The Juno Awards — the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys — have been delayed for a second time due to COVID-19. JP Saxe and his girlfriend Julia Michaels attended the Grammys as nominees last month, and since JP is up for five Junos, he’s hoping he’ll be able to travel back home to Canada to attend that, too.
Originally scheduled for March of this year, the 50th Juno Awards were initially moved to May 16; now they’ve been pushed back to June 6, “out of an abundance of caution in response to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic,” organizers say.
Whenever the ceremony takes place, it’ll be a homecoming for JP in several ways: As a teen, he once worked at the awards ceremony.
“I was 14 or 15, I was in Ottawa, I don’t even remember what I was doing, but I was a volunteer at the Junos,” recalls the “If the World Was Ending” singer. “And it just looked like this larger-than-life imaginary version of future success that like I could only have dreamed of.”
“So, you know, 12, 13 years later to be watching, in my living room, a broadcast where they tell me that I’ve been nominated for five of them…I mean, hopefully I get to go to something!” he adds.
The Weeknd is the leading 2021 Juno nominee with six nods; with five, JP has as many as Justin Bieber does. He says his family back in Canada are pretty proud.
“I think they might have been slightly more excited about the five Junos than they were about the one Grammy,” he laughs. “Just because, y’know, a Juno nomination, for my third cousins, means their wacky family member who decided to ruin his life going into music maybe didn’t make the worst possible decision!”
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
