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BR: Your first independent album, Okay Piano Guy, is coming out in a few days. How are you feeling?

Saxe: I’m so excited. You’re also my first interview on the first independent album. So you’re going to get the, like, unrehearsed version of all of these answers. So they’ll be at their most messy, unrefined form and maybe their most honest.

Can you tell me more about the album and the title of the project?

Saxe: Okay. Well, the album, I guess the surface-level reason it’s called Okay Piano Guy, is ‘cause all the songs are me sitting with the piano talking about my feelings, which is where I feel the most myself. And it’s where I’ve learned how to be myself since I was like fourteen years old. It’s always complicated to be myself. I never really knew what it meant. And then I sat at a piano and I stared at my reflection in the piano. And I talked about, you know, being scared of life and feelings and existence. And then I didn’t really figure it out, but it just kind of got more complicated in ways. And then the songs became about all the ways it became more complicated … People tell me sometimes, JP, “You’re always talking about your feelings.” I’m like, literally, you want to talk about baseball? We can, but I have feelings about that too.

You’re kicking off this era with Saxe’s Piano Bar right here in Toronto, your hometown. Why was it important to you that you started that chapter here?

Saxe: Okay, so we’re doing this Saxe’s Piano Bar. It’s like a pop-up, intimate piano bar that we’re putting in different bars around the world. And Toronto’s the first one, like you said, which is perfect because I grew up here. This is my home. And we’re doing it in the bar, Dina’s Tavern, which Nickie Minshall owns, who I went to high school with. So it’s all very sentimental, interconnected Toronto adventure. And the Toronto ones are gonna be the best ones because they always are.

What are you hoping that people take away from this experience that they might not get from a traditional concert?

Saxe: I hope they make more friends. I feel like it’s going to be a friend-making, compatible environment. I’ve found that people [who] come to my shows, usually would be friends with one another, because it’s like an intersection of people who are thinking way too much and also feeling way too much, and then thinking way too much about the feelings, the aforementioned feelings. So I think it’s, it’s a bit of a common denominator as a human to like my music. And therefore, if you’re in a smaller room with like only two hundred other ones, less scary to talk to them.

How do you decide what parts of your life or emotions get shared and what parts you keep to yourself?

Saxe: That’s a good question. I have no idea. I think the scarier a feeling is to share, the more necessary it becomes to do so. Cause I think that’s sort of the job of being an artist: to make the more frightening parts of ourselves feel more accessible to others.

Why?

Saxe: Why? Because otherwise you’re hiding from yourself. And I’m of the belief that the more of your human experience you have access to, the more alive you feel, and the more alive you feel, the better your life is.

Your career has taken you from performing around Toronto to collaborating and sharing the stage with incredible artists. Is there a version of you from the early days of your career that would be surprised by where you are now?

Saxe: … younger me would be really stoked. Younger me would be very happy about current me life. I am living younger me’s wildest dreams and I intend to live current me’s wildest dreams someday too.

With Okay Piano Guy marking this new chapter, what feels different about the artist that you are now, compared to when you first started, or the artist who released “If the World Was Ending?”

Saxe: I think Dangerous Levels Of Introspection, my first album, was very true to who I was without thinking too much about it. And then after that album, like all of my favorite artists have before me, I started exploring all of the different things that could mean to be myself. I almost got really excited about the idea of being someone other than who I thought I was in my music. Like, who am I without who I think I’m supposed to be? Became an interesting question in the albums I subsequently made, and I’m so glad I did that. And there was a lot of creative exploration in that. This album does kind of feel like a return to my instincts. So in many ways, Okay Piano Guy feels more connected to Dangerous Levels of Introspection than the albums in between it, because this, this album is, is all instincts. It’s all my own taste. It’s all inspired by my favorite music. And, you know, there’s all these different songs that are pulling from different eras of what the piano songwriting genre is, whether that be like, you know, Randy Newman, Nina Simone, Carole King, like Ray Charles, Sara Bareilles, Alicia Keys, like those artists who have defined what it means to sit at the piano and write a song. Yeah. I’m trying to live in their world.

What have you learned from collaborating with other artists?

Saxe: You know, one of those artists I just mentioned, I got to open for. I opened for Alicia Keys for a little while. That was. That was really inspiring. Music is such a team sport. All of my favorite musicians and who I’ve had the honor of having some sort of collaboration with, whether it be on tour together or doing music together, I just learned over and over again that they have built these amazing careers because they always put their desire to collaborate and be a fan of other musicians before their, their desire to be competitive or to be better. I think that’s such a nice thing as an, as an artist. Like when I see another artist that I’m, I’m moved by their art, my feeling isn’t like a competitive, like, “Oh, I got to do something better.” My feeling is like, how do I make something with them? It’s like being an athlete and trying to get your competition on your team.

How do you work through collaborating with artists and still trying to share feelings that could be very personal to you? How do you navigate that?

Saxe: I mean, working with other artists as a songwriter is such a different creative approach than when I’m writing my own songs, so I’ve never really had trouble distinguishing. Sometimes people will ask me, “How do you know if a song is for you or if a song is for a different artist?” It’s a very simple answer. If it’s about my life, it’s for me. Like when I work with other artists, I work with them like I’m in the room with them. So we’re talking about their stories and their life. So they’re their songs.

As people listen to the album and experience your live shows, what’s the core message that you want them to go away with?

Saxe: Core message? That the messiness of being a person is where the best parts usually are. I think that’s like what my favorite art has always done. It’s made the messiness of things like not feel like something to hide, but something to lean into, because that’s what being a human is. So I hope that, you know, in the way that my favorite TV shows have done that for me, that my songs can do that for people, too.

What are you most excited about as you release the project and continue performing?

Saxe: I’m excited to get the DMs from people who are telling me that the songs have mattered to them, because they meant something that I never intended them to mean. I always love when that happens. When someone will be like, “Oh my God, this song helped me get through this,” or “It made me feel this.” And I’m like, wow, I never expected that would be an interpretation. But I totally see it, and I love it. That, I’m stoked for.

Is there a song on this project that you want people to really go in there and read the lyrics and really take them in deeper than any other song?

Saxe: That’s a good question. I’m going to give you a bad answer. I am so obsessive about the words. I write the words before I do anything else. Almost every song, I think the words existed before the melodies or the music existed. I would rather you read the lyric booklet than listen to the music without hearing the words. I think one of the cheat codes of my career is that I’ve taken more inspiration from poets than I have from songwriters. Poets are just better writers. No offense to my genre or to my colleagues. My colleagues are brilliant. I love songwriters, but when it comes to just, like, the written word, like, poets are just doing it on a level that we can only aspire to, because as songwriters, we have the added tool of a melody. A melody can make otherwise innocuous language sound really meaningful. Whereas as a poet, if you’re just relying on your subject matter, on your word choice, like you, you have less to work with, and you have to do more with it.

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