Patrick Watson on ‘Love Songs for Robots’ : “There is not one prog influence on this record”

BF: Can you talk about the theme of Love Songs for Robots? Who are the robots, and are you all writing love songs to them? 

PW: Ha! I mean, it was a title I had a while ago. Our last record, Adventures in Your Own Backyard was very folk-orientated. I know Mishka is too, but I’m a huge sci-fi lover, I love science fiction, and I love that world. It’s mostly what I read. And I’ve written tunes inside that realm,  and I guess this record was an answer to that. But to still make it touching, still make it human. And still make sure people can participate in it – it’s not this cold thing, you know? Even something that was sensual, like “Bollywood,” for me, is a sensual tune with that title, so it’s kind of a play on those kinds of things. It should feel a bit like a sci-fi record for me, but about people. Good sci-fi is always about people, it’s not about robots. Whenever new things are made, people have to challenge themselves to live differently around it, and it changes people. It doesn’t change love though, and it doesn’t change friendship, It doesn’t change any of those things, but it changes how we do things around those. So that’s kind of what it means.

BF: Does your live set-up now tie into that theme as well? It sort of looks like you’re on a sci-fi set. 

PW: I went and saw the Socalled puppet musical, did you see that? And what I thought was amazing about it, and what I took away from that concert, is that when a puppet sings a cheesy, cheesy, cheesy song, that a person would be singing and you’d be like, “ugh, that’s kind of cheesy that someone would say that,” because it was a puppet or an object, it seemed that as a human being, your defence systems were completely lowered. And you could take in the song in a more innocent way.

And even the cover of the record, when we started designing it, was to find something where people lower their defences. Just take it in. So I think the stage design was also a bit for that. To have the same effect of [Socalled’s] musical, where they think of us playing, but they lower their defences. It’s kind of like another world – they don’t have to judge us, they don’t have to judge themselves, you know what I mean? That’s what sci-fi does. All you want to do is to get people to let go. That’s ultimately what you want them to do.

BF: At the show you were talking about keeping Montreal a vibrant place to be able to create music – what do you think it is about the city that allows you to continue to thrive and create here? 

PW: Joe, you moved here. What did you feel when you first moved here?

JG: Well, it’s a lot of cross-pollination of different kinds of music scenes. If you go to another city, often you’ll have, “this is your alt-rock scene, this is your folk scene,” and that does happen here a little bit, but there’s a whole bunch of cross-pollination. It’s like, I got here and started playing more sort of improvised music, some jazz stuff, some rock stuff. Everybody was talking, everybody was communicating. And it’s small enough that that cross-pollination happens. And also, something happens in the French / English thing too, there’s something interesting that happens there.

PW: I came from a very small town, and I remember going to see – I think my first memory of the Montreal music scene was, I went to see a Godspeed! show. It was still like a rock n’ roll band with cellos and violins, and I came from such a sheltered small town – I just remember them being this kind of community. From afar, I saw this community of musicians that were making this world that had no like, ties to the pop world, or ties to this other stuff. And it was like this really awesome community-orientated crazy night, that they put on with the audience. I remember just being so taken aback when I saw that the first time. When I started building all these projects, I kind of always held them as “Ok, that a real project, because they don’t play by anyone’s rules.” And whether you like their music or not, and maybe they take it too far or whatever, but it doesn’t matter – something about the world they built was so inspiring. And then when they had Casa [del Popolo], their own clubs, and those were the first clubs that opened where you could kind of make experimental music, and it was very much like a bunch of people in a music scene, and not like a famous person, or a famous singer. The community was this awesome, trippy thing, and you could participate, everybody could jump in.

Like when we did the Moon Data nights, it was members from every band, and we’d do a show where we’d all take an idea and improvise, and take our bands and our identities aside, and we’d just get crazy together. But the cool thing about it is, is that every band sounds completely different. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s no bands that sound the same. For a community that’s so intertwined and plays so much together, the joke is that every band is really, really different. That comes with a community-orientated spirit. Pop Montreal is a community-orientated spirit. It’s a strong festival, because when you play that festival, it’s like, you’re not a band at the festival, we’re all Montreal bands putting on a weekend together. What’s Montreal to you Rob?

Robbie Kuster: Summer!

PW: Short skirts keeps the music alive. Haha, damn, it’s one of those again. You going to put that as your head title?

BF: I was just waiting for that. 

PW: Waiting for one slip? That one slip you can kill us on?

MS: I mean, I don’t like to over-analyze, but I know it’s definitely an amazing climate here musically. I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and I think the fact that it’s still a somewhat affordable place for an artist – if you compare it to New York, where people have to work three jobs to be able to do their decision-making on what kind of projects they’re going to be doing, it’s probably affected somehow. It’s definitely a factor. I hate to say it, but I feel like that’s definitely a part of it.

JG: I think my rent the first three months I was here was like, $150 or something.

MS: But it is conducive for this amazing thing that’s happening, where all the artists are just mingling and there’s like a healthy kind if competition, you know what I mean?

BF: That’s the other headline: “Healthy Competition.” 

MS: Healthy competition. It won’t kill you.

Love Songs for Robots will be released in Canada via Secret City Records on May 12. Patrick Watson’s next Montreal show is at the Osheaga festival on August 1st. Tickets are available here. For all upcoming tour dates, visit patrickwatson.net.