Songfacts®:

• On his sophomore album, A Grey Area, Canadian singer-songwriter JP Saxe grapples with his emotions in the aftermath of a breakup. He introduces the songs with "Old Times Sake," a poem by Yesika Salgado, as an epigraph that sets the tone for the rest of the album. He sings about all the small things that lie in wait to remind him of his ex-lover.
  
  "When I read her poem, 'Old Times Sake,' it made me feel the way I would hope my music would make people feel," Saxe told Songfacts in a 2023 interview. "It also felt thematically aligned with the subject matter I was exploring with the songs on the album. I asked her if I could work with her to turn her poem into an epigraph."
• An epigraph at the beginning of a book clues readers into the theme of the story, but the meaning doesn't fully reveal itself until the tale is finished. Saxe wanted to recreate the relationship between epigraph and story in album form.
  
  "I always love the process of reading the poem at the beginning of the book, not knowing why it was picked. Then reading the book and having a new perspective on it, having now read the entire story," he told Songfacts.
  
  "I like that creative phenomenon, that relationship between an epigraph and a story. I thought it could be fun to see what that could be on an album. It wasn't something I had seen done before. Yesika's poem was the perfect poem to do it with. I hope people hear that track and it sets the tone for the album and when people hear it, they go back to that first track and hear it in a new way."
• After moving to Los Angeles at 18, Saxe fell in with the local poetry community, where he found the tools to become a better songwriter. "I'm more inspired by poets than I am by songwriters. I think on a whole, they're better writers," he told The Line Of Best Fit in 2023. "Hanging out with poets pushes me to up my game because if I sing something melodically beautiful by lyrically underwhelming to a poet friend, they don't give a shit about how pretty it might sound. They'll tell me I’m being lazy."
• Saxe released A Grey Area in the midst of touring as John Mayer's opening act on the singer's 2023 solo tour of the US. Mayer also co-wrote the album's lead single, "I Don't Miss You."