キュレイテッド | ジョーディ | Schön!マガジン

There’s a famous quote from American author Zora Neale Hurston that reads, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” For Patrick Droney, 2026 has become a year that answers — the questions having been asked, and lived with, for a long time. 

“This season of life for me in the last couple of years wasn’t linear at all,” he says from his apartment in Brooklyn, a place that has become a character in his songs. “It actually started in a really difficult place, contending with the state of things and the industry, and what do I want out of this? I have big ideas; I want to go down the rabbit hole, but how do you make all these things connect?” On ‘Made You Look‘, his third LP and his first full-length in three years, he uncovers that connecting thread and notices the mundane, intimate moments.

It’s an ordinary Tuesday afternoon when we chat. Nothing particularly thrilling about a Tuesday, but for Droney, those are the days where the actual magic happens. A lot has shifted in the three years since ‘Subtitles for Feelings’. He became a father, he took some time away, and yet he kept following what he calls “the hunch.” Somewhere in the process, the questions changed — less “what does this all mean” and more “what if I just paid attention to what’s already here?” That reframing became the record’s whole thesis: look with me, not at me. Not a performance of a life, but an invitation into his inner world and the moments that make up the typical Tuesdays.

The title itself, ‘Made You Look’, plays on that same tension — the old schoolyard trick, the sleight of hand, the pull of spectacle — only here it’s turned inside out. It’s a wink at the idea that the thing worth looking at was never the myth of the artist on stage, but the small truths of a person actually paying attention to his own life. Across the album, Droney treats memory like double exposure; the radio as a photograph, a cigarette break as a fire escape, a bench as a small math problem about what gets added and what gets subtracted. The small moments that stretched across the years — writing “Math of Us” in London, finishing it years later in New York with country artist Kelsea Ballerini, or writing “Growing A Garden” as a letter to himself before his son was born — added up to something even better than what he could’ve dreamed up. 

In conversation with Schön!‘s Kelsey Barnes, Patrick Droney reflects on the making of ‘Made You Look’, the pivots and cities that shaped the record, and why, three albums in, he is 

I feel like you’ve lived a lot of lives since 2019, when your self-titled EP came out. How would you describe your growth between then and now, and even in the last three years, since your last record?

That’s the most compelling question of it all for me: how is this all turning out in real time? I feel like I’ve always been the king of pivots. I had that hunch that this was something I was supposed to do from a young age. I want to tell stories, write about this unique experience of being a person. But the thing about becoming a person is you never stop becoming a person, and these thresholds have shifted so much.

When I think about your question — that first EP was a real inflection point for me, coming of a certain age, an articulation of these stories I’d gathered, and making sense of them as somebody in my 20s. Behind me was this long history of getting there, so there was an arrival of sorts, but that arrival was also this beginning-endings thing. I think it’s really interesting to shift from that pursuit of the hero — which has always been, “what does that look like”, and “what’s the version of this artistry that I’m holding onto” — that mantle, as a storyteller, as a performer, as the guy on stage. That’s this heroic place you imagine when you’re a kid. 

What’s happened in the last couple of years is, “Oh, this is how it turned out — I’m in the turnout as just a person, as a human being.” It’s less about the myth of the hero, and more about what’s the myth of the real person. Becoming Patrick, and then reacting to Patrick as an artist and a storyteller, and being way more honest about these small things that are what life really is — not the striving things you’re wondering what this could be, or looking back and romanticizing your life. This is very real-time stuff.

I think it’s something that might be very stereotypical to say, but this is what happens when you’re in your 30s. When I turned 30, I felt different, and not in a bad way. You arrive at yourself differently. 

In your 20s, so much of your life is a response — so if this is how it turned out for us right now in our early 30s, then the next ten years is going to be our response to that turnout.

It’s interesting how you’re always in conversation with your past self in a way.

Yeah, in correspondence all the time. I always said intuition is remembering ahead — it’s your gut feeling, you’re already there, and you’re working in tandem. Even this conversation — there’s four of us: there’s your inner dialogue, the one you’re talking to me with, and maybe my whole thing right now is trying to connect closer to the way I’m speaking, the way I’m writing, with the way I’m thinking — trying to bridge that gap a little closer.

Patrick as a human versus Patrick as a songwriter — do you see them as just one person, or as that? 

It’s almost like the difference between an observer and the participant — the person experiencing it. I think maybe what’s happening is I’m really recognizing shifting into those different spaces, and pulling the other one with me a little bit. You just can’t be so present all the time. You can’t. We would wake up and just start to sob. There’s a line on the record on “For The Ending” — “isn’t happy sad enough?” It really is. But I have to be able to unplug from that and just be the person living it. It is still good to separate a little bit, so we’re not completely that close.

Yeah, and also you don’t want to go through life thinking, “Oh, this could be a potential thing that I write about.”

But maybe that was the difference — the idea of something when the thing itself is just interesting.

The reason why I gravitated to your music all those years ago is that it does feel very cinematic. It feels like I’m seeing a movie unfold in my mind while I’m listening. When you first started songwriting and getting into this world of storytelling, what are some of the books, the movies, the other albums that inspired you to create this cinematic world, so to speak?

