Patrick Watson - Uh Oh
Secret City Records
Released on September 26th, 2025
“I lost my voice ‘cause I talked too loud,” mourns Patrick Watson in “Silencio,” Uh Oh’s opening track. It’s a true story—the singer-composer wasn’t sure if his damaged vocal cords would ever heal, but if he panicked over this potential calamity, it wasn’t caught on recording. Rather, the song moves between (compulsorily) quiet resignation and hopeful curiosity as Watson uncovers silence’s unexpected bright sides: fewer opportunities to put one’s foot in one’s mouth (“Too many times losing my mind thinking about what I said last night”); bittersweet interpersonal developments (“Think you like me better since I lost my voice”); social perks (“They think you’re smarter when you shut your mouth”); and mindset shifts (“Take a break from yourself … close your eyes while the quiet smiles”).
November Ultra’s soaring Spanish vocals kick off the album, while Watson ghosts in on a harmony; though he’d recovered by the time they recorded, he wisely kept his cast of plan B singers, resulting in a highly collaborative album that frequently explores the thematic avenues surrounding voice and voices in their abundance or lack.
“Choir in the Wires” is one of only two tracks without a feat., though it’s padded by an ethereal choral backdrop of “ooo”s. Here Watson imagines the auditory chaos occurring within a city’s telephone wires at any given time: “Every little story / Sorrow and good morning / Every single laugh / And every single I’m sorry.”
His vocal lines overlap, interrupting each other, documenting this “beautiful disaster.” To bear witness to the harrowing complexity and casual tragedy of countless voices is probably more sensory input than a human brain can withstand, yet his attempt at this daunting exercise results in one of the album’s most enchanting tunes.
Watson’s audience may be conditioned to expect a climax; he has consistently delivered songs that build throughout toward an uplifting breaking point—the dramatically layered “Luscious Life” on Close to Paradise, the hauntingly expansive “Fireweed” on Wooden Arms, the climbing key changes in “Hearts” on Love Songs for Robots, the turbulently roiling “Here Comes the River” on Wave.
Such transcendent crescendos might be a tall order for a singer whose voice is on the fritz, but those of us who got hooked on the emotional peaks of his earliest work are now two decades older, and can likely relate to Uh Oh’s more nuanced vibe (not to mention to the angst of hitting our physical limitations and coping via semi-ironic optimism and other desperate mechanisms). It is often the album’s preoccupation with voices—whether expressed in recurring choral harmonies, constantly changing collaborators, or wide-ranging perspectives—that leads to the stylistic contrasts and subtle drama that maintain Watson’s rich, soundtracky style even in some of these more subdued arrangements.
The songs are frequently surreal or eerily whimsical, as in “Peter and the Wolf,” which recounts a meeting with an alluring monstress, the dreamily ambiguous “Ami imaginaire” (with Klô Pelgag), and “The Wandering” (with MARO), which depicts the delicious emptinesses one encounters out on the road.
The whispering wires return in the title track, a collab with Montreal artist Sea Oleena. “My telephone learned how to sing / Does that mean the cables and wires will start to dream?” Hope emerges from the tumult as Watson muses, “I know I’m just a speck of dust / But I’m singing across the universe.”
“House on Fire,” a team-up with acclaimed singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright, blurs the lines between harmonized and conversational duet. In strong, moving poetry over a keening string section, the two voices grieve the winding down of a long-term love, lamenting, “We are words and we are stones / This world stands still while we are thrown.”
“Gordon in the Willows,” featuring Charlotte Cardin, is strikingly beautiful, with pristine high-range piano and enigmatic lyrics like “You are the wild inside the wilderness.” Cardin reckons with loss and longing, with a nostalgia so old and hazy it seeps into everything—“Your memories are my words …Your melodies the birds.”
The album ends with “Ça va,” a waltz that lilts sadly along, the piano offering a gentle Debussy reference as the song drifts between darkness and serenity. Parisian vocalist Solann delivers a send-off about finding solace from the sorrows of a bad day, a lost voice, a looming catastrophe: “C’est normal qu’on soit tous fous / C’est pas simple d’être humain …”
It’s not easy being human. Miracles and disasters are around every corner, and voices are constantly being lost, silenced, joined in harmony, or discovered for the first time. But together, in song or silence, we make our way through the uh ohs, large and small.
