JP Saxe is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter. Last year, he made headlines after scheduling an ambitious headlining tour that he ended up canceling. Instead of making excuses, like many musicians in the same position have, Saxe got brutally honest about why he scrapped the dates, posting a TikTok and writing a guest column for Variety explaining how low ticket sales were to blame. Somehow, in a situation where his pride could have been irreparably harmed, Saxe felt empowered to soldier on, using the experience as a launching pad into the next phase of his career.
Since then, he’s performed with the Jonas Brothers and contributed songwriting to Nick Jonas’ 2026 album “Sunday Best.” He picked back up on the live circuit, serving as direct support for Megan Moroney’s current sold-out arena tour. And, most notably, he’s gone independent after spending six years and releasing two albums on Arista Records. Most recently, he kickstarted his new era with the single “When I Lose You” in preparation for his forthcoming album “Okay Piano Guy,” out October 23. Below, Saxe discusses how he’s evolved since his tour cancellation and why it’s helped him look past the clutter surrounding what it means to be an artist.
A year ago I wrote about canceling my tour. I wrote about it because I didn’t know what else to do besides tell the truth. It wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t meant to be seen as brave (as it was bizarrely labeled). It just felt less exhausting than pretending.
I’ve resisted writing this “one-year-later” follow-up because I don’t want to act like that experience predicated a comeback story. The honesty of the first essay can’t depend on things having gone well afterward. It had to be worth telling even if nothing improved.
And not everything has. But the cancellation did interrupt my life in ways I’m still trying to understand. I wouldn’t have made this album if I’d gone on that tour. I probably wouldn’t have started a production company with my band. I wouldn’t have spent the last year writing with so many artists I admire. I wouldn’t have become a Jonas cousin. Most importantly, I’m not sure I would’ve become an independent artist.
In October, I’m releasing “Okay Piano Guy,” my first album as an independent artist. It’s the proudest I’ve ever been of a body of work. Not just because the songs belong to me in every way possible, but because the version of success I’m pursuing belongs to me too.
That has not always been true.
After “If the World Was Ending,” I set a trajectory for myself. Every next step had to be a step up. Every room had to be bigger than the last one. Every song had to reach more people. The line was supposed to keep moving in one direction, and my job was to make sure it never looked (to myself or anyone else) like I was moving backward.
Since opening for him in 2019, I’d been pacing myself against Noah Kahan. A couple years later, I was playing the same venues he had played. It gave me a comforting little equation for my career. I could look at where he’d been, look at where I was, and imagine I was a few steps behind him on the same path.
Then he became one of the biggest artists in the world. Which is wonderful. He deserves every bit of it. It also meant I needed to find a new person to measure myself against. So I did. Then someone else. Then someone else. I kept moving the finish line to wherever another artist happened to be standing.
That fucked me up. A little bit because the comparisons made me jealous, but jealousy alone would’ve been simpler. Mostly, it just had me confused. I stopped knowing which ambitions were mine and which ones I’d adopted because they seemed like the appropriate next step for someone in my position.
My ideas of success never lasted as long as it took me to achieve them. By the time I got somewhere I’d wanted to go, I was already looking ahead at someone who’d gone farther. The thing I’d worked toward felt insufficient before I’d even had the chance to enjoy it.
I wasn’t building a career around what made my life feel meaningful. I was trying to maintain a trajectory.
The canceled tour was the first undeniable break in that line. At the time, it felt like proof that I’d failed to keep pace. Now I think losing the trajectory may have been the only way I could start asking where I actually wanted to go.
When I canceled the tour, the thing I was most afraid of wasn’t only losing the tour. It was losing the appearance of momentum. I had spent years learning that success needed to look continuous, public, and undeniable. Admitting that something hadn’t worked felt more dangerous than the failure itself.
James Blake posted recently about how nearly every visible signal of success in music can now be manipulated. It’s a dope post. I highly recommend it and I think he’s right. When numbers, reactions, and entire narratives can be manufactured, protecting the appearance of success starts to feel like a waste of a creative life. Making people care has become a different art form than making something worth caring about.
The more distance I got from the career trajectory I’d set for myself seven years ago, the more I realized I’d been measuring success using someone else’s definition.
A disclaimer on this next thought: I don’t think record labels are inherently bad. I certainly didn’t think so when one helped get me out of sleeping in my car as a broke 25-year-old. I’ve worked with incredible people at labels. People who believed in me, fought for me, and genuinely changed my life.
But I think a lot of artists (including me) make a counterintuitive mistake. We sign to a label because we trust people. In reality, we’re not signing to the people; we’re signing with a corporation. We can have an executive who understands our music better than anyone, who champions every idea we have, who goes to war for us in every meeting. And then they’re gone next week. Not because they stopped believing in us. Because people leave. They get promoted, they get fired. Leadership changes. Strategies change. Budgets change.
Our relationship may have been with a person. But our contract was always with a corporation. And corporations and artists don’t wake up trying to accomplish the same thing.
A label is focused on building the biggest business possible. Labels invest capital and hope enough artists become enormously successful to justify all the ones who don’t. Success, by necessity, becomes scale. Bigger records. Bigger numbers. None of that is evil. It’s math.
An artist’s job is different. An artist isn’t trying to maximize a portfolio. An artist is trying to maximize a creative life. Sometimes those things overlap beautifully. Sometimes they don’t.
A label benefits from momentum. An artist benefits from meaning. A label needs consistency. An artist sometimes needs to disappear for a year and come back with something earnest. A label wants certainty because certainty is easier to finance.
Great art has never required certainty.
Somewhere along the way, I confused the scorecard designed to evaluate a business with the scorecard I’d use to evaluate my own life. There are quieter ways the industry shapes us, too. Why does Spotify show us how many times every song has been streamed before we even press play? It’s become such a normal part of the experience that we rarely stop to question it. But why is that information there at all? Who does it actually serve? It certainly doesn’t help the song.
After seeing those numbers every day, it’s hard not to let them become part of the way you measure yourself. We don’t just listen to songs anymore. We listen to songs while being reminded how everyone else has listened to them. Whether intentional or not, it’s a product decision that turns music into a public scoreboard and quietly monetizes artists’ insecurities.
Are we going to tell people to listen where they’ll simply listen, or where they’ll listen and make the number go up?
I was chasing a version of success while slowly losing myself to the work required to maintain it. Then I canceled a tour. That decision didn’t fix my career. It didn’t reveal some perfect new path. But it did change the metric. More than anything, it showed me something I hadn’t expected. My community was far more excited to rally around the honesty of failure than the façade of success.
“Okay Piano Guy” wouldn’t exist without that cancellation. Neither would the creative life around it. That doesn’t make the cancellation secretly good. I’m not interested in pretending every painful thing happens for a reason just because I eventually found a use for it. I don’t think independence is morally superior. I don’t suddenly know the “right” way to build a career.
I just know that for the first time in a long time, I recognize myself in the ambitions I’m chasing. And whatever success looks like from here, at least I know whose definition I’m using.
English (US) ·