That’s a great question. I’ve always been drawn to score. I think what always compelled me was, in the most emotional scenes of movies I love, it’s not necessarily the theme song happening — it’s the undertone, it’s the “subtitle for the feeling”, if you will.

I look at the way I make the records and write the songs — it’s kind of all one experience. I’ll project images on the wall and start to score what I feel. I think even as a photographer and a guy who likes to shoot the world in a docu style, I’m always listening to instrumental score music, because it’s much more interesting — it really colours the emotion.The cinematic approach is really: life is the movie, this is it. If I’m offering people something to listen to, that’s what this record feels like too. It’s like, “look with me, not at me. I want to be with you.”

What does that distinction — look with me, not at me — mean in practice when you’re making a record, because it’s something you’re still cognizant of at the same time?

There’s this pursuit where it’s like, look at me, look what I can do, this is my talent, this is my thing. You make records and say it’s about this thing, but it’s really — it’s so hard to just remove your self-reflection from it. But the “look with me” on this project — ‘Made You Look’ — the articulation of that says it in itself: it’s today again, and the most important things in your life are probably going to happen on these really ordinary days. It’s Tuesday, it’s 3 o’clock, you didn’t anticipate it, you weren’t ready for it.

I think this whole thing of just paying attention — today, we’re all starved of it, it’s so bad. I’m so guilty of it. I’m trying to combat it by being like, “Wait a second, this ordinary thing is the thing that matters.” These observations on this record are more like me actually trying to pay attention. Instead of me telling you my beliefs or my saga, it’s more of me sharing the details of my days and to take a look with me. I think they’re going to match yours, because we’re all living the same life, just a little differently.

Talking about a few of those specific things — there’s a line in “Cigarette Break” that stopped me in my tracks this morning, which was “sometimes the radio is a photograph.” I think that is such a really beautiful line. Can you tell me a little bit about writing that song, and also what are some songs for you that you’d describe as a photograph?

It’s so cool to talk to somebody like yourself who has context, and I think context is underrated — it’s like a shared experience, and to have that with the music really means a lot to me. Coming of a certain age at this time in my life, I’ve really recognized that the pause is so important, and that it’s not as dramatic all the time as these moments you see on TV. It’s like the person slipping out of the room and taking a beat just for a second. We really need our fire escapes more than ever right now. Those kinds of scenes in my head — I just wanted to give a space for that, essentially a fire escape song. 

The “radio is a photograph” thing — I’m kind of dealing with this double-exposure thing, where I’m at a place in my life and I’ll be in the moment, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a frame will just drop on top of it, and I’ll be somewhere else, connecting to that other part of the timeline. I guess it’s just such a mess of memory now — that liminal space in the car where I really hear that song. When you’re driving, almost with no music on, it’s just silent — that’s kind of the space I wanted to create, like a really tight vocal, a really closed-in spot, but then the exhale of it when it goes to that major chord on the break, and it just settles. 

I wrote that with Stephen Wilson Jr. He’s had an amazing run the last two years. He was a scientist, and had this whole crazy journey to becoming a songwriter. But we always kind of get weird, and that was a perfect combo of our weirdness.

Do you have some songs that are photographs for you, if you want to share?

I totally do. Totally unashamed too — “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis. I mean, just kill me. I feel like I was the Delilah kid — Delilah on the radio, which is the dedication line. I was so young, listening on my Walkman radio in bed to these people calling Delilah and sharing their sentiments, and Delilah would say, “I got a song for you.” So much of my emotional maturity over the years as a songwriter was just understanding that people called Delilah, and Delilah helped them understand their feelings.

Cities act almost like characters in your work. London and New York in “Where You Are” on ‘State of the Heart’, “Manhattan” on ‘Made You Look’, “Brooklyn” on your first EP, “Runaway” on ‘Subtitles for Feelings’. Nashville has obviously been a huge part of your life, too. What is it about places that keeps drawing you back as a songwriter, and do these cities represent something larger than geography for you?

Yeah, they really do — they are characters in my life. Places that we come from, and go to, and end up in, and leave — it’s really not casual. These are our homes away from home, and then it changes the relationship with the home you thought you knew. I think, for me, in this journey of following that intuition and ending up — starting in New York, and that being the seminal, coming-of-age-spectrum stuff, going to school at 18, growing up in Jersey, always hoping to make it to New York — you have those experiences and think it’s one thing. 

Then you go off, you go to LA, and you live there for ten years, and connect all these dots with people who are in your life or aren’t anymore. You change one thing, and the ripple effect happens, so you realize the city is holding everything there for you, and it’s not just in this present moment — it’s affecting everything ahead of you. 

I take so much stake in the meaning of that, and there’s that great quote — some years ask questions, other years answer them. Having question years in London, question years in Nashville, and having answered years in those places, then returning — that’s the most special thing to me. I love going back to places I’ve been and seeing how I’ve changed. I think it’s an underrated part of this experience. Look, if you never leave your small town, that’s okay too, but I really hope you do.

