The 2020s File Feature
If The World Was Ending
JP Saxe and Julia Michaels: The Chart Journey of "If The World Was Ending" "If The World Was Ending" by JP Saxe featuring Julia Michaels emerged as one of th…
01 The Story
JP Saxe and Julia Michaels: The Chart Journey of "If The World Was Ending"
"If The World Was Ending" by JP Saxe featuring Julia Michaels emerged as one of the most poignant and commercially successful acoustic pop collaborations of 2020, a song whose themes of love persisting through catastrophic circumstance found unexpected resonance during one of the most genuinely catastrophic periods in modern memory. The track's extended chart run on the Billboard Hot 100, spanning from April to the autumn of 2020, made it one of the defining pop narratives of the pandemic year.
The Artists
JP Saxe, born Joel Peter Saxe in Toronto, Ontario, represents a breed of singer-songwriter who built an audience through a combination of intimate online content, critical acclaim in the indie pop space, and a handful of strategically placed early releases. Before "If The World Was Ending," he had received attention for his songwriting craft and his collaboration with Julia Michaels on earlier material, with the chemistry evident in their joint work proving sufficiently compelling that a dedicated collaborative release was a logical progression.
Julia Michaels, born Julia Carin Cavazos on November 13, 1993, in Davenport, Iowa, had established herself first as one of the most in-demand songwriters in contemporary pop before transitioning to a performing career. Her credits as a writer included major hits for Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Hailee Steinfeld, and numerous others, and her debut single "Issues" in 2017 demonstrated that her skills translated effectively to performance. Her involvement in "If The World Was Ending" brought both commercial credibility and genuine artistic investment to the project.
Recording and Creative Process
The song was written and recorded before the pandemic altered the context in which it would be received, making its eventual timing a striking case of accidental relevance. The thematic premise, two estranged partners wondering whether they would find their way back to each other if faced with the absolute worst circumstances, was conceived as a universal romantic hypothetical rather than a response to any specific real-world crisis. When the song began its commercial ascent in the spring of 2020, however, its emotional content acquired a resonance that neither artist could have anticipated during recording.
The production aesthetic chosen for the track was deliberately sparse. Acoustic guitar foundations, understated percussion, and production choices that kept the focus on vocal performance and melodic interplay between the two performers created an intimate sonic environment entirely appropriate for a song about private emotional vulnerability. The production stood in deliberate contrast to the maximalist, loudness-war-informed production that dominated much of mainstream pop at the time.
Chart Performance
"If The World Was Ending" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 96 on the chart dated April 11, 2020, arriving just weeks after the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and most major nations had begun implementing lockdown measures. The timing proved commercially significant, as the song's themes of longing across separation and the question of what truly matters in moments of crisis connected with audiences experiencing exactly that kind of emotional displacement.
The ascent was gradual and sustained, moving from 96 to 83 to 73 in consecutive weeks, then briefly dipping to 77 before resuming its climb. This pattern of organic, streaming-driven growth rather than a single dramatic spike indicated audience behavior characteristic of a song that was being discovered continuously through algorithm-driven recommendation systems rather than through a single promotional push.
The song continued climbing through the summer of 2020, eventually reaching its peak position of number 27 on the chart dated September 12, 2020, representing a chart journey of approximately five months from debut to peak. A climb from 96 to 27 over 29 weeks on the chart was remarkable by any measure, and it reflected the song's exceptional streaming performance sustained over an unusually long period.
The 218 million YouTube views the track accumulated are consistent with a song that generated deep emotional connection rather than merely viral attention, as reflected in comment sections that frequently referenced pandemic separation from loved ones as the context in which the song had found particular meaning.
Awards and Recognition
The song earned Saxe and Michaels significant award recognition, including Grammy Award nominations that acknowledged both the songwriting quality and the commercial performance. The track was featured prominently in year-end critics' polls and streaming platform recaps for 2020, cementing its status as one of the year's landmark pop releases. For Saxe in particular, it served as a definitive commercial breakthrough that translated existing critical appreciation for his songwriting into mainstream commercial recognition of his work as a performing artist.
Cultural Context and Legacy
Within the history of pop music, "If The World Was Ending" will be remembered as one of the songs that became inseparable from the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like a small number of other releases that captured the emotional reality of that period, the song achieved a documentary function beyond its existence as entertainment, serving as a record of how people felt during a period of extraordinary collective stress, isolation, and uncertainty about the future. The song's sustained chart presence of 29 weeks is a commercial measure of the depth of this connection.
