After cutting his teeth as a bassist for chintzy pop-rock group the Sessions, Vancouver’s Tobias Jesso Jr. took a moment of crisis before coming into his own. Within two 2012 days, Jesso suffered a harrowing collision with a car while he was riding his bike and then swiftly learned that his mother had cancer — a confluence of events that sent him back to his childhood home. Soon after, he took up playing a piano that his sister had left when she moved out, and began writing simple ballads that were dirgelike out of necessity — because his limited instrumental knowledge meant he couldn’t play the parts any faster. This year, Jesso has churned out a handful of unabashedly raw, lyrically incisive demos via a flexidisc series for True Panther. Though they feature little more than Jesso’s reedy voice and a creaky piano, his debut album, “Goon” produced in part by ex-Girls member J.R. White — allows him to stretch out. On “Hollywood,” the record’s lead single, he adds a dreamy sigh of horn parts to the song’s once-sparse outro.
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Sounds Like: A young Randy Newman’s stripped-down demos,
The Fat Angel Sings 