Yeah, touching on that and how your music soundtracks these moments — when I was living in London and doing long distance, “Where You Are” became a lifeline of sorts. I’d been talking about moving to London for years, and then I finally did it. After two years, I decided that was enough — I can go home. I did it and that was enough.

Yeah, now you know what the rain in London feels like. You know what streets take you where. Setting is important.

It must be really cool for you to have stories from people like me, where your songs have soundtracked those major chapters in their lives.

It’s the coolest thing ever. I think this idea of success today — we’re all wondering what success means, because when you sign up for the thing you love, you sign up in the time that it existed. When that inflection point happened for me, it was like, “Yeah, I want to do music for the rest of my life.” I’m years into this now, and it’s changed. Just to have the impact, to have the collaborative experience with other people out there — that somehow my music has been what music meant to me in my life — what an honour. That’s the thing that makes me want to make another record, and challenge myself to not just rinse and repeat.

This was three or so years of your life, and a lot has changed for you. Taking a pause, in general, can cause a lot of growth. Do you look at the release of this record as a chapter ending or beginning?

It’s a really good question, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. It’s loaded too, because this season of life for me in the last couple of years wasn’t linear at all. It actually started in a really difficult place, contending with the state of things and the industry, and what do I want out of this? I have big ideas; I want to go down the rabbit hole, but how do you make all these things connect? So the arc of this project specifically has been like a generational run for me. 

“For The Ending” is a letter I wrote to myself before a record existed, before my son existed, before anything. I was in this space of not knowing how to land the plane. I got to altitude; I’m in the middle, maybe I just have to land? It’s an ending, it’s a beginning, but the reality is, you never finish a record. We’re all unfinished business. We’re going to leave this earth unfinished, and that’s what I’ve realized — the best part is sharing this unfinished business. That’s how the magic happens. That’s how you and I have this conversation.

Talking about unfinished business: “Maybe This Time Around,” I absolutely love that song. You talk about revisiting who you once were through things you wrote in the past. What was the journey like, rediscovering who you were through things you wrote in journals and letters from the past? 

“Maybe This Time Around” was the last song I wrote for the record. I wrote a couple of similar songs because I’m just living these things in real time, especially the cadence of current life. There’s a pure optimism that’s come from that — just the chance that it might turn out the way you hope it will, because it has. That’s enough to keep the gas in the tank. 

The self-reflection part of that — reading things from younger me again, wondering where we are and who we’ve been — there are letters, physical letters, voice notes, records, my music, photographs, all these things. But at the end of the day, there’s also that inner dialogue that’s so familiar. I don’t know if you feel this; it’s a bit heady — but that voice of yourself you talk to, it does feel like this other. Some days that voice is exactly where I’m at, or maybe it’s a couple years ago, or the one that’s ten years ahead. That correspondence is a really interesting part of life, and I’m learning to have those conversations more healthily, more genuinely, and trying to do that in that song.

I totally feel that sometimes. That song is a great way to represent that. 

Yeah, that song is how I feel right now. 

I love the songwriting on “Growing a Garden.” “Hit you on a drive / you cried and cried and cried / for miles and miles and miles,” “Don’t know who you are / finally settled in / every broken part / you were growing a garden” are so beautiful. What did those words mean to you when you wrote them, and has the meaning changed since then? Do you feel like growing a garden is something you’re always tending to — you’re always planting new flowers, fertilizing, chopping things off?

They say to believe in growing a garden is to believe in the future — it’s to have that faith. It’s so intense, it’s enough to make me cry, because it’s so intense to meet yourself in these spaces where you get to see that it was all part of this grand design. There are parts of your life that feel so far away — what does this mean, how am I going to get through this? And becoming a parent changes that in a way I can’t describe that I thought I knew, and that’s just one part of it, but it’s a huge part of it. 

That drive home is also the drive home from the hospital for me, or the drive home from LA back to New York. All these canon events add up to this really beautiful thing that we’re missing so much of all the time, like the fruits of our labour, if you will — it’s all here. That song is just a great articulation for me of time, and time spent, and that it does lead to something.

I love it very much. I feel like this album is one of those albums that will age so beautifully. It’s such a reflective album about perspective, and how your perspective can change — especially as an artist in 2026.

I want this to age differently. I think I’m optimistic — I also gave a lot more credit to the people out there listening to me. They’re just like me; they want more, they want to dig, they want to see themselves. I want this to age well. As a producer, I love the cinematics; I love everything, but I did try to create some boundaries on this, so it wouldn’t be a timestamp record. I wanted it to sound in a way that, ten years from now, it would still hold up.

How do producer Patrick and songwriter Patrick work together? Are they battling each other sometimes, or how does that work?

They’re like best friends. They exist in tandem, and in some ways I feel like they need each other. I’m a writer who likes to set the scene and set the tone, and that happens in production. A lot of times, I’ll be in my studio, and I’ll have the inkling of the thing I want to say or talk about, but it’s a strange event of uncovering something that feels like it was there the whole time. It happens with these hunches — like, a major chord, and I’m investigating; I love it. I’ll make this pad, create an ambience in the room; that’s the score. I’ll create the score, and then the soundtrack happens by following the lead. As a producer, that’s why I love to make records — the record starts the second the song starts.

