‘We were half-drunk': Patrick Watson on Covid hit and Spotify record-breaker Je Te Laisserai Des Mots
In my studio in Montreal, I came up with what I thought was a nice little melody. I'm from Quebec, so although I'm an English-speaking person, I've always been surrounded by French. Whenever I have the opportunity to sing or write in French, I do. Although I like singing in French, it's a very difficult language to sing in because of the vowel structure. There aren't many words in Je Te Laisserai Des Mots and the first verse is entirely wordless. I didn't think it needed any more words so I just made vocal sounds. Also I probably imagined the song starting to play at the end of the film while there is still dialogue, so didn't want words to clash. We were kind of half-drunk when we did the strings arrangement. It was a really fun night – but outside the film, I didn't think anyone would ever listen to the song.
It initially appeared as a bonus track on my debut album. Then it suddenly took off in the pandemic. Because I couldn't tour, I was doing lots of live Instagrams, which prompted someone to send me a video they'd made of Je Te Lasserai Des Mots. It had a million views and once those algorithms get going, you can't stop them. Sometimes certain emotions hit at a certain time and a song can become the soundtrack of that moment. Before I knew it, people all over the world were making their own lockdown videos featuring Je Te Lasserai Des Mots.
When I first came into the music business, execs didn't take me seriously because I didn't have 'radio songs', but the advent of syncs and then streaming have made a new kind of hit possible. The song's now had something like 200,000 TikTok videos featuring it, more than 60bn TikTok plays and it's the first French language song to hit more than a billion streams on Spotify. I find such huge numbers hard to digest but the song is much more famous than I am. I might be renting skis or something and they'll see the name and go: 'Oh, you have the same name as the singer.' I'm like: 'It's me!' And they don't believe me.
Our string quartet played with Patrick for 15 years and we're still close. When we started touring with him, our kids were quite young so Patrick named us Mommies on the Run. We were his first experiment with a string quartet but after a while on tour we were wilder than him. We'd shout: 'No kids!'
It was such a great adventure and we all spent a lot of time together. We'd go to Patrick's place, there would be things everywhere and you'd put your violin case on the ping-pong table. Patrick would play on the piano and we'd improvise around that. One night Patrick said: 'I have a French song. What do you think of my accent?' He speaks French very well but had never sung in it and there were a lot of mistakes in the pronunciation, but they were part of the charm so he kept them in.
It was a fun session and at one point we had some Jameson whiskey. We tried for a long time to find the right notes and got a little drunk. Everything was starting to slide when suddenly it all just fell into place. There's almost no rhythm to Je Te Laisserai Des Mots, which again is part of the charm. It's a beautiful song that makes your heart melt, and during the pandemic, when we were all very lonely, it touched a lot of people's hearts. I first became aware that it was taking off when my kids were on TikTok and I heard the song. I went: 'That's my quartet!' They couldn't believe it. They told me: 'That song's everywhere.'
Although Patrick isn't obliged to give us songwriting royalties, every year he gives us a symbolic amount to show his gratitude, which is really nice and shows that he respects the fact that people pulling together in that moment created something special.
Patrick Watson's new album, Uh Oh, is released in the UK on 26 September. He plays the Troxy, London, on 7 November
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