Which, in turn, makes the title of the Polaris Prize winner’s new album, Love Songs For Robots, feel strangely ironic. To be sure, Watson is obsessed with machines and the way they interact; he made a bicycle’s inner workings an essential component of 2009’s “Beijing,” for example, while Love Songs For Robots opens with a song containing a line about how “your nuts and bolts are all over the ground.” Yet few singers qualify as less robotic than Watson, whose dreamy falsetto is all airy, swoony sweetness — akin to a cross between Jeff Buckley and Bon Iver‘s Justin Vernon.

For Watson, an interest in mechanical function extends to curiosity about emotional wiring; about how our feelings are fueled by science as much as something more unknowable. Love Songs For Robots‘ themes are a natural extension of that fascination, and of a singer-songwriter whose brain seems to overflow with wise and exacting ways to reflect on the way hearts work.

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