I would be silly not to talk about Kelsea Ballerini’s feature on “Math Of Us,”; she is one of the greatest songwriters in my opinion. What was your reaction when she asked to be part of the song, and how did her perspective change its meaning?

I’ve been a fan of Kelsea’s for a long time. I feel like we’ve had parallels as fans — I’ve always seen that as something that would be a great thing. Kelsea and I have kind of been Nashville people for the longest time. I remember her in my earliest days in Nashville, running around doing her thing, so it’s just been from afar, but kind of acquainted. When the record was done, she had just moved to New York. 

This sounds like it wrote itself.

Truly. This was a really specific time in her life. She took such care to respond to me about the record. It wasn’t like, “hey, I listened, it was great” — she went song by song. It was one of the nicest experiences, somebody really listening to music and telling me what they thought about it. When it came to “Math of Us,” she had a really visceral reaction to it. She’s a song person, and for me, “Math of Us” is my mantelpiece lyric by a long shot on this record — it’s the first time since “Glitter” I felt like I could deepen that sentiment and simplify it, and it’s been such a precious song to me. 

We were chatting, and it just came up — what if we tried doing it together? It was amazing. I went to her place in the city and cut her vocal at her apartment, and we’d done some writing the day before. The rapport was instant, the depth was instant, and the song became ten times deeper. It’s rare for the collab thing to happen these days and be so organic — this felt like something of a different time. The music led, the song led, and it was meant to be. She’s been so incredible, and to be a small part of it, as it’s happening in New York.

I think it’s quite poetic that she ended up in New York at the same time this album was coming together.

It’s a character in the song itself now. I actually wrote that song in a couple different cities — it started in London, and I wrote the chorus and felt super protective over it. It took me a year and a half to write the verses because I was so precious about it. The fact that it finished here in New York with Kelsea… I couldn’t be a bigger fan of her. I was always a fan of her music, and now as a person, I’ll ride or die for her.

You just announced a tour. What can people expect from the show? I’ve seen you in Toronto a few times.

Were you at the Toronto show for ‘Subtitles’? That was a really good one.

It was great. It was sweaty from what I can remember, but in the best way.

Yeah, it was like a solid, old-school rock show. I fell in love with music on stage. When that thing shifted in my life, where it went from “hey, listen to me, pay attention” to “oh my god, you’re coming to see me,” or singing these things to each other — talk about “Made You Look,” I can’t wait for that perspective.

On a record that is so personal and important to me, it’s important to be back with my friends. We did a couple of underplays — Brooklyn, Nashville, and LA last month — and I have such respect for my fans; I hold them in such high regard. There’s just so much in the room; it’s like we’re all here for the same thing, and that’s addicting to me. I can’t even imagine that connective tissue at these shows. I’m very proud to put up a tour in 2026 and sell the rooms I’m selling, because people really listen to my music, and they’re engaged, and that means a lot.

How does your relationship with these songs change when you see people singing them back to you?

It’s a good question. Three full-lengths deep is really interesting too, because I’ve never had this much music to think about or set list. Historically, songs have shifted so much from people’s perspective of them. When you put a song out, you’re letting it go in a way, and it does become something else. I try to protect that for myself a little bit, because I’m changing, and what I wrote it about changes too. 

There’s something about this record that feels so evergreen to me, almost as if I’m always going to feel this way about it. I think if there’s ever a song that goes so wide and so far — everybody’s kind of striving for that — it would be an interesting feeling. I think it’s something to not hold onto too tightly — just let it sit in your hand,

Yeah, because I feel like if you try to hold it, you start thinking about it too much, and it becomes a whole thing that isn’t as..

Genuine as the thing itself.

Since this record is all about paying attention, what is something you’re paying attention to now that you think you would have missed five years ago?

Whoa — that’s insane [laughs]. I think it’s truly the ordinary. For me, it’s not just looking to the next big event of my life or the next goal; it’s the minutiae of my days spent with people I love and care about. That sounds surface, but it’s really not. I feel closer to the things that are just right under my nose. I keep coming back to this “it’s today again” thing — it’s just being here today, and not thinking about tomorrow today, because time’s going very fast — I’m sure for you, too.

I blink, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m 33 now.” 

Time doesn’t move; we move through it. Time’s going to be here when we’re gone. I think paying attention to that is better. In the most blurry time of my life, from a changed perspective, it’s been really amazing to have this opportunity to pay attention.

I think that’s why people gravitate to your music so much — you make the smallest little thing universal, despite it being so specific to you and your day. Everybody probably feels some extent of that, which I think is really beautiful.

That’s the best part — when you realize that, just tell your story exactly as is, and it will be everybody else’s story too.

‘Made You Look‘ is out now. Catch Patrick Droney on tour this fall.

photography + fashion. Stephanie Pistel @ tempomedia.de
talent. Patrick Droney @ Magus Entertainment Inc + Alexandra Baker
production. Frankie Production
post production. Stephan Lesger
interview. Kelsey Barnes

There’s a famous quote from American author Zora Neale Hurston that reads, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” For Patrick Droney, 2026 has become a year that answers — the questions having been asked, and lived with, for a long time. 

