Interview with Jose Gonzalez
Although you wouldn’t guess it from his name, Swedish born singer/songwriter Jose Gonzalez, shot to overnight global fame with the track ‘Heartbeats’ ,which was featured on a Sony Trinitron advert in 2004. In case you’ve forgotten, it was the commercial where thousands upon thousands of brightly coloured bouncing balls, float slowly down a beautiful San Francisco mid-summer street, backed by the most beautifully enchanting soundscape. As an artist he had in fact been receiving critical acclaim from the European music press long before this, but when the advert first aired his popularity went stratospheric. Since then, he was been touring the globe and captivating audiences with his unique and haunting delivery. Last September saw the release of his ‘dreaded’ second album, but true to form ‘In our Nature’ has provided another selection of fantastic tracks to equally match those of its predecessor ‘Veneer’, which had record breaking sales globally. Outline caught up with Jose, currently on tour in North America, to get his view of the world…
After such a hugely successful debut album with ‘Veneer’, did you feel a lot of pressure when approaching ‘In Our Nature’?
It didn’t matter to me about the amount of sales, it was more a thing that anything I put down on paper was going to be listened to by a lot of people; it was a bit weird for me, but those feelings disappeared as soon as I started to write the songs. At this point, I was also back home and not on tour, so it was easier for me to be creative again and I was able to write new songs that I was really into.
Was it all written from home and not on the road then?
I took some time out between tours, but eventually I decided to stay at home. From about November ‘06 I stayed at home for about 5 to 6 months and that’s when I got to finish most of it.
Concerning the lyrics, you were quoted as saying you didn’t want to write about love as such, but rather other universal themes. A book called ‘The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins was a massive inspiration for you - can you tell us more about this?
I guess I didn���t want to write lyrics that were too personal, especially about love, because I feel that’s become too common in pop music, especially in singer / songwriter music. I started listening to and reading stuff in English about other universal themes like philosophy and religion and human nature. I mentioned the God Delusion as one of my inspirations, but it was mainly for one song on the album called ‘Abram’. The book in itself is sort of a critique of religions in general, but mainly the monotheistic ones, which are the biggest in the western world, like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The song is about the Abrahamic Religions, and how they go on, just because<
