Grammy-nominated, Canadian musician JP Saxe is winding down from the success of his debut album Dangerous Levels of Introspection. He’s released two new singles ahead of his forthcoming album, which —  from what I know about it so far — is going to be an absolute thrill for his audience. It was recently announced that JP would accompany John Mayer on a leg of his solo acoustic arena tour in 2023. The brass tacks are this: JP is cool as hell and he’s really out here following his dreams. My philosophy is that an interview should be a conversation, an even give and take. I try to offer up the same kind of information I’m hoping my interviewees will so graciously share with me. It doesn’t always land, sometimes it doesn’t happen quite like that, but that’s always been my goal. My conversation with JP is an example of my goal fulfilled. I sat down with him in Nashville, ahead of a show a couple months ago, and ended up staying over the scheduled time — thank you to his team for being accommodating once we got to talking! One of my favorite photographers, Dimitri Tzoytzoyrakos, did the shoot with JP once he was back in Los Angeles and I love what he came back with; the photos really capture the energy of our conversation. I hope that if you’re a fan of JP, you learn something you might not have previously known about him, and if not — that you can appreciate his honesty and candor regardless. I’m a fan, and I know I do. ◇ 2023

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JP Saxe: I like your flower tattoo on your wrist.

Cariann Bradley: This one? Thank you.

JP Saxe: Yeah. I have one that's similar in a similar spot.

Cariann Bradley: Oh, what kind of flower?

JP Saxe: Lily of the valley.

Cariann Bradley: Mine is a lilac. I'm actually getting it removed. [Laughs]

JP Saxe: Why? Actually, you don't have to tell me. That's a personal thing.

Cariann Bradley: No, it's fine. I got it with a friend and we're no longer friends, so I think I did that one to myself. Getting matching tattoos with somebody is not always the best idea. [Laughs]

JP Saxe: I have a tattoo from when I was 16 that I'm thinking of getting, not removed, but I want to turn it into something else.

Cariann Bradley: What is it?

JP Saxe: It's embarrassing. It's like some 16-year-old embarrassing stuff. [Laughs]

Cariann Bradley: Right next to the floral, this was my first one when I was eighteen and it's a Bible verse. I'm also getting it removed, so I also have regrets.

JP Saxe: Which Bible verse?

Cariann Bradley: Yeah, it's 1 John 1:5 from the New Testament.

JP Saxe: I'm Jewish. I don't know too much about what... I can't recite what that is, but—

Cariann Bradley: I’m stating for the record, I'm no longer religious. [Laughs] But it's, "God is the light and in Him is no darkness at all."

JP Saxe: Hard to reinterpret that one. [Laughs]

Cariann Bradley: Yeah, so it's getting removed along with the flower. My wrist is just kind of cursed at this point, so I'm getting it all off.

JP Saxe: What about the lion? Do you still like that one?

Cariann Bradley: Yes. This is for my grandfather. He worked for the government before he retired and his code name was ‘Golden Lion.’

JP Saxe: That's a great code name.

Cariann Bradley: He's the coolest person ever — he's still alive. He struggles with Parkinson's, though.

JP Saxe: I'm sorry. That's hard.

Cariann Bradley: Thank you, yeah, but he's the coolest person I know. I got that for him.

JP Saxe: I have a grandfather tattoo too.

Cariann Bradley: What is it?

JP Saxe: It's this one — he was a cellist and he designed his own cello bridge.

Cariann Bradley: Oh wow. That's cool as shit.

JP Saxe: Yeah, he was my hero. Really cool guy.

Cariann Bradley: Is he no longer with us?

JP Saxe: Yeah, he died over 10 years ago now. 2012. Wow, that's 10 years ago.

Cariann Bradley: I'm really scared to lose him. I don't think I'm going to handle it well when the time comes, but that's life, I suppose.

JP Saxe: The longer you have your grandparents, the harder it is to lose them.

Cariann Bradley: Yeah, because you get to know them better.

JP Saxe: Yeah, they're a part of your life as an adult, not just a part of your life as a kid. All of my grandparents died in my youth except for that grandfather [I got the tattoo for]. That was obviously the hardest one because I was like 17 or 18 when he died.

Cariann Bradley: Yeah… it’s also my mom's father and she doesn't have a great relationship with either one of her parents, but I have a relationship with both of them. It's been so strange navigating that. 

