Tobias Jesso Jr: since Adele tweeted his song, he's even bigger than his dad
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Version 0 of 1. When Tobias Jesso Jr posted the first of his lambent ballads – Just a Dream, with just his soft voice and the family piano – on YouTube in 2013, he had a fairly low bar for success. “I noticed after a couple of days that it’d had 34 plays, and I was like: ‘Oh cool!’ Then I started posting songs on Facebook for my friends, and every time I had a new song I’d put it up. They all started clicking up the views and I was getting over 100 views” – he says this as if he’d sold out a stadium – “and I’d be: ‘I can’t believe this! This is amazing!’ Somebody would comment and I’d be like: ‘Yeah! I’ve no idea who that is!’ It was a really exciting feeling.” Rather more people are watching his videos online now. Adele’s only tweet of the year so far to her 21.9 million followers was a link to Jesso’s video for How Could You Babe, from his startlingly good debut album, Goon. “This is fantastic,” she advised. “Click away.” In two weeks, the video has received 131,000 views. Not Gangnam Style numbers, but pretty good for someone who, two years ago, aged 27, had moved back home to Vancouver after failing to carve out a musical career in Los Angeles, and had decided on a new path for himself. “I’d started working for my friend’s moving company,” he says, “and I thought I was going to work my way up and I was going to be the manager one day. Writing songs was just my hobby.” Goon is a gorgeous, subdued delight of a debut. Jesso’s piano is occasionally accompanied by orchestration, with an array of producers, including Ariel Rechtshaid, the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and Girls’ Chet “JR” White, who all achieve the same evanescent, nocturnal mood. That’s because Jesso’s songwriting is the key element. The songs bring to mind that glorious wave of late 60s and early 70s US singer-songwriters – Nilsson, Todd Rundgren, Emitt Rhodes – inspired by the Beatles. What’s strange, though, is that Jesso hadn’t heard those artists when he began writing the songs that appeared on Goon. Like all kids, he started in music by playing the recorder – “Why must people learn the recorder? You’d think that would turn everyone off music. It’s not like: ‘Who’s the best recorder player in the world?’ There’s no Jimi of the recorder” – before switching to sax. He’d been a bassist and guitarist before moving back to Vancouver, and had never played the piano until he sat down at home and started to write. The languorous nature of the songs comes not from a desire to sound like it’s 1972 all over again – “I wasn’t like: ‘Oh, it’s the 70s! It’s time to buy a corduroy jacket” – but because that’s all Jesso’s limitations enabled him to play. “I couldn’t write anything but ballads for three months,” he says. “The space on Hollywood comes from …” he mimes staring at a keyboard, then painstakingly moving his hands from one chord to the next. Did he have a moment of revelation, realising he’d found his true songwriting voice at an instrument he could barely play? He giggles (he giggles a lot). “No, I had a moment of revelation that was: ‘You’re 27. Who do you think you are, trying to learn the piano? Give me a break. My friend’s cousin who’s seven can play better than you. You’re trying to get into the music business with this? That’s ridiculous!’” The breakthrough moment came when he discovered that Girls, one of his favourite bands, had split. He found the email address of bassist JR White and sent him a note of commiseration. Then, “as a Hail Mary”, he tacked on a link to the songs he’d posted. “About an hour later he wrote back, and my heart was beating out of my chest,” he remembers. “It was like a miracle: ‘Call this number.’” White started playing Jesso’s songs to others, and Jesso began sending him everything he wrote, with White responding with advice – plus music from all those 70s singer-songwriters that Jesso had never heard. Before long, Jesso had signed to the Matador imprint True Panther, which inadvertently reinforced the impression of Jesso as some sort of retro fetishist by pressing a series of five limited-edition flexidiscs to generate a buzz. “I didn’t even know what flexis were,” Jesso says. “He sent me the first one and I put in on the record player and … it sounded like shit.” But it meant that Jesso’s music was hard to upload to the web, giving him a faint aura of mystery, all part of the label’s plan. The 70s theme, though, has continued with a tour poster, uncannily reminiscent of the kind of thing that Stiff Records used to do, bearing the legend: “You can’t miss Tobias Jesso Jr. He’s six foot seven.” There’s an excited innocence about Jesso, even though he’s now 29 and has been making music since his teens. He talks excitedly about someone singing along to True Love at his first show, then discovering it was Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear – “NO WAY! HOLY SHIT!” – and about how he needs an upright piano onstage, not an electric keyboard, so the audience can’t see his legs shaking with terror. He mentions how he only added the Jr to his name to prevent him getting mixed up with his dad, also called Tobias, who runs a software company, worried that people might come across things that he’d said and think they’d come from his father. He shouldn’t worry. Even if Adele’s imprimatur doesn’t guarantee success, he’s already achieved one accolade: the king of the Tobias Jessos on Google. Goon is released on True Panther on 16 Mar. Tobias Jesso Jr tours the UK in May; tobiasjessojr.com |