Active Child, In Another Life

Take some time to listen to In Another Life, and check out the interview below.

Hi Patrick, how are you? How’s life been? 

It’s a little weird, you know. But my family is all healthy, so I’m just grateful for that. My wife is actually pregnant with our second child, and she's due in a couple of weeks, so we've been figuring out how to deal with doctor's visits and all that stuff. It's been a little bit hectic! But everyone has their own struggle with it, you know what I mean? 

I imagine this is a super busy time for you right now. What does a work day look like for you and your team with all of these precautions for social distancing? How has it affected the drop of your album? 

It has in ways that I don't think I really am seeing yet, 'cause we're sort of just getting into the momentum of this rollout. But we had planned a tour for the summer, and now that's kind of up in the air. And it's just been a lot trying to balance taking care of the house, taking care of the family, and trying to pay attention to this album. I think everyone is just trying to figure out what the next step is. But on a positive note, I think this time puts people in a space where they get to spend time with music as opposed to giving a passive listen. I’m interested to see what that means for this album.

"Brighter Day" and "Cruel World" speak so well to these times. Do you have any advice on what you want the world to take from these songs?

Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot recently. I started the record in 2015, and seeing the Bataclan concert footage and the Paris attacks stirred something in me, so that's when I wrote "Cruel World." And that sort of became this launching point for what I wanted the record to talk about. I think "Brighter Day" and "Cruel World" or even in the title track In Another Life, I hone in on this appreciation for brotherhood, humanity and an idealistic hope that we can all come together and, you know, sort of kumbaya better.

Let’s talk about your inspiration for In Another Life. Your last album, Mercy, dropped in 2015. Is there a reason you waited until now to hit full send again? 

Yeah, it's been so many different things. When that record came out, I was feeling a little bit burnt out with the cycle of touring and writing. My life was changing a lot as well; I got married, and we started a family. And I left my label, because I wasn't happy there anymore. I decided that I wanted to build a new team, so I got new management. It was a lot of just reshuffling the cards and trying to figure out what my next step was. The writing process itself really only took about two years. But in the midst of all the other changes and finding this new label and management and then finally like getting a chance to roll it all out, it just took forever.

How do you feel the industry has changed since your last single, "Cruel World," came out in 2017?

I think we can all see it changing all the time. There's a lot more focus and push from online media and journalism, and I just feel like that squeezes everyone a little bit in the interim. Since people have become more freelance, a lot of the smaller outlets have just not been able to sustain themselves financially. So it's tougher. It's a tougher atmosphere to find a way to promote yourself and get people to really champion your music. So I feel like it really has become a time where you have to be your own marketer, your own promoter, your own everything. And then you have to really connect with your fan base, and hopefully they'll continue to spread your message. That seems to be the best way that I see it right now.

Where do you think your sound has evolved between your three albums? 

During my second album, I got a little bit lost as to where I was going as an artist. I'm not really interested in making people dance, and I think there were moments where I was trying to touch into that. I think sometimes as an artist, it takes a while to wrap your head around what you're trying to say or who you really are. But with this new album, I feel like I'm finally really coming into my own. I wish it hadn't taken me 10 years, but I'm glad that I can say I feel like I do have a foothold on who I am as an artist. This time away has helped me to refocus my vision in a lot of ways, and it sort of goes back to those tracks that you pointed out in the beginning and me feeling like that sort of subject matter, that tone of sort of drama and emotional energy is something that I really wanted to hone in on. I think a lot of that comes back to the instrumentation that is on the album, which has a lot of string composition. I focused a lot on engineering my own vocals and trying to make them as powerful and dramatic and layered as I could without it feeling prestige or novelty. But yeah, all those things have made me very excited about the next body of work, 'cause I feel like I've really latched onto something. It feels good.

Is there an overarching narrative for these 10 songs? 

Initially, the general theme was more about the tragedy and the drama that I was seeing in the world. And then when my little girl was born, it became more about just the overall arc of a life and a look at generations and family. I looked back on images and videos of my parents and grandparents as children and felt moved in acknowledging that each of us has this moment of being young. I found a lot of comfort in seeing that, but I also had this sense of dread over my childhood being gone and unable to come back. The songs revolve around that struggle with change. The initial songs are more about the wonder of everything in this next chapter in my life, and other tracks, like "Color Me" or "Painted Staircase," are induced with fear of the void that may exist when it all comes to an end. So, it’s a little bit of everything.

I’ve read that your time as a touring choirboy influenced your music, I hear those roots so strongly in In Another Life. How do you feel that sound has carried into this new chapter of your life?

