José the lonely

José González has been described as ‘broodingly handsome’. True, he does not exactly possess a motor-mouth and seems to relish contemplative silences. But brooding? Oh, I’m not so sure.

You might as well write off his music as ‘downbeat’ or ‘depressing’ – descriptions that clumsily catch the essence, yet rather miss the point (you’ll have to judge the handsome part for yourself, I’m afraid).
No, enigmatic, is a more appropriate word for González, whose plangent acoustic confessionals and subtle Latin grooves are set to see him crowned the year’s first major breakout artist.
Several days after our interview, someone will tell me that González , the 28 -year-old Gothenburg-raised son of Buenos Aries émigrés, is a huge Ali G fan, and it will make a weird sort of sense.
If there is a sad, poetic González –– and his records make a powerful case – it is a version of him that comes fully alive only on stage. Elsewhere, he appears more ‘normal’ than a supposedly tortured troubadour perhaps should – his regular dude air feels, ironically, quite strange.
“I was on English television yesterday, with Craig David,” says González, wrinkling his nose. “It’s a new show and they have three people who are in the charts on. There was me, the guitarist who used be in Blur [Graham Coxon] and... ” - another, more pronounced flaring of the nostrils - “Craig David.”
They could have collaborated, I suggest, Craig laying on the smoochy vocals, while José plucked his guitar. González looks horrified. “Oh no. Craig David? No.”
This morning finds the singer happier than he has been for some time. A few days previously, ‘Crosses’, the second single off his album Veneer, reached the top five, officially lifting from his shoulders the millstone of one hit wonder-dom (at the time of writing, the LP itself has vaulted to number two in the Irish charts).
González confesses to mixed emotions about ‘Heartbeats’, the song that catapulted him from the indie-folk underground. A cover of electro-pop group Knife (also from Sweden) ‘Heartbeats’ came to prominence in a television commercial, in which multicolored dots rain eerily down on San Francisco.
The promo is undeniably haunting and González, who has his head screwed on, says he doesn’t regret licensing the track (the ad is for Sony, a company which he defines as ‘not evil’). Nonetheless, one senses an aftertaste.
“The cover of the single is a still from the ad,” he says, grimacing. “Anyway, I hate CD singles. I think they’re a horrible format. For me, the purpose of a single is to promote the album. I am very happy that ‘Heartbeats’ led people to the LP and that now it is selling very well.”
Composing lyrics, González admits, fills him with dread. He is a painstaking writer; his songs, which often are based on the repetition of a single chord sequence, come together torturously slowly. The words he leaves until very last. Sometimes, he scribbles down lyrics just before a show, stirred into action through sheer terror.
“I hate clichés. I don’t want to do the whole 'I love you/you love me' thing,” he explains. “I try to write from a different perspective. I don’t want someone from my life to hear one of my songs and for them to think it is about them, because that’s not very fair on them.”
This, perhaps, explains his fondness for covers. In addition to ‘Hearbeats’, González regularly performs songs by Joy Division, Massive Attack and – seriously – Kylie Minogue. Does he have a sneaking regard for bubble-gum pop?
He shakes his head, still troubled, perhaps, by thoughts of Craig David: "Sometimes I don’t even particularly like the tracks I cover - as in Kylie’s ‘Put Your Hand On Your Heart’. There is just something in there I want to extract.”
The influence of González’s Argentine heritage on his music is understated yet palpable. He plays a nine-string guitar, popular in South America but unusual among singer-songwriters. His crisp style mixes classical guitar-playing with touches of Tropicalia, 1960s samba and bossa nova. And his music has rhythm; González favours complex sequences, which often seem on the cusp of slipping into a groove.
As a teenager he developed an obsession with the finger-picking style of Cuban musician Silvio Rodriguez (“Quite dramatic, both in the vocals and the guitar”), and played Beatles tunes with his father. But when he joined a band at 18, his interests had moved on to apocalyptic punk rock (Gothenburg is Sweden’s’ hardcore capital).
“We spent a long time playing a Black Flag kind of punk,” he says. “I played electric guitar for a while, mostly indie rock. What drew me, I think, was the intensity. And of course the excitement. Playing in a punk band can be a very thrilling experience.”
González's parents came to Sweden as political refugees. His father had been a student activist in Buenos Aires in the mid ‘70s, when a military junta seized power.
“They started rounding up dissidents,” recounts the singer. “Many of my father’s friends at college vanished. They were never seen again.”
Fleeing to Brazil, his parents sought refuge in foreign embassies. The Argentine junta pursued dissidents ruthlessly; the danger did not end after González's parents reached the border. Fetching up in Rio, they went to the first embassy they could find. It happened to be Sweden’s.
“They had no plan about coming to Sweden. It was just the first embassy they reached it. It sort of occurred by accident.”
The singer first visited Argentina as a child, in the early ‘80s (his father moved back there several years ago). González regards himself as Swedish; growing up in Gothenburg he never felt as though he didn’t belong: “There was a big community of migrants in the suburbs where I grew up, so I didn’t think of myself as different. In a way, everyone was an outsider, so we all felt as if we belonged.”
Still, there is an undeniable outsider quality to his songbook (he cites such brooding poets of alienation as God Speed You Black Emperor as an influence). The title Veneer reflects his belief that “things that look a certain way from the outside that is different from the inside”; among its 11 tracks, only two, he explains, follow the conventional verse/chorus structure.
Of these, ‘Heartbeats’, is a cover; the other, ‘Broken Arrows’ was the last to be written.
“By then I thought I’d worked hard enough trying not to be formulaic. I thought, ‘Okay now I can have a break and put a chorus in’. It’s not fun trying to be different all of the time.”