For Canadian singer-songwriter JP Saxe, a role in an internet conspiracy theory is just a rite of passage in media nowadays.

That happened with his song, “If the World Was Ending,” released in October 2019, or just a few months before the coronavirus pandemic rattled the world. Featuring Julia Michaels, the song from his “Hold It Together” EP has racked up more than 190 million views on YouTube and was nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys.

“Twitter’s got crazy ideas, man,” Saxe said in a recent phone interview. “… So, yes, when you write a song in 2019 that forecasts the world ending and then covid happens in 2020, people start asking questions, but the truth is the world has been feeling like it was ending for a really long time.”

In the ensuing years, Saxe has released two albums — 2021’s “Dangerous Levels of Introspection” and 2023’s “A Grey Area” plus an eight-song live collection from his latest album earlier this month. His world tour in support of his new album includes a stop on March 11 at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale, with Justin Nozuka opening.

Although he’s created a setlist, he doesn’t expect his concerts to be the same in each city.

“I think that the fun of going to a show is feeling like you’re spending time kicking it with a real person who’s just sharing their songs and art with you,” he said. “And I think as soon as you feel like you’re hearing someone read from a script, it stops feeling nearly as fun.”

A show that would be repeated night after night doesn’t seem to fit his style, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad.

“Look, I love shows like that, and I think different shows serve different purposes. I don’t think one is more valid than another,” he said. “For example, (I’m a) huge fan of Broadway and that’s the same every night. I don’t think that’s the kind of show that suits my music the best because my music is so sincerity forward and so intentionally flawed.

“So I think that’s what I want to bring to the stage, just kind of being myself as possible, and that includes letting it include the occasional (mess)up.”

His album, “A Grey Area,” which features songs like “I Don’t Miss You,” “Everything Ends” and “Who You Thought I’d Be,” has two threads running throughout.

“I think the first theme was my love of nuance and recognizing the both/and of everything. I find every bit of my life feels a little bit more real, more alive, more honest when I’m not trying to make it one extreme or another,” he said. “If I’m trying to decide what something means to me and I’m between two things, it’s very rarely one or the other. I think art usually allows a comfortable window into holding onto that nuance, that ambivalence, that in between, which is usually where I think the most sincerity is.

“And I would say the other thing with the album is the validity of love that doesn’t last forever and the recognition that love can be really beautiful without having to be something that ends in death.”

The record also comes on the heels of a breakup with Michaels after about three years of dating. In September 2022, not long after the split, Saxe posted a clip of “When You Think of Me,” which wound up on the album. With lyrics like, “When you think of me, are you setting fire to every memory? And do you believe what doesn’t last forever don’t mean anything?” the song fits right in with his second theme.

Despite stories on the breakup making magazines like People and Us Weekly — “It’s surprisingly easy to avoid. You kind of have to seek it out, honestly,” he said — Saxe doesn’t plan to stop mining the intimate details of his life. The self-described “sentimental mess” said he considers it an occupational hazard, much like a hockey player risking a concussion.

“I don’t want to feel like an artist is talking to me like someone they don’t know,” he said. “I want to feel like an artist is talking to me like I’m their best friend and they’re telling me things they’d never say to anyone.”

And as much as he opens up, he finds that fans will do the same when they meet him.

“I love guts. Honestly, I think it’s something very human and beautiful to want to share back to someone who has shared with you. I think in the same way that, when you have a great conversation with a friend, the more open they are with you, the more open you then want to be back,” he said. “And so whenever someone’s open with me, I feel like it’s a result of them feeling as if I was open with them. And that is a repercussion of the sincerity of my heart that I’m grateful for.”

With a lot of the record written in Colombia, Saxe said his latest album was inspired by Latin music. “It wasn’t necessarily like the sonic identity of it,” he said, “but more the sort of the energy, the philosophy, the approach, the courage I heard in the creative choices.”

For his first album, the British comedy/drama series “Fleabag” left a big impression. Saxe’s songwriting process includes journaling, in order to listen to his internal dialogue, get familiar with it and then find its more sincere version.

“I saw an interview with (“Fleabag” creator) Phoebe Waller-Bridge where she says that she knew a scene needed to stay in the edit if it scared her a little bit, because if it didn’t scare her a little bit she probably wasn’t being real enough,” he said. “And that one thing she said in an interview informed many choices I made on that first album.”

Ultimately, Saxe might be doing exactly what he’s best suited to do, as creativity runs in his family. (His grandfather was Hungarian cellist Janos Starker, a Grammy Award winner.)

“I have a really beautiful life that I’m grateful for because my music has moved people, and I would be so trash at any other job. Like, my skill set of a human being is so specifically suited to this very strange, unique job that I have, and very not suited to hardly anything else,” he said. “So I’m just grateful that being like a super ADD, all over the place, sentimental, over-thinker of a human has perfectly placed me in the career of singer-songwriter.”

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)