JP Saxe

“As a weirdo kid growing up in Canada with too many feelings and not very many friends, songs were the first place I really figured out what it meant to have a relationship with myself, and have a dialogue with myself,” JP Saxe tells Apple Music. “To this day, I don’t feel closer to myself anywhere than sitting at an instrument.” That intense soul-searching goes a long way to explaining how this Toronto-bred talent—born Jonathan Percy Starker Saxe in 1993—has connected with such a wide, genre-spanning audience since he moved to L.A. at 19 to pursue his musical dreams. But where many aspiring tunesmiths catch their big break writing for more famous names, Saxe’s delicate fusion of modern pop, R&B, country, and post-Coldplay indie romanticism has drawn A-listers onto his own records. Like his patiently paced piano ballads, Saxe’s first major success was a slow-burn triumph: Initially released in late 2019, his dramatic, Finneas-produced duet with Julia Michaels, “If the World Was Ending,” crept up the international charts over the course of 2020 as it became the pre-eminent love song of the pandemic. (This pledge to commitment in the face of crisis only turned more poignant after it was revealed Saxe and Michaels fell in love for real while writing it together.) His 2021 collaboration with country star Maren Morris, “Line by Line,” further entrenched Saxe’s in pop’s upper echelons. This laidback, hammock-swaying lullaby is a love song—albeit one dedicated to the art of songwriting itself. “As songwriters, we have the blessing and the curse of really intense introspection at all times,” Saxe tells Apple Music. But, as his track record proves, the best writers have an innate gift for presenting their innermost feelings as universal sentiments.