Patrick Watson

Singer-songwriter, composer and pianist extraordinaire, Patrick Watson is both the given name of the solo artist and the indie-rock band he formed in 2000. Born on October 8, 1979 in Lancaster, California, US, Patrick Watson grew up in Hudson, Quebec and cut his musical teeth in ska band Gangster Politics at high school before going on to study music at college in Montreal. He assembled the Patrick Watson group with guitarist Simon Angell (formerly of Gangster Politics), percussionist Robbie Kuster and bassist Mishka Stein and they self-released their chamber pop-adjacent debut album, Just Another Ordinary Day, in 2003. Winning Canada's prestigious Polaris Music Prize in 2007 for their second album, Close to Paradise, Patrick Watson received a New Artist of the Year nomination at the 2007 Juno Awards and went on to traverse alt-folk, ambient, chamber pop and indie-rock on another five albums: 2009's Wooden Arms (nominated for the 2009 Polaris Music Prize), 2012's Adventures in Your Own Backyard, 2015's Love Songs for Robots – their fourth straight album to reach Canada's Top Ten – 2016's The 9th Life of Louis Drax and 2019's Wave. Patrick Watson has also forged a successful career as a film composer, which includes his feature-length debut It's Not Me, I Swear! in 2008 and 2016 thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax. Patrick Watson's music has also made its way onto the small screen in various guises, with "To Build a Home" being featured in Orange Is the New Black (2017) and "Here Comes the River" featured at the end of episode 6 of The Walking Dead: World Beyond.