Patrick Watson is returning to Australia this November for his first tour of the country in more than a decade, with the Canadian songwriter set to bring his latest album UH OH to the East Coast.
It has been a long absence for an artist whose reach has quietly grown far beyond the intimate, intricately arranged music with which he first made his name. Across two decades, Watson has moved between indie rock, chamber pop, classical music and cabaret, building songs around his distinctive voice, piano and an instinct for arrangements that rarely settle into conventional shapes.
His return to Australia comes following one of the most challenging periods of his career.
Released in 2025, UH OH emerged after Watson suffered a vocal cord injury that left him unable to sing for several months. For a musician whose voice had always been central to his work, the injury presented an obvious question: how do you make a Patrick Watson record when Patrick Watson cannot sing?
His answer was collaboration.
Rather than putting the album on hold, Watson invited other voices into his songs, with UH OH featuring guest vocalists including Martha Wainwright, Charlotte Oleena, MARO and Charlotte Cardin. The result turned necessity into a different way of approaching his music, allowing familiar elements of Watson’s writing to be refracted through other performers.
The record subsequently earned a Juno Award nomination for Adult Alternative Album of the Year, while ‘House On Fire’, his collaboration with Wainwright, was shortlisted for the 2026 SOCAN Polaris Song Prize.
Watson’s Australian return also arrives at a point when one song in particular has introduced his work to an audience vastly larger than the one that first encountered him two decades ago.
Originally released in 2010, ‘Je te laisserai des mots’ has passed one billion streams on Spotify, becoming the first French-language song to reach the milestone. Its extraordinary second life has made the delicate piano piece Watson’s most widely heard recording and introduced a new generation to a catalogue that reaches considerably further back.
That catalogue includes Close To Paradise, the 2006 album that won Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music Prize the following year and established Watson internationally. Albums including Wooden Arms, Adventures in Your Own Backyard and Love Songs for Robots followed, each finding different ways to stretch his combination of intimate songwriting and expansive arrangements.
His music has travelled through popular culture too, appearing in television series including Grey’s Anatomy, Orange Is the New Black and This Is Us, while Watson has continued touring internationally with performances capable of shifting between near-silence and considerably more elaborate ensemble pieces.
More than a decade after his last Australian visit, November’s East Coast dates therefore arrive with plenty of ground to cover. There is UH OH and the unusual circumstances surrounding its creation, but also another ten years of music that Australian audiences have never had the opportunity to hear from Watson on home stages.
Go HERE for tickets.