02 Song Meaning
Love at the Edge of Catastrophe: The Meaning of "If The World Was Ending"
"If The World Was Ending" by JP Saxe featuring Julia Michaels uses the framework of apocalyptic hypothetical to strip romantic feeling down to its most essential and unguarded form. The song asks a simple question, whether a severed romantic connection would be restored if all ordinary reasons for maintaining emotional distance were removed by catastrophe, and in asking it reveals the persistence of genuine feeling beneath the social protocols and self-protective rationalizations that typically govern human relationship behavior.
The Hypothetical as Emotional Truth-Teller
The organizing conceit of the song, imagining the end of the world as a moment that would override all the reasons two people have been apart, is a rhetorical device with considerable philosophical depth. It functions as a way of testing what is real in a romantic relationship by eliminating the conditions that allow ambiguity to persist. In ordinary circumstances, people can maintain comfortable uncertainty about their own feelings and those of others. A genuine apocalypse, by eliminating all future possibility, all social consequence, and all time for continued equivocation, would force a moment of absolute honesty.
The brilliance of the conceit is that it allows the narrator to express romantic feelings of great intensity while maintaining a layer of hypothetical protection. Saying "if the world was ending, I would come to you" is simultaneously a declaration of profound love and a statement that can be defended against accusation of vulnerability, because it is framed as contingent on an event that has not occurred. This rhetorical double movement, simultaneously confessing and hedging, captures something deeply true about how emotionally guarded people actually navigate romantic communication.
Pandemic Resonance and Contextual Meaning
The song's release timing, coinciding with the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, gave its hypothetical framework an unintended but powerful real-world echo. The experience of lockdown, separation from loved ones across distances that suddenly felt insurmountable, and a genuine collective sense of uncertain futures created conditions in which the song's emotional premise was no longer purely hypothetical for millions of listeners.
People who were physically separated from partners, estranged from former lovers, or uncertain about relationships they had been taking for granted found in the song a precise articulation of the emotional question that the pandemic had made urgent: if normal life were truly suspended, if the ordinary reasons for maintaining distance were removed, who would you go to? The collision between the song's lyrical content and the lived experience of its listeners in 2020 gave it a documentary quality that purely fictional love songs rarely achieve.
The Duet Form and Emotional Dialogue
The structure of the song as a duet between two performers who actually collaborated on its creation adds a dimension of meaning that a solo performance could not achieve. When JP Saxe and Julia Michaels sing to each other, the exchange carries the weight of a real artistic relationship, and the audience is aware of this additional layer of reality beneath the fictional scenario. Whether or not the romantic content of the lyrics is autobiographically accurate, the genuine creative intimacy between the two performers permeates the recording and gives it an emotional authenticity that few duets manage to sustain.
The back-and-forth structure of the lyrical content, each voice responding to and extending what the other has offered, creates a sense of genuine dialogue rather than two parallel monologues. This is formally appropriate to the song's themes, which are ultimately about the possibility of communication and honesty between two people who have had difficulty achieving either.
Acoustic Minimalism as Thematic Choice
The production's deliberate spareness is itself a meaningful choice that extends the song's thematic content. In a cultural moment when pop production often employed maximum sonic density as a form of emotional amplification, "If The World Was Ending" stripped away almost everything except voice and acoustic guitar. This choice enacts the song's premise in sonic terms: if you remove all the elaborate construction and surface noise, what remains is the essential thing, the voices of two people speaking honestly to each other.
The vulnerability of the vocal performances, unmasked by layers of production, is therefore not incidental but thematically central. The listener is invited to hear the human voice without embellishment, just as the hypothetical scenario in the lyrics invites the characters to relate to each other without the social embellishments that normally mediate human connection. Form and content achieve genuine unity in this alignment.
Universality and Cultural Legacy
Beyond its pandemic context, "If The World Was Ending" addresses one of the most universal human experiences: the persistence of genuine feeling after a relationship has formally ended. The question of whether love survives its official conclusion, whether the people who mattered most remain significant regardless of changed circumstances, is one that virtually every adult listener has confronted at some point. The apocalyptic framing gives this universal experience a dramatic crystallization that makes it both memorable and emotionally precise, a combination that accounts for the song's remarkable commercial durability and global resonance.
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