When Patrick Watson found out director Spike Jonze was adapting the famed children’s book Where the Wild Things Are for the big screen, he knew just what he had to do.

The 29-year-old Montreal musician wrote a song and submitted it to Jonze to be included in the film.

“I don’t know if it ever got to him or not,” Watson said last month, just hours before an energetic performance on the alternative stage at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. “You try things, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, and it doesn’t really matter—you’ve just gotta try it.”

Watson included the song, appropriately titled Where the Wild Things Are, on Wooden Arms, the latest album by the critically acclaimed band he fronts.

Rounded out by guitarist Simon Angell, bassist Mishka Stein and drummer Robbie Kuster, the band is called Patrick Watson.

The quartet gained notoriety in 2007 when the album they released a year prior, Close to Paradise, won the Polaris Music Prize. Since then, the band has played its piano-driven, orchestral art pop all around the world, stopping for a few months late last year to record Wooden Arms.

“I think it’s much more instrumental than the last record,” Watson said. “There’s still strong songs there, but I think we left more room for the instrumentation to take over at some points.”

“ I’d be a little scared to win it twice. I’d be like, ‘Oh, sorry guys, I feel badly that we got this.

Patrick Watson, musician

Recorded for the most part live off the floor, the result is 11 songs that are cinematic-sounding and experimental. On Beijing, for example, Watson plays a bicycle, while on the title track, someone plays a tree branch.

It may seem unorthodox, but it’s earned the album a spot on the shortlist for the 2009 Polaris Music Prize, to be awarded next month.

“It’s a big honour again,” Watson said. “I’d be a little scared to win it twice. I’d be like, ‘Oh, sorry guys, I feel badly that we got this.’”

The band used the $20,000 that came with its 2007 win to pay off the cost of a van it totaled while touring in the U.S. As it luck would have it, the bill for the van arrived the morning the prize was awarded.

“That’s the beauty of Canadian music—somehow you always just break even,” Watson said. “No matter what happens, for some reason, you just always break even.”

There’s no telling whether Watson and his bandmates will be winners when the prize is awarded next month, but it’s a safe bet they’ll be in a movie theatre when Where the Wild Things Are comes out in October.

“Probably one of the best gifts of being artistic is, sometimes you can close your eyes and go somewhere, even if you’re not anywhere special. So, I think for me, the book is all about that,” Watson said, likening the book to walking outside in the woods by yourself at night.
“No matter what, if it’s pitch black around you, you’re gonna be scared for your first time, until you get used to the dark,” he said. “And I think that’s kinda what the book’s about: He goes to the wild place and he becomes king of the wild things. He becomes king of his own imagination, and once you do that, you can come home again.”

Published in Volume 63, Number 30 of The Uniter (August 13, 2009)