“This season of life for me in the last couple of years wasn’t linear at all,” he says from his apartment in Brooklyn, a place that has become a character in his songs. “It actually started in a really difficult place, contending with the state of things and the industry, and what do I want out of this? I have big ideas; I want to go down the rabbit hole, but how do you make all these things connect?” On ‘Made You Look‘, his third LP and his first full-length in three years, he uncovers that connecting thread and notices the mundane, intimate moments.

It’s an ordinary Tuesday afternoon when we chat. Nothing particularly thrilling about a Tuesday, but for Droney, those are the days where the actual magic happens. A lot has shifted in the three years since ‘Subtitles for Feelings’. He became a father, he took some time away, and yet he kept following what he calls “the hunch.” Somewhere in the process, the questions changed — less “what does this all mean” and more “what if I just paid attention to what’s already here?” That reframing became the record’s whole thesis: look with me, not at me. Not a performance of a life, but an invitation into his inner world and the moments that make up the typical Tuesdays.

The title itself, ‘Made You Look’, plays on that same tension — the old schoolyard trick, the sleight of hand, the pull of spectacle — only here it’s turned inside out. It’s a wink at the idea that the thing worth looking at was never the myth of the artist on stage, but the small truths of a person actually paying attention to his own life. Across the album, Droney treats memory like double exposure; the radio as a photograph, a cigarette break as a fire escape, a bench as a small math problem about what gets added and what gets subtracted. The small moments that stretched across the years — writing “Math of Us” in London, finishing it years later in New York with country artist Kelsea Ballerini, or writing “Growing A Garden” as a letter to himself before his son was born — added up to something even better than what he could’ve dreamed up. 

In conversation with Schön!‘s Kelsey Barnes, Patrick Droney reflects on the making of ‘Made You Look’, the pivots and cities that shaped the record, and why, three albums in, he is 

I feel like you’ve lived a lot of lives since 2019, when your self-titled EP came out. How would you describe your growth between then and now, and even in the last three years, since your last record?

That’s the most compelling question of it all for me: how is this all turning out in real time? I feel like I’ve always been the king of pivots. I had that hunch that this was something I was supposed to do from a young age. I want to tell stories, write about this unique experience of being a person. But the thing about becoming a person is you never stop becoming a person, and these thresholds have shifted so much.

When I think about your question — that first EP was a real inflection point for me, coming of a certain age, an articulation of these stories I’d gathered, and making sense of them as somebody in my 20s. Behind me was this long history of getting there, so there was an arrival of sorts, but that arrival was also this beginning-endings thing. I think it’s really interesting to shift from that pursuit of the hero — which has always been, “what does that look like”, and “what’s the version of this artistry that I’m holding onto” — that mantle, as a storyteller, as a performer, as the guy on stage. That’s this heroic place you imagine when you’re a kid. 

What’s happened in the last couple of years is, “Oh, this is how it turned out — I’m in the turnout as just a person, as a human being.” It’s less about the myth of the hero, and more about what’s the myth of the real person. Becoming Patrick, and then reacting to Patrick as an artist and a storyteller, and being way more honest about these small things that are what life really is — not the striving things you’re wondering what this could be, or looking back and romanticizing your life. This is very real-time stuff.

I think it’s something that might be very stereotypical to say, but this is what happens when you’re in your 30s. When I turned 30, I felt different, and not in a bad way. You arrive at yourself differently. 

In your 20s, so much of your life is a response — so if this is how it turned out for us right now in our early 30s, then the next ten years is going to be our response to that turnout.

It’s interesting how you’re always in conversation with your past self in a way.

Yeah, in correspondence all the time. I always said intuition is remembering ahead — it’s your gut feeling, you’re already there, and you’re working in tandem. Even this conversation — there’s four of us: there’s your inner dialogue, the one you’re talking to me with, and maybe my whole thing right now is trying to connect closer to the way I’m speaking, the way I’m writing, with the way I’m thinking — trying to bridge that gap a little closer.

Patrick as a human versus Patrick as a songwriter — do you see them as just one person, or as that? 

It’s almost like the difference between an observer and the participant — the person experiencing it. I think maybe what’s happening is I’m really recognizing shifting into those different spaces, and pulling the other one with me a little bit. You just can’t be so present all the time. You can’t. We would wake up and just start to sob. There’s a line on the record on “For The Ending” — “isn’t happy sad enough?” It really is. But I have to be able to unplug from that and just be the person living it. It is still good to separate a little bit, so we’re not completely that close.

Yeah, and also you don’t want to go through life thinking, “Oh, this could be a potential thing that I write about.”

But maybe that was the difference — the idea of something when the thing itself is just interesting.

The reason why I gravitated to your music all those years ago is that it does feel very cinematic. It feels like I’m seeing a movie unfold in my mind while I’m listening. When you first started songwriting and getting into this world of storytelling, what are some of the books, the movies, the other albums that inspired you to create this cinematic world, so to speak?

