Anywhere

Album: A Grey Area (2023)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this piano ballad, JP Saxe and his loved one are separated by a long distance, but he reassures her that he'll be with her in spirit until they're reunited again. Saxe was working through his feelings about loss on his sophomore album, A Grey Area, involving a rough breakup and the 2020 death of his mother, which is reflected in the song.

    "It's about the people who are there for you even beyond their ability to be beside you," Saxe told the New York Post in 2023. It also includes the cello as a nod to his late grandfather, the Grammy Award-winning cellist János Starker. He added, "Playing the cello on that song was particularly sentimental."
  • For the music video, directed by Matthew Takes, Saxe performs by himself in a room that's wallpapered with letters from his fans. The singer-songwriter tasked them to write letters to parts of themselves that were lost - a concept created by his friend, the poet Alyesha Wise.

    "I asked Alyesha to listen to the song and asked her if she had any visual allegories that came to mind," Saxe explained in a 2023 Songfacts interview. "She had this idea to incorporate letters to the piano and environment, and that became, why don't we ask fans to submit letters to a prompt? She wrote the prompt, which was: Write a letter to a part of yourself that you've lost touch with, or a part of yourself that you've lost. We got all these really beautiful letters from fans, and we turned all those letters into wallpaper and created a whole set out of it."

    Daniella Ortiz, the art director for the album, created the set for the video. Saxe said he's grateful to have a team to help him on the visual aspect of the album because he's not a visual artist. "I don't think that way," he continued. "I think in metaphor. I think in lyricism. I don't think in visual storytelling, so to be able to work with people I admire, it's cool how that expands the world of art."
  • Most of A Grey Area was written in Colombia, where JP Saxe spent the summer of 2022 to learn Spanish as a way to honor his late mother, who fluently spoke the language from her years of living in South America. Saxe told People magazine in a 2023 interview, "I think that when you lose someone, you can still develop your relationship with them even without them, and for me, Spanish became this symbol of an entire world that she had that I didn't get to really be a part of with her."
  • JP Saxe teamed up with Mexican indie-pop singer-songwriter Carla Morrison to release a new version of "Anywhere" on December 1, 2023. Carla Morrison sings her vocals in Spanish. "Being with someone can mean more than being beside them," said Saxe. "This song is our way of saying that, in Spanish and in English, to the people we love. The first time I heard Carla sing this I was in tears."

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