Patrick Watson

Very few singers and bandleaders in the last quarter-century have navigated both the mainstream and arty fringes, the accessible and the experimental quite as well as Patrick Watson. To wit, his exquisite lullaby for the lonely, “Je te laisserai des mots,” is the first French song to have been streamed more than a billion times, and his spiraling collaboration with The Cinematic Orchestra, “To Build a Home,” has been used in wildly popular shows like Orange Is the New Black and Grey’s Anatomy. But Watson’s magnetism stems not only from his feather-light, lithe voice and instantly relatable lyrics but also his willingness to fuse genres. He and his eponymous band can fold the theatrical flair of a Broadway musical inside a twinkling folk-rock number, a grand span of post-rock against a woozy microtonal dream.

There may be no better example of Watson’s fearlessness than the new Uh Oh, named for a months-long spell when Watson lost his voice, missing the ability to speak to his children let alone sing to his audience. Rather than despair, Watson—an accomplished film composer with 15 features to his name—dug into his modular synthesizers and the emotional expressiveness of instrumental music. Finally, he had an idea: What if he wrote songs for others to sing, like Martha Wainwright or his local barista, Charlotte Oleena? Watson’s voice eventually returned, so Uh Oh is a series of stately duets. But the restriction gave his writing a new boundlessness, from the fractured trip hop of “Ami Imaginaire” to the chamber-pop-meets-trap swagger of “Peter and the Wolf.” Patrick Watson—the singer and the band—finally bring their songs to Big Ears.