“I'm not a pop star who reaches out to publishing companies and is like, ‘Send me 40 of your hits and I'm going to pick one,’” Scott Helman told Apple Music. “That’s not my MO.” While the Toronto singer has worked closely with seasoned songwriters like Simon Wilcox and Thomas “Tawgs” Salter since emerging as a teenage phenom in the mid-2010s, Helman has always grounded his work in personal experience, embracing the auteurist vision of Justin Vernon as eagerly as the tropical pop hooks of Justin Bieber. His 2017 debut, Hôtel de Ville, yielded bouncy bops like “PDA,” but also the sobering acoustic meditation “Ripple Effect,” a song “deeply inspired by [my parents’] divorce and trauma and heartbreak. It was one of the first moments where me and my team accessed the heart of what we do.” That autobiographical lens expanded even more on Helman’s ambitious 2020 release Nonsuch Park (sa), the first of a two-part series reflecting on his childhood, his girlfriend, and—on the aching, ethereal ballad “Papa”—the death of his grandfather. “I really wanted to write a song about him and about his life, but I just couldn't do it, it was so hard to do,” Helman recalls. “Simon Wilcox says writing songs is sometimes like this pipe, and when all is going well, you have songs coming out of it—but then songs stop coming, and it's because there's a song that’s lodged in there and you just got to get one out that you love. 'Papa' was that song for me.”