The Quiet Rock Star: An Interview with José González
Words: Michael Rabinowitz
Photo: Fredrik Egerstrand

Appearing:
February 29, 2008
Manuel Artime Theate, Miami

March 1, 2008
The Social, Orlando

It’s not everyday a folk singer gets the rock star treatment.  But, that is just what’s expected at a José González show: a quiet folk singer and his guitar surrounded by hundreds of raptured indie music fans.

However, when I mention this to the Swedish folk guitarist (his family fled Pinochet controlled Argentina in the 1970s), he is quick to correct me.

“I am really surprised, actually,” he says with a sincere sense of bemusement.  “But at the same time, its fun to watch the movie from Woodstock where Joni Mitchell sings in front of I don’t know how many thousands of people.  So, in a way, I’m not able to play to that large of a crowd.  I feel pretty far from being a rock star.”

No, he is not Joni Mitchell, but González, after the release of his slow burner debut Veneer in 2005, and his most recent release, In Our Nature, is developing a core audience for a folk singer beyond your typical coffee house crowd.  The attraction is his deft accoustic guitar play and evocative vocals with a tinge of latin sway. 

He speaks very much like he sings, in slow deliberate tones, each word carrying its own weight.  I am willing to bet his pulse is no higher than forty-five.  And he is more interested in discussing his music, the recording technique, the thematic style of his writing, than toil over the details of his tour going “green” or renewing his collaboration with fellow electro-pop Swedes, Zero 7.  Maybe its because of González’s Belichick-ian obsession with music, dating back to his childhood.
 
“I was fourteen, fifteen; I was playing in a punk band and learning classical guitar and also trying to write my own songs.”  He nonchalantly tosses out this biographical nugget as if all of us had an adolescence of mastering classical guitar while performing in a Black Flag cover band with our high school chums. 

Born into a musical family, González is more well-rounded than an eagle scout.  Music is his second career choice, studying microbiology up until Veneer’s release.  His cerebral tendencies carried over toward his writing.  The premise behind Nature was the result of influences from the atheist text “God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins and the philosophical tome “Practical Ethics” by Peter Singer.

Like an academic dissertation, both González albums have concrete themes.  Veneer,  with tracks like “Slow Moves” and “Dead Weight On Velveteen,” is about the facades people construct to protect them from the harsh truth.  Nature, with its title track and “Cycling Trivialities,” on the other hand, focuses on man’s destructive side.  But for Gonzalez, he discovers the themes almost in the same way the audience does.

“It’s very much post-construction,” he explains.  “I decide the title for the album in the last moments.  They share a common thread in a way.  On In Our Nature, there were still a lot of lyrics I had not written, so I started to think in terms of in our nature, before I even finished.” 

The timbre of Nature is sharper, more forceful than Veneer, as if you had a microphone on each guitar string.  González admits it was his intent to make Nature’s sound “bigger,” an understatement to say the least.  A track like “Teardrop,” his haunting, propulsive cover of the Massive Attack song, builds and builds until the climax when the entire orchestration tumbles over the listener, an army of guitar strings crashing down.  The song seems too large for one man to produce without a rhythm section, at least a harmony chord or two to assist.  Not so, insists González.

“It’s always just one guitar,” he says.  “There is no rhythm guitar.  That’s always been my ambition, since Veneer and all my songs, to do everything on one guitar.  It’s only one take on the guitar, but always dubbed on the vocals.” 

This determination to go at it alone rests on González’s use of silence.  He exploits the vacuum as a medium better than anyone else, allowing gaps in his sound to pull the listener inside the song.  Recording this way is one thing.  Performing it puts the artist in a vulnerable position.  All of those people just standing there, standing at attention, a common sight at shows in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but for a soloist, how does González accustom himself to the stares, or the lack of an audience reaction?  The folk genre is intended for intimate affairs, not a club setting.  A thousand hands not clapping can be deafening.

“A song like ‘Fold,’ when I have a crowd that talks or doesn’t seem to be quiet enough, I leave out those songs,” he explains.  “But most of the time it works.  It seems like people, many times their favorite songs are like ‘Heartbeats’ which is pretty mellow, so I think they come with a mindset of being quiet and listening.” 

With songs this quiet, the message of González’s lyrics can be construed in a number of ways. Lyrics such as “someday you'll be up to your knees in the shit you seed, all the gullible that you mislead won't be up or it,” wring of an op-ed piece about George Bush and the Iraq War, especially when it comes from a European singer who wears his heart on his sleeve.

“That is definitely something I thought about,” he admits.  “Especially on ‘How Low,’ maybe even in ‘In Our Nature.’  But, they are meant to be general and more philosophical than political.”  He then pauses and laughs out loud before continuing. “I sort of enjoy people getting a sense of conspiracy.  And there is a sense of angriness when they listen to my music.  It sort of gives them the opportunity to apply the lyrics to whatever feeling they want.”

And this is the secret to González’s success.  He gives his audience room to contemplate this and let all of their experiences, beliefs, and morals to seep within the gaps of bass lines, cymbal crashes, and guitar solos. 

It’s funny how big a rock star can get with his audience if he would just be quiet.

jose-gonzalez.com