JP Saxe: Being able to have a relationship with someone that is separate — that you can compartmentalize from the relationship that other people you love have with that person — is a really challenging and, I think, nuanced skill that if you can have, can actually bring a lot of joy to your life, but is really hard to do. I have this similar dynamic with my maternal grandfather because my mom had a really complicated relationship with him because he had a very impressive, illustrious life. He was a cellist, he was the first cellist in the Metropolitan Opera in New York, won Grammy's, toured around the world and had a really purposeful, impactful life.

So did my mom, but my mom, she found her sense of self in a lot more places. She traveled around the world and she worked for different NGOs and she spoke six languages and taught those languages in different places. But I think my grandfather really valued a more singular contribution. You find what your expertise is when you become exceptional, and I actually don't necessarily believe that. I absolutely don't believe that that's the only way to have a really purposeful life. I think we actually kind of romanticize and overvalue exceptionalism. Exceptionalism I don't think always leads to happiness. It can be equally and, in some ways, even more meaningful to have a life that's contributive without having to be the absolute best at whatever one thing.

But anyway, that was kind of my grandfather's mentality, and because my mom didn't fit into it, she always grappled with his respect. Whereas for me, I was a kid who loved music, and he had never had a son. I think there's an old-fashioned element there as well. But my mom did, I think, a really good job at never tainting that for me.

Cariann Bradley: Yeah, it's hard. I'm just a feeler. I feel like I know how people feel about certain things and survey those cues more closely. I try not to make assumptions because that's just the worst thing you can do. Also, having a relationship with your grandparents is kind of their do-over with kids. 

One of the first conversations I remember having with my grandpa Leon as an adult was about his career. I was in college and he was retired; he'd been retired for a long time at that point, and he fought in the Vietnam War and then was in Iraq and Afghanistan a lot working later in his career. And I just remember asking him, "Do you ever grapple with what that means, doing something for your country versus doing it for yourself?" That's such a huge thing right now in general in society. But he was like, "I know that what I did was right for my country, but I still don't know if it was right for me." And I still think about that often. I thought that was the most vulnerable thing for an older man to say, that he's still open to learning more.

JP Saxe: That is beautiful. I always find it deeply inspiring when people are still bettering themselves in their eighties.

Cariann Bradley: That's the goal. I never want to not be that way.

JP Saxe: My grandfather still practiced [cello] at the end of his life. He'd really achieved a level of being considered the greatest at his instrument and he was still practicing at the end of his life. Who knows if that was for agency or for joy — maybe a little bit of both.

Cariann Bradley: Speaking of legacy… I did want to ask you about your career. Are you working on a new album right now?

JP Saxe: Yeah.

Cariann Bradley: I figured. I wanted to ask you about your album that already came out, Dangerous Levels of Introspection. Didn't you work on it for like four years before putting it out?

JP Saxe: Mm-hmm.

Cariann Bradley: What’s it been like working on something new from which you didn't have a well of material to pull from? 

JP Saxe: Well, I went about it a bit differently than the last process, obviously. I had different circumstances to work with, but I wrote the whole album before I did any production on it at all, which to me was important because I wanted to be able to make decisions only based on a lyric and a melody. I think when you're working with a lot of different studios and different people, you get all of these demos of songs and the demos kind of exist in different forms. Being able to discern what you're reacting to can get somewhat muddy.

So for me, it's really indicative of what is important in a body of work, what I want to put on in the car. Maybe I want to put on a certain demo because I fuck with the drum sounds, not because I thought the storytelling was great, or maybe I don't want to put on a certain other song because I don't like how the vocal was recorded. Having all that periphery distracts me from paying attention to my reactiveness.

I wonder, do you ever find in your writing, part of when you know something is good is when you read it back, you're reacting as a reader, not a writer?

Cariann Bradley: Yeah, absolutely.

JP Saxe: So for me, it's similar. I really try to keep myself present as a listener. I knew I wanted to really refine what I was listening for. The process this time that was the most different from the last time is I just wrote and then I did melody and then I did chord structure. I really tried to bring it down to its foundations.

Cariann Bradley: I bet just as a creative person... for me, I get so close to what I'm writing that I’m completely swallowed up in it, and it's hard to pull back and get everything in order. My OCD brain would be so happy to have done that process of, all right, get it all out, then we'll work on the sound, then we'll work on everything else, visuals, blah, blah blah. That's interesting.

