrastructure that's in the sky, you just see so much life. it looks like this you just see every millions of life system hanging in this like the weight of all the wires around the city so i i had presented that impression to them and then i let them answer that impression in their own way and then we wrote we recorded that thing in like two hours written recorded and then we brought the then we brought in the next day the horn players just like and then they blew our minds on that you know so yeah it was one of my favorite moments of this record only because like you're translating different languages and it's like chum play I just like the whole chaos of it, you know?

52:21Tell me about The Wandering. The Wandering, this is one of the houses we rented. So we decided it'd be really funny to rent like a really obnoxious mansion in the hills of Hollywood, just like the Paris apartment. Because we had a show, we had two days off, like let's rent, once again, use our studio budget, rent like something that has a pool, like totally ridiculous kind of. So we were sitting there just hanging out and Olivier started to play that guitar part, who's a teased drummer, he's not even a guitar player, and I was like, that's a really... And then we just started, it just started coming together.

52:52So we wrote the music part. I had the melody, not the words. Within like six hours, we had written and kind of recorded that, the basis of that, the chord structure with Mishka and Olivier. And the lyrics were like, we were sitting in this absurdity of this silly mansion in the hills of Hollywood. And I had been touring since I was 16 years old. It's a long time to tour. And you're always just like this ghost. and you're always this wandering kind of observer in all these places. And here we are sitting in this ridiculous place again as the observer. And even my earliest memories as a kid, I just remembered always feeling like a ghost in a lovely way, wandering through strangers and just being the observer and capturing this thing.

53:35And so I felt like when that song kind of came to fruit, I thought that would be really fun. So I just tell stories of being the great, you know, the wandering. And then what was fun is that it had a Brazilian undertone, and I thought of Mauro, who's a Portuguese singer, not Brazilian but sings in Portuguese immediately. And she comes from generations of Fado singers. So those are some of the best singers of all time. So I think she's like a modern iteration of generations of Fado. And so I thought about her immediately because to kind of celebrate the Brazilian and the Portuguese kind of undertones of the song that naturally it had.

54:10It's just, since I was a kid, I just felt like a ghost. And the two people, that one, the two people is not two people. It's just that when you travel, a part of you separated, you become two different things, the traveling version of you and the home version of you. And that traveling version of you becomes your companion you travel with that you're high-fiving because you're always in crazy places together. And I think that song is about being your best travel companion as all the different people you need to be to walk through all these different landscapes of people. We'll be in the Deep South in places that people have really different, radically politically different ideas.

54:43I'll be in Asia with different radicals. And I find that as a musician, you have this multi-pass, this passport. You're welcome through everybody's door. And with that, it doesn't mean that you need to agree or validate, but you are kind of the observer of these different things. So when I sing, I'm singing about all these people that have pushed and pulled my imagination. Me as myself, it's not very interesting, but I have had the fortunate life to meet very, very interesting people throughout my history of traveling. in remarkable ways that money can't buy, and not because they're famous. Like, I remember this soldier.

55:21I was in Vietnam when these painters invited me there. I'd go up to this gentleman's house. It's the middle of the night. He's 12. He's like, are you a musician? He's like, yes. And on his wall, he had this blanket over the wall. And when he pulled the blanket, there was like thousands of vinyls on the wall. And each one of those vinyls he had taken from an American soldier during the war. Oh, vinyl. Every vinyl. So CCR, it's like he was just from the Vietnam War. so what he would do is raid the bases or they would play these tricks like literally lps yeah so this guy in his wall was a collection of records that he had stolen from other soldiers that they they had killed in the in the meantime our bases they had raided it's an incredible story yeah and what was the stolen music of the vietnam war and why that was really interesting is that i was there a week after september 11th and why that was interesting is that a lot of old ladies would come up to me saying that's so sad because they just assume i'm american it's so sad what happened and knowing anything about that war I just didn't believe them at first and so when I was with that gentleman with this wall I felt comfortable enough to be like hey I want to know for real do you really feel that empathy or is that like just for money like what is I just want to know you know and he's like every time like if I carry any anger whatsoever about that it means the war is still happening and that war is finished and I don't want to ever go back there so it's when the lady feels empathy and she feels sad is because she has no interest in carrying that war another day.

