José González is much like the music he creates: quiet, not shy, but reserved and pensive. His trademark sound – finger-plucked nylon-string classical guitar and understated vocals – has enraptured audiences around the globe. José, however, is more interested in the kookaburra perched on the handrail of his hotel-room balcony; as excited as a kid at Christmas, he’s got more questions about the bird than I have about him, taking photos on his phone to send to relatives back home.
It could have been a very different life for José González. A biochemist in training, he gave it up in May 2003 when he “noticed that I wasn’t paying attention to the cells in the lab.” He first picked up the guitar at the age of 15, and fell into classical guitar by accident. “Umm, it was kind of funny because the first year when I was picking out different songs, I felt like I wanted to do something else,” he recalls, originally teaching himself Beatles tunes. “It was mainly jazz guitar that I felt ‘yeah that’d be cool to learn’. And I asked this teacher from school if he’d teach me and he said ‘no, but I can teach you classical guitar’. And I was like ‘ahhh, sure!’”
At the same time, he was playing bass in teenage hardcore bands with such names as Back Against the Wall and Renascence. But his desire to make music on his own, influenced by artists such as Cuban musician Silvio Rodríguez, saw José drifting farther away from the bands he was in. “I would make guitar parts that were really difficult and then make the vocals,” he says, “and then record the guitar and eventually try to put the two together. The first songs that I used to do were really intricate.”
Catapulted to success by being the soundtrack to bad American teen drama and millions of coloured balls bouncing down the hills of San Francisco, José González finds himself promoting his second album, In Our Nature ; an album four years in the making. “I basically burned all my songs on the first album Veneer and I didn’t have anything left and I went on tour and then while on tour I didn’t understand how to write so I tried many times and I couldn’t get it to work.”
Was it a case of the dreaded writer’s block that stilted José? “Yeah, yeah,” he answers. “I mean, at first I was doing it because it was fun, and then on tour I was feeling the pressure – my own pressure trying to make another record, and then the whole carousel rolling on and the record label asking for a second album. So it took awhile and it wasn’t until I stopped touring completely and stayed home until I had a new record.”
Describing the songwriting process as “work… I use the word ‘work’ because it actually felt that way because of the pressure,” In Our Nature is a record that maintains José’s trademark minimalist music and yet, despite all the tribulations, sounds more assured than its predecessor. “As soon as I started going,” says José of the writing process, “it was actually fun again to just spend a couple of hours a day playing guitar, and then since I decided to work on my English, it was actually really fun to start reading and looking up words in the dictionary and synonyms. So this time it’s been a lot more conscious way of writing.”
Recorded at home on a computer with the same microphones he used on Veneer (“they’ve got a distinct kind of distortion that isn’t that harsh and they get sort of a punchy sound”), José described In Our Nature to UK mag NME as a “primitive” record. Expanding on this notion, he explains it as “the stuff like greed, anger, hate and love – but not the person-to-person kind of love, the general kind of love. The parts that are universal for all humans and more about the human animal. So I think that’s what I meant, and also I like the word primitive because I actually feel like I like that in my music, or that’s something that I strive towards; repetitive stuff.”
Another of José’s trademarks is his ability to rework other people’s songs and give them a new lease on life: The Knife’s Heartbeats, Kylie Minogue’s Hand On Your Heart, Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart and, on In Our Nature, Massive Attack’s Teardrop. “It’s been mostly just picking my favourite songs,” says José. “It can be a bit tricky and you can offend some people if it’s a very well-known song, so it’s been nice to pick out something like Hand On Your Heart that’s more about lifting forward. Something about the song that’s really nice even though the original isn’t really my taste [laughs].”
Despite all his success, José remains humble and nonchalant about his music and his talent. He says Heartbeats isn’t a hard song to play, which it clearly is, and admits he struggles to listen to Veneer. “For a very long time, I didn’t feel comfortable at all with that record, but after a while, being on tour, I felt that I could see it more as a documentation of what I used to do, and now I can’t really listen to it mainly because of the vocals. It’s really wimpy singing.”
Who: José González
What: In Our Nature out now through Shock