JP Saxe: Yeah, I mean it's been helpful for me just to remember what it is about songs that I love the most. I mean, to your point, getting out of college, you weren't even sure what to write about. When I was 21, 22 years old, I wanted more than anything to be an artist, but I didn't really have shit to say, or if I did, I didn't think it was worth saying.

If you're going to dedicate your life to trying to get a lot of people to hear something that you have to say, it kind of matters that you've decided that it's important for them to hear it, not just because I want people to care about me. It's like, no, I want to create something that feels like it matters. And lots of other people, at this point in my career, there's a lot of other people dedicating a lot of time to trying to get people to hear something that I have made. So it's pretty critical that it just seems like something worth hearing. I didn't feel that way when I was 22. Some people do and there's absolutely 22-year-olds, 17-year-olds, who have made something that they wholeheartedly believe deserves to be heard and they're right. That just wasn't me at 17.

Cariann Bradley: Yeah, I don't think that was me either. I was just starting therapy at that point. [Laughs]

JP Saxe: I mean it's impressive you got into it that early. I didn't start therapy until I was like 23, 24.

Cariann Bradley: It was really tough. I started when I was 19, around then. Growing up, it didn’t really feel like my parents believed in therapy. I had to find it on my own, and it was scary but good. 

JP Saxe: I really admire people who are able to develop a moral compass that is a contrast to the moral compass that they were taught. I think that's a really critical part of a lot of people. That moment where they recognize that their sense of right and wrong wasn't necessarily going to be perfectly in line with the one they were raised with. A lot of people I know, that's such a turning point, like, ‘Oh, I'm going to develop my own morality, and it'll be derivative in some ways of what I was taught by my parents or my community or my church or my whatever. But it's not going to be exactly the same.’

I'm very lucky that despite my parents' shortcomings, I can look at what my parents' sense of right and wrong is, and I can draw a line between that and mine. I didn't have to unlearn anything really dramatic. I didn't have to unlearn any religious extremism or anything quite like that. My parents and I are still on similar moral pages of what it means to live a good life.

Cariann Bradley: It's interesting that you say that it’s a beautiful part of who someone is. I feel like I went through that, but it just makes me feel messy. It doesn't make me feel, like, any more triumphant of a person or more triumphant over my emotional landscape. It just makes me feel like I've been all over the place. It's kind of like reading stuff you've written from a long time ago and you're like, "I can't even take one more look at that," but it means you grew, which is a good thing.

JP Saxe: Yeah. I mean, I certainly don't mean to undermine how fucking painful and difficult of a thing that is. I just mean to say I admire people in my life who had to, as adults, really relearn critical infrastructure to what it meant to be a good person in their lives.

Cariann Bradley: Right. I get that. I had to go through that a little bit when I left Christianity. I've talked about this in interviews before. Like you said, relearning your moral compass, it was so ingrained in religion for me. I didn't know what my moral compass was. I completely had to just level everything, and I'm just standing alone in a field which had previously been filled with people and love and doctrine that I believed in. Just standing there by myself was maybe the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I don't even know how I did it. I think if I had realized at the time that I was alone in that gigantic metaphorical field, I would've been too scared to even try to get out of it. It really is phenomenal what we can do when we strip everything down and decide what we really believe.

JP Saxe: Yeah, I think it's extraordinarily brave to be able to derive your sense of right and wrong, your sense of morality, from something other than what has been necessarily given to you the most obviously because it often requires you to question a place that gives you your sense of acceptance and belonging. I think what's even more brave is to be able to take some and leave others. It's easier to take something wholeheartedly, and it's easier to reject something wholeheartedly. The beauty and the challenge is to be able to say, "I want to take some." I don't know how to describe this, but you know what I mean, to be able to be discerning about there being beauty in something you aren't accepting completely and looking for that beauty and then also realizing that maybe in what you're moving towards or a way of thinking that you're moving towards, there's going to be flaws in that as well, and not just jumping wholeheartedly from one mentality to another, to be able to be nuanced.

Cariann Bradley: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that a real level of maturity that is hard to grasp is being able to come from something and not feel combative towards it still, being able to respect it, and say, "It was important for me at the time," is really tough. 