56:46And what he was really saying is they legitimately felt bad. And as you know, it's a very complicated play. So it was a very inspiring moment. That's like, you know, that's nothing to do with me. I'm a Canadian small-town boy. But I am a receiver of these incredible scenarios like this that become, when I open my mouth and sing, I carry the weight of these interactions in people. I carry the responsibility of carrying the depth of these interactions. Now, is there a particular song that addresses that incident? I mean, yes, in a way that I never saw the world the same. I can tell you that much.

57:20Big Bird in a Small Cage was on the same trip, and that was a real story. We went to the musician's house. There were six generation musicians, and they literally had a collection of birds in the back, like 100 songbirds. and literally there was this like really tiny cage in the back of the room that had the biggest bird all stuck in it and he's like why would you do that it's like if you put a big bird in a small cage he sings all the time and i'm like yes he's crying for help for fuck's sake sorry he's crying for help you know obviously but it was i thought that was like a really lovely idea for music and yeah so i put that in my pocket and then funny enough i was traveling in new orleans after that and the collision of those two places really allowed me to give birth to that song.

58:02I don't usually write right away. I let it sit in my pocket for five, six years when it's an idea like that big and let it collide with life a bit before I write. The heaviest emotional song on this album, I think, would be House on Fire. Yes. Or at least it's at the highest sort of pitch. Tell me about that song. House on Fire, it's complex because I co-wrote it with Martha and initially I had that chorus and a lot of the ideas of the song before Martha showed up and I was hiring her because she has like fire and she like fights and I don't have that. And then my biggest mistake in the album was like having too much of an idea to bring to her, which in fact was a bit rude in my way, especially because the nature of the song was complex.

58:45The nature of the song, the original intent was, you know, sometimes you have two truths. You know, if you've been through divorce or different parts or different complicated moments in your life. And then at one point, those two truths matter if it means the whole house is going to burn down. And I thought, and during COVID and all these really important conversations that we've been having in the last six years, it keeps on making me think a bit of my childhood home where you have these colliding truths. And at one point, do you want the whole house to burn for one to be right? And at what point, is it better to let two truths exist and not burn the whole house down?

59:19Was that a feature of your upbringing? Yeah, to some extent. I mean, I watched them burn down the house in certain ways for certain truths to exist. And I don't know if they were a fight that was worth losing that battle, you know. But then that's a very obnoxious subject to bring to a woman's perspective, because often those two truths had like, is the way they've been silenced. And like, it's in fact the worst thing. you wait a little but i was not referring to those situations but she was coming from a totally different perspective than mine so she's like no you i'm not singing that idea like that because i don't have that same experience as you so then we try to find a way for the two realities that coexist in the song where we can still sing together and she could still have her perspective as clear as day and i have my experience so in the end it kind of worked out great for the song being what being what it was you know but it was a learning experience i mean i felt a bit silly after that I would have tried to bring that to Martha.

1:00:13I did it because that melody, I was like, no one will sing that melody like Martha. There's no way. No, it's an amazing performance. Yeah, it's just like, that's the only person who could sing this song for me and the way it was written. But she does come from a family that literally works out their problems in songs. So I think she's actually the ideal person, isn't she? Because she is the person who can sing this song and then her brother sings this, you know, famously. I know, they're amazing. You could tell the whole family's relationship just jumping from one song to another. Well, that's an amazing, well, they're amazing.

1:00:49They're all amazing. Rufus is very talented. I mean, I was young in Montreal looking up to these people. Like, I would look up to Martha, you know, I'd see her on stage and dream that I'd be on stage like hers, you know, so to sing with her is quite a lovely experience for me, you know what I mean? And very humbling experience, clearly. and Rufus I mean I play piano and sing I thought I'd never have a career because he did it first and I was like well there's no point in me doing this anymore yeah he's done it yeah he's done it I gotta quit you know so yeah thank god he went to write operas thank god it saved me yeah well I think I went much more towards experimental music at that same drift probably because of Rufus probably because I was like what's the point he's got that gig already I better do something different it's been delightful yeah super fun conversation in the episode description you'll find a link to a playlist featuring our favorite songs from Patrick Watson, including his new album, Uh-Oh.

1:01:41Be sure to check out youtube.com slash Broken Record Podcast to see all of our interviews. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at The Broken Record Pod. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Talliday. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for$4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast Subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app.

1:02:16Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.

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