I think that it'll always be with me, you know? I started when I was nine years old, so I was just a little, little guy, and I sang in the choir for four years. It just really transformed the way I looked at myself and my relationship with music. I remember this phase I had of bringing sheet music to school and not understanding why people thought that was kind of weird. You know, like, why is this guy carrying around sheet music? Everything that I love about the things that I do now, all of those pieces sort of carried that same intensity. I think our tastes in things are almost genetic, at least in my experience. Each of us are drawn towards art or music or whatever. And for me, it's always been that high emotion, tear-jerking kind of music. 

How do you feel working with others affects your style and voice?

For me, it's always been really positive. I generally get everything to a close point for myself, and then I find someone to sort of co-produce the finishing touches. But my co-producer Andrew Sarlo was just huge on this one. It had been so long since I put anything out, so I developed this overwhelming feeling of self-doubt to the point of just not being able to finish anything. Andrew came in and injected a sense of confidence in me. It was such a big moment for me to find this person who understood what I was trying to do and knew how to pull it out of me. I spend a lot of time by myself as an artist, so I don’t feel my most confident when collaborating. That's something that I'm hoping to improve on in the future. With this album, my friend Ro and Brita both played the strings. And my friend Dominick does sound healing baths here in LA, so I had him come into the studio, and we spent the entire day tracking him over every song. It created this hidden energy throughout the record that I think is really cool. 

So Andrew Sarlo pulled this album out of you, how did you make that connection and why did he make the cut? 

I had been trying to find the right person to work with and was not finding someone who felt right for this album. My management suggested Andrew and I started looking at the records that he had produced, and they were all like my favorite records. So I was like, well now I need to meet this guy! He had done all of the Big Thief records, and he had done Nick Hakim's debut record, which I really loved. So we just met up here in LA, and it was just this strange feeling. We almost look like brothers, so right off the bat, we were just like, "This is kind of bizarre." We just really clicked, and we talked about the songs that I had sent him, and he gave me his honest critique. He wasn't scared to give me feedback, which I thought was a brave thing to do in a first meeting. I put a lot of faith in him pretty quickly, and I’m so happy I did, because Andrew saved it for me.

On "Weightless," you collaborated with Sapphire Adizes. He’s known for his roots in classical and jazz. What do you feel he brought to the song?

We only really had a day together when we did that song, but he’s just such a skilled piano player and had a fountain of ideas. He was really fun to work with, and we blended nicely, because we were in kind of a yin-and-yang situation. He’s just this bundle of incredible energy. I move at a much different pace, and I find myself in that position a lot when I do co-writes. It’s like I'm the turtle, and everyone else seems to be the hare, which is a good combination. 

I loved your music videos for "Weightless," "Set Me Free" and "All Eyes On Me." Are you planning on releasing more videos from this album?

There's a video for the title track that is sort of a continuation of the "Weightless" video. It's actually my favorite video so far. It's really beautiful. And then there's an additional video that's coming out a little bit later for "Color Me," which is directed by this really great director Martin de Thurah, who has done some great work you’ve probably seen like the James Blake’s "Retrograde" video, some stuff for Fever Ray and a bunch of other cool artists. I was involved pretty heavily in all of them up until Martin’s video. He's a friend who I've been asking to do something with forever, honestly. I sent him the song very early on, like years ago, and he said he’d love to do it. I just told everyone on my team like, "Don't worry, just let him do his thing, and it will be magical." This is the first record where I've done a video on my own, which is for the second single, and it was really exciting. It felt almost like the first time I made a song in a lot of ways. So I just—I filmed it all, and I jumped into iMovie. It was like I was making it my first song in GarageBand or something, and it was really invigorating. I was just so excited the whole time. Everything was exciting to me and new. I've had a lot of fun making these little vignettes for the new songs that are coming out. And I think I might do another video for a separate song eventually.  

After the album drops, how are you planning to celebrate?

Oh man, I'd love to be out of quarantine... but I know that's not the case. I don't know. Maybe I'll just order a bottle of champagne from Instacart or something. We’ll see.

Do you have any advice for other creatives who are trying to put out content right now?

Try not to be too precious with your work. I think that has been my biggest learning curve. Your whole career as an artist will be you letting go of things, especially in the sort of moment that we are in now. I think people really enjoy the more, almost like off-the-cuff, not amateur—but you know, people want to see a little bit without it being too pristine, you know what I mean? So I would say try to be a little bit less precious with your work.