JP Saxe: I think part of the reason I'm able to look at this with a bit of bird's eye view is that I didn't have to do this.

Cariann Bradley: Right. I was going to ask, what was your formative time, do you think, when you might've had something similar?

JP Saxe: I'm not sure I necessarily had that because neither of my parents were particularly religious.

Cariann Bradley: Oh yeah, it doesn't have to be [religious].

JP Saxe: Most of my core values are reasonably aligned with what my parents' core values were. I never had to unlearn homophobia. I never had to unlearn any sort of strong patriarchal view of what it meant to be a certain gender. They got a lot of things right. I would say probably my formative trauma was my mom being an alcoholic. That was a tough one for me, separating that my mom was this incredible human being who was struggling to necessarily be the most committed parent because she wasn't in her right mind a lot of the time.

Cariann Bradley: That's very personal to share. Thank you.

JP Saxe: Yeah, and also I think it affects the way I write because I learned my... I'm an only child.

Cariann Bradley: Me too. And I also have an alcoholic parent.

JP Saxe: Really?

Cariann Bradley: Yeah.

JP Saxe: Look at that. So, only child, an alcoholic parent — that's like half of your family essentially. That's half of your home. When half of your home, in half of your home that's supposed to be looking out for you, is a lot of the time not really in a position to be nurturing. My dad would be like, "You have to be the mature one." I'd get home from school, I'd be like eleven years old, she'd be out, and if I was able to... It's fucked, but I kind of made a game for myself. If I was able to interact with her the right way, she could be fun, but if I said one wrong thing... It could be the most innocuous. I could say one little thing wrong or do one little thing wrong, and then she'd just be off the handle breaking shit, leave for three days, get violent, all kinds of shit.

She died a couple years ago. One of the most beautiful things at the end of her life was her and I coming to terms with this and having these conversations. And my dad would be like, "You have to be the mature one," and I think that really ingrained me as an eleven-year-old, okay, you can't just react to things. You have to make sure that you come up with the most ideal way to handle the situation and then do that.

Cariann Bradley: That’s a lot of pressure for a kid.

JP Saxe: Don't show any raw emotion… that created some of my favorite things about myself and things that I'm working through in therapy because that created me as emotionally analytical. [As I was] growing into an emotional being, the most emotional things that were happening in my life were things I needed to immediately compartmentalize and immediately figure out how to articulate. That's why I'm able to write about feelings. Also, it's very hard for me to feel present in any feeling ever.

Cariann Bradley: That is so true. Just the way you put that is so... I really relate. My dad is an alcoholic. Did your mom get sober before she passed away?

JP Saxe: Yeah.

Cariann Bradley: That's good.

JP Saxe: She didn't get all the way sober, but it got better.

Cariann Bradley: And she could talk about it.

JP Saxe: Yeah, two years before she died, we had a really game-changing conversation about it, where she owned up to a lot of things… because she was an amazing woman and had an amazing life. That was part of the disparity for me. I knew all these stories about my mom traveling the world and working for the state department, running refugee camps, being this incredible woman, and yet for me, from age seven to when I moved out at 17 — my parents got divorced at 16 — she was just not that person. So, having to recognize that both things were true.

Cariann Bradley: My parents divorced when I was five, and I found a lot of what I was doing... I would say that you compartmentalizing those emotions and having to think on the spot — that was mental acrobatics. The acrobatics that I had to do, I feel like, were to be so aware of both of my parents' feelings because I was the connecting point. They hated each other so much and still do to this day. It's just tough. When I would go over to [my dad’s] house and have fun, I would come home and lie to my mom about it because I didn't want her to feel bad — that sort of thing. Everything felt so duplicitous. It was hard to understand. Nothing was clear-cut and it was really tough and it's still tough.

My dad is an alcoholic and he's never been able to admit it, at least not to me. He's nowhere near going to AA, that I know of. So, we are estranged. I really feel like I tried to have a relationship with him, but there's just something blocking it. My therapist says that addiction can create this halted progress in a person. Like, a lot of emotional development gets paused at a certain age for an addict, and from then on it's just the addiction that takes over. So it's a lot harder to connect with my dad because sometimes it feels like there's not much of him left in there, the dad I felt like I knew… but maybe it was never there, maybe I never knew him, I don’t really know… I've been in Al-Anon for years. [Laughs]

JP Saxe: That is really sad.

