About Apple Music Home Session: Patrick Watson

Montreal indie visionary Patrick Watson has always thrived in intimate spaces—for him, quietness isn’t a limitation, but a portal into all manner of subliminal sonic chicanery. So in his case, recording an Apple Home Session isn’t so much an opportunity to strip things down as stretch things out—and take full advantage of Spatial Audio technology. “It really gives a natural sense of a place,” Watson tells Apple Music. “It can make someone feel like they're actually in the room, sitting beside someone.” To put that theory into action, Watson dug deep into his own catalog to reinvent two personal favorites from his 2009 Polaris Music Prize-nominated album Wooden Arms. He transforms the oscillating acoustic hymn “Man Like You” and the soaring art-folk anthem “Big Bird in a Small Cage” into skeletal solo-piano pieces that nonetheless teem with textural details—throughout, you can hear his breath hit the mic, like a fog permeating the mix. “I picked both of those songs because they had totally different arrangements, and I'm not entirely sure about all the production I did on them back then,” Watson admits. “So I was curious to hear what they sounded like really bare.” But where those tracks put the spotlight squarely on Watson’s heartfelt songwriting, his cover selection shows how his restless creative energy can animate even the mellowest of tunes—in this case, Mazzy Star’s 1993 dream-pop classic “Fade Into You.” If the original bears a haunted lost-highway quality, Watson’s take is downright ghostlike, his airy voice wafting like a spirit over a gentle piano arrangement and percolating electronic percussion. “I picked something from the '90s, because it's been fun watching the '90s come back a little bit,” he says. “And this is one of the real jewels from that era.”