ON STAGE
What: JP Saxe with Alexander Saint
Where: Capital Ballroom, 858 Yates St.
When: Thursday and Friday, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m.
Tickets: admitone.com
JP Saxe waited years for his debut album to arrive, which it eventually did — squarely in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.
Unfortunate timing notwithstanding, Saxe made a very memorable first impression. The 28-year-old’s full-length debut, Dangerous Levels of Introspection, features two songs, If The World Was Ending and A Little Bit Yours, that thrust him into the spotlight, earning Saxe six Juno Award nominations in 2021.
The first song, a duet with girlfriend Julia Michaels, also earned him a Grammy Award nomination for song of the year, and has been streamed 685 million times on Spotify to date.
Saxe began dating Michaels, a three-time Grammy Award nominee, following the co-writing sessions for If the World Was Ending in 2019. While the couple hunkered down in Los Angeles during the pandemic, she frequently pushed Dangerous Levels of Introspection in the right direction. “I think to varying degrees, every artist is using their partner as a sounding board,” Saxe told People magazine in June.
“When your partner is the greatest songwriter of all time, you may use them as a sounding board a little bit more. So I’m grateful for Julia’s opinion and take [that] very seriously at every step of the process.”
His tour to support Dangerous Levels of Introspection started Monday in Calgary. He was originally scheduled to play a single show in Victoria, at the Capital Ballroom, on Friday. Due to provincial health protocols and the resulting mandates, the single show was split into four reduced-capacity shows spread over two days. His concerts at the Yates Street venue at 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Thursday and Friday are all sold out, according to organizers.
The room is considerably more intimate than some of his recent promotional appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Late Show With James Corden and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. But Saxe is grateful for any opportunity to perform, no matter the size.
“In a lot of ways, this feels like the very beginning and something I’ve been working towards for 15 years,” Saxe told 519 Magazine recently. “I had my first weekly gig in Toronto at a piano bar called Statler’s, when I was 14 years old. They hired me to play at their Sunday brunch. So that was my first gig. Then, for five years, I played every possible open mic I could find in the GTA.
“Then at 19, I moved to Los Angeles, which felt like a huge adventure. It might have been just a reckless dive into the uncertainty. But it all felt so exciting. It’s been nine years now since I moved to Los Angeles, and I’ve just put out my debut album…it feels like the beginning of something. But yes, I’ve been working towards this for a very long time.”
mdevlin@timescolonist.com