Cariann Bradley: Our relationship, or lack thereof, has been a big inspiration in some writing I’m doing at the moment. The main character has a tumultuous relationship with her dad and she kind of explores that, and it's about her seeking closure for herself because she's not going to get it from him, which is a recurring element in my own life. Maybe one day my dad and I will get to have some sort of breakthrough conversation, but sitting in the now when there's just no closure is really tough.

My mom's an amazing woman and I've learned a lot about her, too. The things that she had to do, the situations that she left in order for me to have a good life, I don't think I've ever really realized how incredible that was and how poignant it is. 

JP Saxe: Yeah, I mean I think there's definitely a turning point in every kid's life when their parents stop being just their parents. I had that, I think, a little earlier than most people, but I mean, I don't know what most people is. I think sometimes it comes at 25, sometimes it comes at nine. For me, it was around nine. Oh, that's what a mom's supposed to do. And now it's so funny because I'm having the opposite situation with my dad. My dad was a superhero dad and did more of the parental things — took me to practices, took me to school. Now it's seeing him create his life as a person and seeing that struggle. It's extremely bizarre. I really admire my dad. One of the most beautiful acts of love I've ever seen in my life is my dad showing up for my mom at the end of her life — after they were divorced — being at every doctor's appointment. He was her best friend, everything she needed for the last two years of her life, and they had been divorced for years.

This might seem like a strange segue, but I think it really informs the core theme of the album I've made because I would say the most central idea of the album is that love can be over and real at the same time, or that relationships can be over and the love can still have been real. I think we live in a society that often puts on a pedestal that the only valid version of love is the kind that ends in death.

Cariann Bradley: Romeo and Juliet kind of stuff.

JP Saxe: If it isn't that, then it was a mistake that you thought could be [forever love]. It's impossible for me to believe that, having seen the way my parents existed at the end of my mom's life. Their love was more sincere, ending in divorce, and they still loved each other so much. And my dad was still there for her. Every appointment, every hard piece of news, he was with me. He was with us when she was talking about whether she was going to be euthanized, holding her hand. That love was so real.

Cariann Bradley: That must have been an insane thing to witness and you're the product of both of them. It's incredibly profound.

JP Saxe: Yeah, I think so too.

Cariann Bradley: That's beautiful. Your dad sounds like a saint.

JP Saxe: Good guy. My mom's amazing too.

Cariann Bradley: Yeah, she sounds amazing.

JP Saxe: Struggled at a core time in my life.

Cariann Bradley: As we all do.

JP Saxe: There was a conversation we had, must have been like 23. She died when I was 26, so I think it was around 23. We were in Virginia for my godsister's son. I don't know the terminology — I have a madrina, Peruvian godmother, my mom's best friend. Her grandson was baptized. I went to the baptism when my mom and I were in DC, and she was doing a little better. I think her alcoholism did get better after she wasn't living with me and my dad. She also wasn't stuck in a situation that was an hour outside Toronto with no community. It was after a lot of therapy that I told her the impact it had on me and her reaction was not what I expected. She cried and said that, as painful as it was to hear, it was a relief to understand why she didn't feel like she had the relationship with me that she wanted to have.

Cariann Bradley: Wow.

JP Saxe: That she had always wondered why her relationship with me wasn't what she had with her mother or why when we talked, I always seemed a little bit guarded, or why I was never too open with her about what I was struggling with. I only told her what the good things that were happening, and she had never really understood where that had come from. As much as it was hard for her to hear, like she said, it was a relief.

Cariann Bradley: Wow. That's beautiful. Also, what you said [about your parents] reminds me of the song on Taylor Swift's evermore album called “happiness.”

JP Saxe: That's my favorite Taylor Swift song.

Cariann Bradley: Really? That subject matter reminds me a lot of what you're saying.

JP Saxe: "There will be happiness after you and there's happiness because of you. Both of these things can be true." It's perfect. It's my favorite Taylor Swift song because it's nuanced, and there aren't very many songs that speak to the validity of not-endless love. That's one of them. There's some songs on Ghost Stories, the Coldplay album.

Cariann Bradley: That's a good album.

JP Saxe: When he talks about his divorce. There's Dolly Parton's “I Will Always Love You.”

Cariann Bradley: Yeah.