That’s a great question. I’ve always been drawn to score. I think what always compelled me was, in the most emotional scenes of movies I love, it’s not necessarily the theme song happening — it’s the undertone, it’s the “subtitle for the feeling”, if you will.

I look at the way I make the records and write the songs — it’s kind of all one experience. I’ll project images on the wall and start to score what I feel. I think even as a photographer and a guy who likes to shoot the world in a docu style, I’m always listening to instrumental score music, because it’s much more interesting — it really colours the emotion.The cinematic approach is really: life is the movie, this is it. If I’m offering people something to listen to, that’s what this record feels like too. It’s like, “look with me, not at me. I want to be with you.”

What does that distinction — look with me, not at me — mean in practice when you’re making a record, because it’s something you’re still cognizant of at the same time?

There’s this pursuit where it’s like, look at me, look what I can do, this is my talent, this is my thing. You make records and say it’s about this thing, but it’s really — it’s so hard to just remove your self-reflection from it. But the “look with me” on this project — ‘Made You Look’ — the articulation of that says it in itself: it’s today again, and the most important things in your life are probably going to happen on these really ordinary days. It’s Tuesday, it’s 3 o’clock, you didn’t anticipate it, you weren’t ready for it.

I think this whole thing of just paying attention — today, we’re all starved of it, it’s so bad. I’m so guilty of it. I’m trying to combat it by being like, “Wait a second, this ordinary thing is the thing that matters.” These observations on this record are more like me actually trying to pay attention. Instead of me telling you my beliefs or my saga, it’s more of me sharing the details of my days and to take a look with me. I think they’re going to match yours, because we’re all living the same life, just a little differently.

Talking about a few of those specific things — there’s a line in “Cigarette Break” that stopped me in my tracks this morning, which was “sometimes the radio is a photograph.” I think that is such a really beautiful line. Can you tell me a little bit about writing that song, and also what are some songs for you that you’d describe as a photograph?

It’s so cool to talk to somebody like yourself who has context, and I think context is underrated — it’s like a shared experience, and to have that with the music really means a lot to me. Coming of a certain age at this time in my life, I’ve really recognized that the pause is so important, and that it’s not as dramatic all the time as these moments you see on TV. It’s like the person slipping out of the room and taking a beat just for a second. We really need our fire escapes more than ever right now. Those kinds of scenes in my head — I just wanted to give a space for that, essentially a fire escape song. 

The “radio is a photograph” thing — I’m kind of dealing with this double-exposure thing, where I’m at a place in my life and I’ll be in the moment, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a frame will just drop on top of it, and I’ll be somewhere else, connecting to that other part of the timeline. I guess it’s just such a mess of memory now — that liminal space in the car where I really hear that song. When you’re driving, almost with no music on, it’s just silent — that’s kind of the space I wanted to create, like a really tight vocal, a really closed-in spot, but then the exhale of it when it goes to that major chord on the break, and it just settles. 

I wrote that with Stephen Wilson Jr. He’s had an amazing run the last two years. He was a scientist, and had this whole crazy journey to becoming a songwriter. But we always kind of get weird, and that was a perfect combo of our weirdness.

Do you have some songs that are photographs for you, if you want to share?

I totally do. Totally unashamed too — “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis. I mean, just kill me. I feel like I was the Delilah kid — Delilah on the radio, which is the dedication line. I was so young, listening on my Walkman radio in bed to these people calling Delilah and sharing their sentiments, and Delilah would say, “I got a song for you.” So much of my emotional maturity over the years as a songwriter was just understanding that people called Delilah, and Delilah helped them understand their feelings.

Cities act almost like characters in your work. London and New York in “Where You Are” on ‘State of the Heart’, “Manhattan” on ‘Made You Look’, “Brooklyn” on your first EP, “Runaway” on ‘Subtitles for Feelings’. Nashville has obviously been a huge part of your life, too. What is it about places that keeps drawing you back as a songwriter, and do these cities represent something larger than geography for you?

Yeah, they really do — they are characters in my life. Places that we come from, and go to, and end up in, and leave — it’s really not casual. These are our homes away from home, and then it changes the relationship with the home you thought you knew. I think, for me, in this journey of following that intuition and ending up — starting in New York, and that being the seminal, coming-of-age-spectrum stuff, going to school at 18, growing up in Jersey, always hoping to make it to New York — you have those experiences and think it’s one thing. 

Then you go off, you go to LA, and you live there for ten years, and connect all these dots with people who are in your life or aren’t anymore. You change one thing, and the ripple effect happens, so you realize the city is holding everything there for you, and it’s not just in this present moment — it’s affecting everything ahead of you. 

I take so much stake in the meaning of that, and there’s that great quote — some years ask questions, other years answer them. Having question years in London, question years in Nashville, and having answered years in those places, then returning — that’s the most special thing to me. I love going back to places I’ve been and seeing how I’ve changed. I think it’s an underrated part of this experience. Look, if you never leave your small town, that’s okay too, but I really hope you do.

