If you’re still clinging to verse-chorus-verse like it’s a security blanket, Patrick Watson would like to have a word. Actually, scratch that—he’d like to sing a word, preferably just one, floating inside a hypnotic synthscape with no bridges in sight.
His new record Waves might be the most intimate and emotionally unguarded release of his career, which is saying something for a guy who’s made a living out of turning heartbreak and wonder into orchestral lullabies. “It’s probably the hardest record I’ve ever had to make,” Watson says, not as a brag, but like someone who just washed up on a shore after the storm.
Written during a period of personal upheaval that he mostly declines to detail (“I’m not a diary writer”), the album isn’t about those events so much as it’s about surrendering to the current. “It’s like being in the ocean and getting caught in a bad wave,” he says. “There’s this moment when you have to let your body go, or you’ll drown. And once you do, there’s a kind of peace in that.”
That might sound ominous, but Watson insists the record isn’t sad. “I don’t want to write something that makes people feel worse. I’m not interested in being melodramatic. I don’t even want to write sad songs—I want to write songs that make my body buzz.”
The buzz is real. “Broken,” a standout track, leans into late-80s melancholy with a Bruce Hornsby-like shimmer, which Watson credits to a recent Tom Yorke performance that gave him permission to go full-on sentimental. “It’s probably the only song I’ve ever really let myself go that far into that style.”
If the lyrics feel more plainspoken this time, that’s intentional too. Watson cites working on a posthumous Leonard Cohen song as a turning point. “I took all the music away and just listened to his voice. There was so much belief in every word. I thought, Okay, whatever I say, I want to own it like that.”
The Cohen connection runs deep—Watson produced one of the final tracks for Adam Cohen’s upcoming Leonard Cohen album. “It was just his voice and some MIDI saxophone from the '80s,” Watson says, laughing. “I stripped everything else out. Honestly, I almost didn’t want to put anything back in.”
Sonically, Waves avoids genre like it’s contagious. Watson borrows from hip-hop’s skeletal structure—big low end, minimal mids, the vocal pushed to the front—and blends it with chamber pop, ambient textures, and South American folk. “I don’t think about genre,” he says. “Ever. I think, what do I want to feel? And then I go find it.”
He credits hip-hop with blowing up traditional song form. “Hip-hop killed song structure in the best way,” he says. “You don’t know where the chorus is anymore, and it’s great. You’re free.”
Visuals play a huge part in his songwriting too. Not just music videos, but actual film stills and photographs. One track, “Here Comes the River,” was inspired by an old photo of a flooded street in Beijing. “Sometimes I can’t even write a song until I’ve found the right image,” he says.
Even the album cover—a tender, near-kiss between two people—was chosen to cut through the noise. “We live in a really loud world,” he says. “At some point, I just wanted to hear someone talking to me, not a bunch of production tricks.”
That’s the key to Waves: it’s not trying to dazzle, or even explain. It just wants to sit beside you, quietly, until something in your body shifts.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
