Patrick Watson first broke through to audiences in 2006 with his album Close to Paradise. The album went gold in Canada and won numerous awards, including the Polaris Prize. It saw international release in September 2007 and has since sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. His core four-piece band of Watson (vox, keys), Mishka Stein (bass), Simon Angell (guitar) and Robbie Kuster (drums) began to take shape in the wake of the self-released Just Another Ordinary Day in 2003, and before long buzz on their live show had lead to performances with an impressively diverse group of artists, from Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, to Feist.

His 2009 album, Wooden Arms, saw the band expand in the live setting to include a string quartet—not surprisingly, considering the lush arrangements present on all the albums. Indeed by this time Watson himself had established a reputation as a producer and composer of film scores, in addition to role as, band-leader, piano-player and singer-songwriter. Watson’s latest offering, entitled Adventures in Your Own Backyard, is in his own words, an effort on the band’s part to “make the kind of music we would want to listen to at home.” The album’s title is both a nod to this sentiment, and to the fact that it was recorded almost entirely in Watson’s apartment in Montreal. The result is an album that is still ripe with the touchstones one has come to expect from Patrick Watson and his collaborators, but permeated with a greater sense of patience, and confidence. Adventures in Your Own Backyard is an attempt by Watson and the band to simplify their sights—to make music a bit more close to home, in every sense of the phrase.