Yeah, touching on that and how your music soundtracks these moments — when I was living in London and doing long distance, “Where You Are” became a lifeline of sorts. I’d been talking about moving to London for years, and then I finally did it. After two years, I decided that was enough — I can go home. I did it and that was enough.

Yeah, now you know what the rain in London feels like. You know what streets take you where. Setting is important.

It must be really cool for you to have stories from people like me, where your songs have soundtracked those major chapters in their lives.

It’s the coolest thing ever. I think this idea of success today — we’re all wondering what success means, because when you sign up for the thing you love, you sign up in the time that it existed. When that inflection point happened for me, it was like, “Yeah, I want to do music for the rest of my life.” I’m years into this now, and it’s changed. Just to have the impact, to have the collaborative experience with other people out there — that somehow my music has been what music meant to me in my life — what an honour. That’s the thing that makes me want to make another record, and challenge myself to not just rinse and repeat.

This was three or so years of your life, and a lot has changed for you. Taking a pause, in general, can cause a lot of growth. Do you look at the release of this record as a chapter ending or beginning?

It’s a really good question, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. It’s loaded too, because this season of life for me in the last couple of years wasn’t linear at all. It actually started in a really difficult place, contending with the state of things and the industry, and what do I want out of this? I have big ideas; I want to go down the rabbit hole, but how do you make all these things connect? So the arc of this project specifically has been like a generational run for me. 

“For The Ending” is a letter I wrote to myself before a record existed, before my son existed, before anything. I was in this space of not knowing how to land the plane. I got to altitude; I’m in the middle, maybe I just have to land? It’s an ending, it’s a beginning, but the reality is, you never finish a record. We’re all unfinished business. We’re going to leave this earth unfinished, and that’s what I’ve realized — the best part is sharing this unfinished business. That’s how the magic happens. That’s how you and I have this conversation.

Talking about unfinished business: “Maybe This Time Around,” I absolutely love that song. You talk about revisiting who you once were through things you wrote in the past. What was the journey like, rediscovering who you were through things you wrote in journals and letters from the past? 

“Maybe This Time Around” was the last song I wrote for the record. I wrote a couple of similar songs because I’m just living these things in real time, especially the cadence of current life. There’s a pure optimism that’s come from that — just the chance that it might turn out the way you hope it will, because it has. That’s enough to keep the gas in the tank. 

The self-reflection part of that — reading things from younger me again, wondering where we are and who we’ve been — there are letters, physical letters, voice notes, records, my music, photographs, all these things. But at the end of the day, there’s also that inner dialogue that’s so familiar. I don’t know if you feel this; it’s a bit heady — but that voice of yourself you talk to, it does feel like this other. Some days that voice is exactly where I’m at, or maybe it’s a couple years ago, or the one that’s ten years ahead. That correspondence is a really interesting part of life, and I’m learning to have those conversations more healthily, more genuinely, and trying to do that in that song.

I totally feel that sometimes. That song is a great way to represent that. 

Yeah, that song is how I feel right now. 

I love the songwriting on “Growing a Garden.” “Hit you on a drive / you cried and cried and cried / for miles and miles and miles,” “Don’t know who you are / finally settled in / every broken part / you were growing a garden” are so beautiful. What did those words mean to you when you wrote them, and has the meaning changed since then? Do you feel like growing a garden is something you’re always tending to — you’re always planting new flowers, fertilizing, chopping things off?

They say to believe in growing a garden is to believe in the future — it’s to have that faith. It’s so intense, it’s enough to make me cry, because it’s so intense to meet yourself in these spaces where you get to see that it was all part of this grand design. There are parts of your life that feel so far away — what does this mean, how am I going to get through this? And becoming a parent changes that in a way I can’t describe that I thought I knew, and that’s just one part of it, but it’s a huge part of it. 

That drive home is also the drive home from the hospital for me, or the drive home from LA back to New York. All these canon events add up to this really beautiful thing that we’re missing so much of all the time, like the fruits of our labour, if you will — it’s all here. That song is just a great articulation for me of time, and time spent, and that it does lead to something.

I love it very much. I feel like this album is one of those albums that will age so beautifully. It’s such a reflective album about perspective, and how your perspective can change — especially as an artist in 2026.

I want this to age differently. I think I’m optimistic — I also gave a lot more credit to the people out there listening to me. They’re just like me; they want more, they want to dig, they want to see themselves. I want this to age well. As a producer, I love the cinematics; I love everything, but I did try to create some boundaries on this, so it wouldn’t be a timestamp record. I wanted it to sound in a way that, ten years from now, it would still hold up.

How do producer Patrick and songwriter Patrick work together? Are they battling each other sometimes, or how does that work?

They’re like best friends. They exist in tandem, and in some ways I feel like they need each other. I’m a writer who likes to set the scene and set the tone, and that happens in production. A lot of times, I’ll be in my studio, and I’ll have the inkling of the thing I want to say or talk about, but it’s a strange event of uncovering something that feels like it was there the whole time. It happens with these hunches — like, a major chord, and I’m investigating; I love it. I’ll make this pad, create an ambience in the room; that’s the score. I’ll create the score, and then the soundtrack happens by following the lead. As a producer, that’s why I love to make records — the record starts the second the song starts.

