Which way, José?
More than a year after a flashy TV commercial brought his quiet, contemplative music to the masses. Sterling tracks the contrary career trajectory of Gothenburg’s most reluctant star
words by Sophy Grimshaw
portrait photography by Ben King
With just a discreet street sign outside, the eccentric west London hotel where José González is holed up is almost impossible to find. Inside, Miller’s Residence is stuffed with African masks, porcelain Buddhas and antique candlesticks. A crematorium urn contains digestive biscuits. If you were told that a famous musician was about to walk into the room, you might hazard a guess at Keith Richards, but it’s the infinitely less flamboyant González who’s holding court here today.
Rock star or not, 2006 was José’s year. When his cover of Heartbeats, a radical transformation of a song by Swedish electro duo The Knife, was chosen to soundtrack an advert for Sony Bravia high-definition TVs in late 2005, González’s world changed – and it wasn’t because he’d found a way to get a sharper image on his TV screen. “It’s pretty cool,” he muses. “In Sweden, my album Veneer went gold without any commercials and that took everyone by surprise. Outside Sweden, the Sony commercial helped me to make the step from alternative to mainstream.”
Shy and softly spoken, González might not be in danger of swinging from a chandelier any time soon, but he’s warm, unpretentious and likeable. He thinks carefully before pulling his answers out of the ether, occasionally retracting a word he’s already said and replacing it with another because the languages of his Swedish mother and Argentinian father come more naturally to him. “I had reservations at first,” he says of the advert, which featured hundreds of coloured balls bouncing along a street to González’s song, with its addictive, understated hook. “Even if you’re in need of money it can be a negative thing in the long run if you become too connected with a brand. I think it’s important how you present your music, but I guess as commercials go it’s one of the most OK to have done.”
González was studying for a PhD in biochemistry at Gothenburg University when he wrote Veneer. His music is unadorned and direct, with sparse sonic landscapes and hard-to-decipher vocals that lend it a meditative, often bleak, tone, yet he’s struck a chord with the masses. “Compared to when I was living in Gothenburg and studying, people treat me very differently,” he says. “I’ve lived there all my life, but now if I walk into a shop the teenagers tend to recognise me. They expect me to be moodier
than I am. It’s a different city now that I’m doing music.” He says that he doesn’t mind this attention, on the grounds that: “I think I manage to be quite anonymous considering the number of people that know my music. A lot of people who know my music still don’t know what I look like.”
If González has any kind of ego it’s probably in storage somewhere in his apartment in Sweden, covered in cobwebs. “I’ve been constantly on tour but Gothenburg is my home and it’s where my apartment and all my friends are,” he says of his decision to spend most of 2007 at home in the studio. “Some cities feel cold, but I don’t think Gothenburg is like that.”
A native Swede with a distinctly Argentinian name, González is a knot of contradictions. For a singer-songwriter who favours intimate, beautifully bare musical structures, González’s lyrics conspicuously eschew the dear-diary approach. “That was always intentional,” he agrees. “My style of music is so bare that if you sing obvious, open, extroverted lyrics then the music stops being the primary focus. The lyrics need to come second. If you sing vague lyrics it’s easier to make room for the music. The words shouldn’t be in the way of the sound.” It’s an approach that’s rare for someone with González’s level of success, yet it has everything to do with the breadth of his appeal. “It’s also a personal thing,” he continues. “I don’t really enjoy expressing myself in public. It’s a compromise. I want to sing songs with words, so I choose vague and abstract words.” It may seem odd to state – in a magazine interview during a tour of European music festivals – that you don’t like to express yourself in public, but you only have to look at González to see that he genuinely means it.
Bizarrely, perhaps the closest González comes to singing about his personal life is on his cover of Kylie Minogue’s 1989 pop hit Hand On Your Heart. “I watched it on TV and the lyrics got to me,” he says. “It captures a general feeling in relationships when they end. Like the other covers I’ve done [including Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart], as soon as I play it on the guitar it sounds like my other songs. It’s not ironic at all.” When González croons Kylie’s lament that “I thought we were just beginning and now you say we’re in the past” against a guitar accompaniment that brings to mind the patter of rain, you feel you’re hearing an alchemist at work.
Despite his dark musical output, the good-natured González is too polite to behave sullenly in real life, and this only adds to his aura of vulnerability. Once back in Gothenburg he’ll probably record his next album on his laptop in the privacy of his own home, as he did with Veneer. A shy, talented and complex individual, you can see why he’s hidden himself here amid the clutter of an exotic junk shop.
what they say about josé
“A Swedish-born Argentine folkie who exhales snatches of rainy-day poetry
and fingerpicks his guitar like he’s backing a suicidal flamenco dancer.”
Spin, USA
“Lo-fi folk doesn’t get any more exotic.”
Q, UK
“There are plenty of reasons to talk about González as the ‘new Nick Drake’.
Sure, that phrase has been applied willy-nilly to just about anyone who sings
softly against an acoustic guitar. But in González’s case, the comparison is
virtually unavoidable.”
San Francisco Gate, USA
“This music doesn’t simply demand stillness and quiet, it creates it, spinning
a gauzy bubble inside which time, as measured by the noisy, conventional
world, seems to slow.”
Guardian, UK
“His deft, syncopated fingerpicking and hushed vocals are hypnotic.”
Entertainment Weekly, USA
on josé’s stereo
Black Flag
“I played bass in a rock band from 1993 to 1994,” recalls González of his teenage years, when he and his friends called themselves Back Against The Wall and played Black Flag-influenced tunes. “It was fun. I still listen to many different styles.”
Silvio Rodriguez
González, a dexterous classical guitarist, first learned the skill as a teenager by imitating the fingerpicking of Cuban musician Silvio Rodriguez. His Argentine father also introduced him to bossa nova, samba, and The Beatles.
Cat Power
“Cat Power is always good,” González says. “I like her new record, The Greatest.” González believes he’s much closer to this gorgeously morbid American singer-songwriter (real name Chan Marshall) in terms of sound than he is to artists such as James Blunt.
The Smiths
“I wanted to check out the classics, so I just bought The Best of The Smiths,” says González. “I’ve never been a fan of The Smiths, but my friends love their records so I wanted to have a listen. Today’s mission was to buy classic albums. I also bought an album by The Jam and Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key Of Life.”
The Knife
González is a fan and friend of The Knife, the superbly weird and wonderful electronica duo who wrote Heartbeats, as well as a guest vocalist and tour mate of Zero 7. He also contributed vocals to the upbeat track Send Someone Away by DJ Embee, donning a polar bear costume for the video
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