In the middle of 2012, Tobias Jesso Jr. bottomed out. Hard. Reeling from a recent breakup, the Vancouver native was riding his bike through Los Angeles, where he had tried—and failed—to make it as a behind-the-scenes songwriter for a few years, when a Cadillac blindsided him, sending him flying, his hand smashing down on the car’s hood ornament. As the driver sped off, Jesso looked down to see a gnarly gash and lots of blood… and then looked up to see a man pedaling away with his bicycle. “He literally waved to me as he was leaving,” says Jesso over Skype, still in disbelief—he holds up his palm to reveal an emergency-room scar in the shape of a “J.” The next day, as he wondered whether his hand would ever work quite as well as it did before, he found out his mother had cancer. That was it. He moved back into his old bedroom in North Vancouver, utterly lost and dejected, feeling like a failure.
With all of his musical equipment in storage back in L.A., he turned to his sister’s abandoned piano, an instrument he had never really played in a serious way. were marked by a youthful desire for success, when he started putting chords and lyrics together at that piano, things were different.
His forthcoming album Goon, due out next year, features production from White, along with the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney, the New Pornographers’ John Collins, and studio guru of the moment Ariel Rechtshaid. It also boasts Jesso’s wonderfully plainspoken songs of heartbreak and apprehension, which bring to mind a less snarky Randy Newman or Harry Nilsson, or a more hopeful Nick Drake. On the classic-sounding “Hollywood”, he tells an autobiographical tale about going through the showbiz wringer. “I think I’m gonna die in Hollywood,” he sings near the end of the song, before unexpected horns swell up, suggesting an unlikely afterlife.
The Fat Angel Sings 