I would be silly not to talk about Kelsea Ballerini’s feature on “Math Of Us,”; she is one of the greatest songwriters in my opinion. What was your reaction when she asked to be part of the song, and how did her perspective change its meaning?

I’ve been a fan of Kelsea’s for a long time. I feel like we’ve had parallels as fans — I’ve always seen that as something that would be a great thing. Kelsea and I have kind of been Nashville people for the longest time. I remember her in my earliest days in Nashville, running around doing her thing, so it’s just been from afar, but kind of acquainted. When the record was done, she had just moved to New York. 

This sounds like it wrote itself.

Truly. This was a really specific time in her life. She took such care to respond to me about the record. It wasn’t like, “hey, I listened, it was great” — she went song by song. It was one of the nicest experiences, somebody really listening to music and telling me what they thought about it. When it came to “Math of Us,” she had a really visceral reaction to it. She’s a song person, and for me, “Math of Us” is my mantelpiece lyric by a long shot on this record — it’s the first time since “Glitter” I felt like I could deepen that sentiment and simplify it, and it’s been such a precious song to me. 

We were chatting, and it just came up — what if we tried doing it together? It was amazing. I went to her place in the city and cut her vocal at her apartment, and we’d done some writing the day before. The rapport was instant, the depth was instant, and the song became ten times deeper. It’s rare for the collab thing to happen these days and be so organic — this felt like something of a different time. The music led, the song led, and it was meant to be. She’s been so incredible, and to be a small part of it, as it’s happening in New York.

I think it’s quite poetic that she ended up in New York at the same time this album was coming together.

It’s a character in the song itself now. I actually wrote that song in a couple different cities — it started in London, and I wrote the chorus and felt super protective over it. It took me a year and a half to write the verses because I was so precious about it. The fact that it finished here in New York with Kelsea… I couldn’t be a bigger fan of her. I was always a fan of her music, and now as a person, I’ll ride or die for her.

You just announced a tour. What can people expect from the show? I’ve seen you in Toronto a few times.

Were you at the Toronto show for ‘Subtitles’? That was a really good one.

It was great. It was sweaty from what I can remember, but in the best way.

Yeah, it was like a solid, old-school rock show. I fell in love with music on stage. When that thing shifted in my life, where it went from “hey, listen to me, pay attention” to “oh my god, you’re coming to see me,” or singing these things to each other — talk about “Made You Look,” I can’t wait for that perspective.

On a record that is so personal and important to me, it’s important to be back with my friends. We did a couple of underplays — Brooklyn, Nashville, and LA last month — and I have such respect for my fans; I hold them in such high regard. There’s just so much in the room; it’s like we’re all here for the same thing, and that’s addicting to me. I can’t even imagine that connective tissue at these shows. I’m very proud to put up a tour in 2026 and sell the rooms I’m selling, because people really listen to my music, and they’re engaged, and that means a lot.

How does your relationship with these songs change when you see people singing them back to you?

It’s a good question. Three full-lengths deep is really interesting too, because I’ve never had this much music to think about or set list. Historically, songs have shifted so much from people’s perspective of them. When you put a song out, you’re letting it go in a way, and it does become something else. I try to protect that for myself a little bit, because I’m changing, and what I wrote it about changes too. 

There’s something about this record that feels so evergreen to me, almost as if I’m always going to feel this way about it. I think if there’s ever a song that goes so wide and so far — everybody’s kind of striving for that — it would be an interesting feeling. I think it’s something to not hold onto too tightly — just let it sit in your hand,

Yeah, because I feel like if you try to hold it, you start thinking about it too much, and it becomes a whole thing that isn’t as..

Genuine as the thing itself.

Since this record is all about paying attention, what is something you’re paying attention to now that you think you would have missed five years ago?

Whoa — that’s insane [laughs]. I think it’s truly the ordinary. For me, it’s not just looking to the next big event of my life or the next goal; it’s the minutiae of my days spent with people I love and care about. That sounds surface, but it’s really not. I feel closer to the things that are just right under my nose. I keep coming back to this “it’s today again” thing — it’s just being here today, and not thinking about tomorrow today, because time’s going very fast — I’m sure for you, too.

I blink, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m 33 now.” 

Time doesn’t move; we move through it. Time’s going to be here when we’re gone. I think paying attention to that is better. In the most blurry time of my life, from a changed perspective, it’s been really amazing to have this opportunity to pay attention.

I think that’s why people gravitate to your music so much — you make the smallest little thing universal, despite it being so specific to you and your day. Everybody probably feels some extent of that, which I think is really beautiful.

That’s the best part — when you realize that, just tell your story exactly as is, and it will be everybody else’s story too.

‘Made You Look‘ is out now. Catch Patrick Droney on tour this fall.

photography + fashion. Stephanie Pistel @ tempomedia.de
talent. Patrick Droney @ Magus Entertainment Inc + Alexandra Baker
production. Frankie Production
post production. Stephan Lesger
interview. Kelsey Barnes