JP Saxe: "If I should stay, I would only be in your way. So go. But I'll think of you every step of the way, and I'll always love you." Other than that, there aren't too many examples. There's definitely examples in movies and television. Songwriting often seems to be set more in a polarized version of our emotional spectrum. Either the ‘fuck you’ songs or the ‘I love you forever’ songs or the ‘you hurt me and I like it’ songs. I would say those are the three main buckets.

Cariann Bradley: I don't know anything about songwriting, but I respect it so much. That's fascinating.

JP Saxe: It's a fun medium for storytelling because to me, it's the challenge of trying to get to the smallest moment that's indicative of the biggest feeling.

Cariann Bradley: Right, and the more specific you get, the more people you end up relating to.

JP Saxe: I think so.

Cariann Bradley: I believe the same.

JP Saxe: That's the kind of songwriting I like the most. There's a lot of beautiful songwriting that doesn't do that that I really love, but it's just not personally the one that I gravitate towards.

Cariann Bradley: Is there anything else you can tell me about the new album?

JP Saxe: Yeah, what do you want to know?

Cariann Bradley: As of today, what's your favorite that you've written on the album and why?

JP Saxe: I mean, I should tell you that it's the first single that's going to come out because that's the only one I've really talked about.

Cariann Bradley: Okay.

JP Saxe: And I really wouldn't choose a song for an album if it wasn't my favorite song.

Cariann Bradley: That's a good answer.

JP Saxe: I know it's diplomatic, but it's true. I have never put out a song that at one point in time wasn't my favorite song I'd ever written. I'm actually really proud of that fact because it really easily couldn't have been the case. I didn't put out my first single till I was 24. I waited a long time because of what we were talking about earlier. I wanted to be able to say wholeheartedly that it mattered for people to hear it. And even now, my favorite songs, when I'm listening to my note where I have all the new songs, what I want to listen to really depends on what kind of mood I'm in that day. I wrote those songs from different emotional places, and usually, when I'm in those emotional places, I want to go back to those songs.

It's helpful for me because songs have always been my way of figuring out my feelings, and sometimes when you're moving through something, you come to the same conclusion over and over again, you arrive back to a thought or an anxiety or a feeling about something. And then you take two hours and then you arrive back to the same version of a clarity that you've arrived at 80 times before. To me, songs, whether they're my own or someone else's, feel like I get to skip that step of the process. I don't know, here's what it feels like when I get to that clarity, and I don't need to obsess over this for the next two hours. I think that's one of art's most beautiful functions, just as a little bit of a window to get us to the parts of ourselves that can take a while to maneuver ourselves into on our own.

Cariann Bradley: Right. We're just chipping away at it. I often describe art in terms of sculpture, chipping away at a giant block to turn it into something. I think that's what we do with ourselves as well.

JP Saxe: I really love that analogy because it's not really creating something out of nothing. It's trying to find what's already there but buried.

Cariann Bradley: What has been inspiring you recently? 

JP Saxe: I wrote a lot of the album in Colombia. There isn't any explicit musical Colombian influences and I'm not singing in Spanish, but I do think that the process of learning a new language while writing in a different one has meaningfully impacted the way I'm thinking about language because spending a month and a half in an environment where I'm meeting a lot of new people and I'm existing in a language that isn't my first one and I don't really speak that articulately, especially as someone whose identity is really rooted in the way I communicate myself, I really feel very at home in English, in communication. It's a huge part of how I identify who I am, is the way I talk.

So to take that away and then meet myself over and over again in different situations and exist in situations where I don't get to be myself in English did have an impact on the way I think about and articulate my listening voice. I think that was one of the most inspiring parts of viewing myself in these songs.

Cariann Bradley: That's fascinating. I've only left the country once, but I had similar feelings.

JP Saxe: Where'd you go?

Cariann Bradley: I went to France. I studied there for a short semester in college. Language is not easy for me, and it was a bit of a relief coming home. It was so nice to be back to where I understood people. Feeling that disconnect in France because I didn’t know the language well, was difficult for me because I always want to connect with people on a deeper level.

JP Saxe: I had literally a moment at dinner yesterday where I was like, "Wow, I've understood everything everyone said for the last two hours."

