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

Patrick Watson has heard the advance buzz on his latest record, the expansive Love Songs for Robots, but he isn’t buying it.

“There is not one prog influence on this record,” he reveals during a recent interview at his Montreal studio. “I don’t think we ever even thought about prog when we made it.”

The early comparisons to progressive rock likely stem from the fact that Love Songs for Robots is a stark departure from Watson’s previous album, 2012’s intimate Adventures in Your Own Backyard. An eclectic, science-fiction themed album bursting with meticulous ethereal compositions and Beatles-esque harmonies, Love Songs for Robots may not fall into official prog-rock territory, but it is definitely a record best experienced with an open mind and a proper set of headphones.

The Polaris Prize winner and prolific film composer is just beginning a long day of press at the band’s Plateau studio when we catch up with him mid-morning, killing time by enthusiastically demonstrating his newest toy – a virtual reality phone headset that Watson predicts will soon completely change the way we relate to media.

We sat down with Watson and his band (Mishka Stein, Robbie Kuster and Joe Grass) a few days after they debuted the new album in its entirety at a pair of surprise hometown shows to discuss the sound of the new record, the Montreal music community, and why Katy Perry is like Frank Zappa.

Bad Feeling: Love Songs for Robots seems to have a much more expansive sound than Adventures in your Own Backyard, which was a very intimate album – it seems like a headier record. 

Patrick Watson: Headier, eh? It’s more visceral than the last record, by a landslide. It’s definitely not headier, that’s for sure. I can just tell from the audience reaction. If we do a song like “Hearts,” or we do something like “Good Morning Mr. Wolf,” it’s like an immediate response. No record we’ve done has ever done that. In the sense there’s so much drums and bass, and it’s so much more groove-orientated, it takes away all the headiness. Even when I play it for people that didn’t so much like the other stuff because it was a bit too like, “ladi dadi,” for them, it’s the first record they really love. Maybe you’re not wrong though; I’m just saying from my experience, it’s been the opposite.

Mishka Stein: That seems to be people’s reaction though. French people call it “prog.” You call it heady, they call it prog.

BF: The only thing I had heard prior to listening to the record was that there were a lot of prog influences on it. 

PW: There is not one prog influence on this record, I don’t think we ever even thought about prog when we made it.

Joe Grass: I was just thinking of King Crimson the entire time (laughs).

PW: They’re stories, right? Like some forms of art in the old days, where you start with a story, the story expands, and wherever the story ends, that’s where the song ends up. We’re not going to try to make the music complicated, we’re just trying to tell a story.  In “Hearts,” it starts off as a story, then it gets pretty violent, and they’re turning in circles at the end trying to figure out where to go. And the same thing with “Turn Into the Noise,” there’s kind of one minute inside the story where there’s the explosion that starts the story off. I don’t think it’s prog music. It’s not about like, sections.

JG: It doesn’t start with a classic verse-chorus formula at all. It starts with a musical idea and a story, and then it kind of does what it has to do to accommodate that.

BF: I think often people call anything that was made to be played on headphones “prog music.”  There’s just more of a benefit if you listen closely. 

PW: I guess the only reason I get defensive about that is because for me, when I make a song, it’s definitely music to communicate with people, it’s not just music to communicate with musicians, in a way where prog has that history of being music that only musicians get because they’re going to do this in a crazy time change colour. And I’m not saying prog music always does that, I’m just saying it has that reputation. I like making music for people, more than musicians. I want people to get something out of it, even if they don’t know anything about music. There’s a difference.

BF: You’re not trying to impress music nerds, you’re trying to communicate to as many people as possible. 

PW: I’m trying to communicate a story. And it’s funny, because I was listening to a lot of music on the radio – I have kids, so they would make me stop at like, super pop stations, like Katy Perry and stuff like that, and I was actually amazed at how wild the arrangements are. But since it’s kind of in the format where you have really loud drums and it’s up-tempo, people just think it’s easy, because there’s this huge driving beat that carries everything. But if you actually sit down and listen to the arrangements, it’s like Frank Zappa. It’s fucking insane. Just crazy colour changes. The Beatles would go to crazy colour changes, like with “A Day in the Life.” If our music is prog music, they’re like, super space prog. “A Day in the Life” is my favourite Beatles song. I love the construction. I like how it takes me through a day, and it takes me through two different characters. That song I find very touching for that. But it’s not prog music to me. So I think [Love Songs for Robots] is closer to that concept of writing than I would say prog.

BF: How does the writing process work in the group? Is it lyrics first, or are you working on pieces while music is being written within the band?

PW: Lyrics we finish just right before we go mastering (laughs). Like, “The record’s done, but I’m missing four words!” I have trouble getting the right words all the time.

BF: So do you try to match what’s happening lyrically to the music?

PW: There’s three different ways of constructing a piece. If I narrowed it down to make a precise answer, we have one where like, with “Hearts,” Mishka brought in this awesome chord progression, where I heard it and just started singing. And I had some words, I had more of a feeling, and he had his own feeling about what it was about. And then slowly, it just built into a film, and as we played the piece, the film became more clear, and then the arrangement adjusted, and the lyrics adjusted – they adjust together.

And then you have a song like “Grace,” a Joe and Mishka combo idea, where they brought it in and they had a really strong musical idea of what they wanted to do with it. And then you have a song like “Turn Into the Noise,” which was the first demo I made for a film thing, so that was something I built like a world, and then we jumped in together to see what we could do with it. So those are like the three different ways we can construct songs. It takes me a long time to find what I want to say.

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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.