THE GENTLE TOUCH...
JOSÉ GONZÁLEZ TELLS SHARON O’CONNELL HOW BECOMING A DAD HELPED HIM TO BECOME MORE CREATIVE
THERE have been some significant changes in José González’s life in the last six years, not the least of which was starting a family: he now has a four-yearold daughter and a son aged four months.
More recently, he released his fourth album, Local Valley, which sees him building on his love of West African rhythms, using a drum machine for the first time, singing in three languages – English, Spanish (he’s of Argentinian parentage) and Swedish (he was born in Gothenburg) – and revealing the seldom heard playful side of his personality. These things are not unrelated.
José acknowledges that his songs are defined by quietness, softness and a sense of containment, even though in the late 1990s he played in a hardcore band.
The gentleness is part of his own character, but it’s also what drew him to the music he first learnt to play on the guitar, aged 13 – The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel and the great Cuban musician Silvio Rodríguez. ‘All of them have this quiet approach,’ José explains, ‘but the ones that I was thinking about were João Gilberto and Chet Baker. They would sing very quietly and close to the mic and there was something special when I heard their recordings with only one instrument.
‘As soon as they started to have more production and more instruments, then their voices wouldn’t sound as interesting. So really early on I thought that was something special, when you had sparse production and a soft way of singing.’
The new, lighter spirit of Local Valley is most obvious on Lilla G, a sweet, two-minute song that’s part nursery rhyme, part palm-wine music and has José cooing ‘Lilla, lilla gumman’ – it means ‘little darling’ in Swedish – over and over.
He says: ‘There is a clear switch from my previous album to this one, where we decided to do a colourful cover and I decided to allow myself to be more playful. I think what prompted that was becoming a dad and playing for three years with my daughter; every day, there were many hours of just hanging around and being creative.’
Becoming a time-strapped parent also taught José that he had to fix his focus and make the most of what hours he had. ‘Whenever I have time to write or record,’ he says, ‘I do that more effectively and also with less of a judging mind.’
Around the time of his second album, 2007’s In Our Nature, José became interested in the music of Ali Farka Toure, Mamar Kassey and Tinariwen but on his latest record, highlife and songhai rhythms have made more of an impact.
As he says: ‘Their styles are inspired by blues and I’ve also been inspired by blues in some of my songs, so it wasn’t a huge step away from what I’ve been playing, but with the years I’ve continued to have as one of my features these riff-oriented songs. I feel like I need to add a bit of fire into the mix, in order to make the very soft songs come across more interestingly.
If it’s only soft music, it’s not that interesting.’
In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone finding José’s songs dull. Aside from their understated beauty and beguiling rhythms, on Local Valley some have unusual themes, including meditation (on
Lasso In – José’s been a keen app practitioner for years) and with Tjomme, ‘people who are very confident about how the world will end and what we should do about it’ (he calls them ‘doomsday dudes’).
They reflect José’s philosophical, existential, ethical and scientific interests, fostered in part by his academic study: he has a masters degree in molecular biology and started a PhD study on viruses but left halfway through because ‘music took over’.
José’s a follower of the effective altruism movement, which uses data and reasoning to determine the best ways to act to benefit others. Since so many people are already working to stop catastrophic climate change, José reckoned it made more sense to engage his mind with something else – energy. He’s a nuclear advocate, although he acknowledges the risks as evidenced by history. ‘Nuclear energy is one of the green technologies that has bad PR,’ he says. ‘I just try to point people to the data and see if there are any ways of at least keeping this one technology that might help to decarbonise the future.’ So, will we ever hear a song from José González about the benefits of nuclear energy? ‘My friends that are in a think tank were asking me the same question and I said no. I was of course hesitant to get into this topic when I did, probably because I didn’t want to completely destroy my artistic future.’ José laughs: ‘From an artist’s point of view it’s not such a good step – at least, not until people change their minds.’
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‘I feel I need to add a bit of fire. If it’s only soft music it’s not that interesting’