Cariann Bradley: Literally. [Laughs]

JP Saxe: One of the things I really love, emotionally, about learning another language, too, is the way it's enabled me to talk about things that are otherwise really hard for me to talk about. I'll give you an example: say, talking about the loss of someone or grief or parents' divorce, any number of things that are difficult — ingrained parts of our life, when we talk about them in our first language, those words are connected to all of the feelings that we have had about them for any number of years. When you talk about them in a different language, same meaning, but none of the same associations.

Cariann Bradley: Yeah, you're learning new things about them.

JP Saxe: When I say those things in Spanish, it's not connected to the feeling I had when I said them four years ago in English. It almost allows a little bit of room to speak a little bit more freely with a little bit more of a fresh perspective without any of those emotional attachments to the words that I'm saying.

Cariann Bradley: Wow, that's really impactful. I really respect when someone can learn languages as adults. It was always very difficult for me. Wait, how old are you?

JP Saxe: 29.

Cariann Bradley: I'm 27, so we’re the same generation…

Going back to what we were saying earlier about exceptionalism, I just feel like our generation… everyone's so panicked about not being good at only one thing, or at least that that's what it feels like in creative circles. It's always really stressed me out; like, I don't really know what I'm doing. I can try to do five different things okay, but I'm never going to do just one thing excellently. 

JP Saxe: I mean, removing the element of the equation where you have to get a job to make money, the practical element of it — which is obviously a big part of developing a skill set, and I recognize that. Aside from that, I think, especially in your youth, you learn to do things not to learn to do them…you learn to do things to learn what it means to be yourself, and you learn what it means to be yourself by doing different things. So, even if you play the fucking trumpet in high school band for however long and you don't end up being a trumpet player, but something about that experience brought you closer to an understanding of yourself, that's now integrated in everything else you're now doing. I played baseball growing up, but I’m certainly not ‘a baseball player.’ Although I just did a festival in Kentucky and they gave me a bat with my name on it and I was very excited about it.

Cariann Bradley: I bet that was really exciting.

LP Saxe: [It was a] big culmination of a lot of years of baseball. I can point to elements of that that are part of my life now. I don't know, I think if the mentality that everything needs to be towards a linear goal, it's not necessarily the most helpful. I think the idea that the function of learning something is to be the best at it, is flawed. We're not all going to be the greatest in our field, but we can all have some sort of life that feels purposeful and contributive and fulfilling, and that doesn't necessarily come from being the most exceptional. I don't know, this isn't a fully fleshed-out thought, but it's actually something I've been considering lately.

Cariann Bradley: Have you been talking to anyone about it, or is there anything that's happened that prompted you?

JP Saxe: No, it's in the zeitgeist, I guess. That conversation has come up a few times lately — the idea of pursuing exceptionalism versus pursuing sincerity.

Cariann Bradley: Yeah. Well also, I would say you're someone who has garnered some accomplishments, so you're in the middle of your career or at least coming up to it. It's weird to still be thinking of how to make that better or what that means for you.

Cariann Bradley: It's a metaphor. Not even about the protagonist, but it just kind of encapsulates the story. L'Odet has been on a sort of back burner for the last six months while I worked on the novel. I've never been able to fully flesh-out a story, and I got so burned out after school, like we talked about earlier. I got so burned out from just reading and writing, which sounds like the dumbest thing ever, but I just didn't want to do it, didn't want to write my own stuff. I didn't feel like I had anything to say. So in the in-between time, I've been doing Midnight Woman and l'Odet, talking to other people about what they have to say. To get a whole story out on paper and now trying to get people to give it a chance and read it, when I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to do that… it's very scary.

JP Saxe: Yeah. I mean, you know this because you're a writer, but the writing process starts long before you're sitting with a laptop or a pen and paper. All of that time you're spending not writing, you're kind of writing because you're developing your perspective.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a writing coach, I took a poetry class that he did. I'm going to misquote, but essentially, what I took away from the idea was that he was talking about finding your listening voice rather than your speaking voice. 

Your listening voice is a truer representation of the way you will express yourself than your speaking voice. Listen to the way you’re describing the world to yourself in your head, the way you're listening to the world around you, and then try and write with that voice. And it really stuck with me. This was years ago, he said that. I think about it a lot.

Interview By Cariann Bradley  | edited by Kass Ringo | design by Madeline Westfall |   Photos By DIMitrI TZOYTZOYROKOS