“Killing Time,” the roiling centerpiece of Jared James Nichols’ fourth LP, climaxes with a cinematic guitar solo—one that, he recalls, brought a close collaborator to tears in the studio. That visceral response is understandable. Nichols, one of his generation’s most lauded hard-rock guitarists, has built his career on bluesy dexterity—but he’s never sounded more tastefully cathartic than he does here. It’s a symbol of the vulnerability that radiates throughout the new Louder Than Fate.
Nichols with his Gibson Custom Shop Futura.
Photo by Eric Ahlgrim
“Roger [Alan Nichols, a producer on the album] has always been very complimentary about my playing,” he tells Premier Guitar. “But [for ‘Killing Time’] he said, ‘Do something special.’ It kind of stuck with me. That night, I was driving home from the studio, exhausted, and I’m listening back to the chord progression: ‘What the hell am I gonna say, man?’ It’s not like most of them, where you just play a burning guitar solo. It was like, ‘How am I gonna paint this picture?’ I slept on it, woke up in the morning, and started humming melodies on the way in. Roger said, ‘Good morning,’ and I said, ‘Roll the tape.’”
He wound up with the album’s definitive moment. “After that, [Roger] looked at me, and by the time I got done—and I’m not even joking—he was crying. He had a tear in his eye. He looked at me and goes, ‘That’s fucking perfect.’ It sounds like a tall tale, but I knew right then that we did it. It was so raw and real. I felt like I was on a roller coaster, just riding the rails. You can hear the scrapes and the squeeze of it. I even said, ‘I’ve had solos in the past, like [2020’s] ‘Threw Me to the Wolves,’ where I was really, really proud, but that ‘Killing Time’ solo is as honest and genuine as I’ve ever played.”
“Moving to Nashville has really, really changed a lot for me as far as becoming a songwriter, trying to figure out who I am and what I want to say.”
The honesty there is key—while Nichols, 37, has always been known for his instrumental skills above all else, he wanted to get deeper as a songwriter on Louder Than Fate, revealing more sides of himself. The record, like all of his past work, is built on snarling blues and heavy riffs—but it also dips its toe into light-show balladry, arena-rock choruses and twangy slide guitars, often showcasing the grit and elasticity of his vocals alongside his fingerstyle fretwork.
Nichols has always been the virtuoso in any room. Early on, he briefly attended Berklee College of Music, won big-deal guitar contests, formed a power trio that shared stages with giants like Zakk Wylde, and earned multiple signature models with the Gibson brand—including the Epiphone "Old Glory" and "Blues Power" Les Paul Custom models. And even though he was grateful for the major profile his playing has provided, he’s always been eager to expand.
“It was such a calling card for so long,” he says. “Basically, my whole career was built around that, and it opened up so many doors. It was such a blessing. When anyone asks me about guitar, or any of the companies I’ve worked with, or who I’ve jammed with, I always start with, ‘I’m really lucky.’ Because there are so many amazing guitar players from all different genres and walks of life. The fact that I was able to get on the fast track a little bit and get recognized, I was just lucky. But having that wind in the sails, it starts to get detrimental. You go, ‘Cool, but now I need to be the musician and the artist I want to be.’ There’s so much more to say.”
Photo by Eric Ahlgrim
The Wisconsin native found the perfect spark for that growth in his current home of Nashville, co-writing with professionals (including his friend CJ Solar) who weren’t concerned whatsoever about any potential “guitar hero” baggage. “Moving to Nashville has really, really changed a lot for me as far as becoming a songwriter, trying to figure out who I am and what I want to say,” he says. “It’s almost as if I took myself away from a lot of my friends for a little bit who are straight-up guitar. I wanted to hang out with people who didn’t care about that. I started to do songwriting sessions. I threw myself in the fire, writing with different artists. They knew I was a guitarist, but they didn’t walk into the session going, ‘This is a guitar guy, so we have to write like this.’ It was a beautiful moment of taking that guard away.”
“I could literally run my Gibson, a cord, and a Marshall amp, and it’s all there.”
Nichols continues, “I think the biggest thing I’ve been trying to do is lead with my head and my heart and say, ‘What does this song need?’ For this new record especially, we wrote songs and we put the guitar to the songs. In the past, it was all about the guitar, all about the solo. For this record and where I’m at now, I consider the guitar a huge force, as it always has been, but it’s just a piece of the overall puzzle.”
But Nichols also admits—multiple times, in various contexts—he was “nervous” about showing other sides of himself. “Killing Time,” with its clean picking, tender belting, and dramatic string lines, shows exactly how he pushed himself. “When I wrote that intro riff, I was initially thinking super old-school blues,” he says. “But I went into the chord progression for the verse, and it started to take on this different form. It’s something I’m really passionate about now—no matter what dynamic I’m playing at or singing at, I want to have the intensity for the song. And when I say ‘intensity,’ I don’t mean brute force, like my last records. I mean this certain emotion I can convey.”
Another example of this new range is “Bending or Breaking,” a quiet-loud tale of relationship turmoil laced with swirling keyboards, heart-tugging acoustic patterns, and anthemic, layered guitars during the almost-proggy instrumental bridge. “When I was in the studio, I was thinking of Brian May, of Neal Schon—of that stuff where the songs were obviously compositions, but when the guitars come in, it meant something,” Nichols says, reflecting on those harmonized leads. “[Those songs] took you on a ride. That middle section [of ‘Bending or Breaking’] never happened until we were in the studio. I was like, ‘Let’s build this. This has potential. This is where the guitar can really shine.’ It has a cool, dramatic rise, and then breaks it back down.”
Nichols kept that song in his back pocket for a while, lacking the confidence to put it on the record—until he played it, along with other demos, for Louder Than Fate producer and mixer Jay Ruston. “Once that vocal came in, he kinda twisted his head and said, ‘Which one is this? You didn’t send me this!’” Nichols recalls. “It’s a little more vulnerable. I’m showing a little more skin. I’m not using a wall of guitars. It was so incredible. We cut this song at Dave Grohl’s studio, 606—we cut a lot of material there. Once we started recording with the band, it was the first time with material like this that I actually felt like me. There’ve been a lot of times I tried to play things that were a little outside of my grasp—or, at the time, depth. This was the first time I was able to do this and believe in myself.”
Not that everything on Louder Than Fate moves somewhere surprising—one of its highlights is the haunted, grunge-dusted rocker, “Ghost,” which draws from some of his staple inspirations. “My biggest vocal hero ever is Layne Staley [of Alice in Chains],” he says. “I love all of those dark undertones, but [thinking about] ‘Ghost’ especially, one of the first records I ever bought was Silverchair’s [1997 album] Freak Show. There’s something to be said about a bone-crushing riff and a cool vocal. ‘Ghost’ kind of bridges the gap between my love of grunge, hard rock, and blues—it’s even got a little Southern twang on the front end, too. That one is just kind of a juggernaut of all of the things I love.”
2023 Gibson Custom Shop 1957 Les Paul w/ signature Seymour Duncan JJN P90 Silencer pickup in neck
2022 Epiphone Jared James Nichols “Blues Power” Les Paul w/ Seymour Duncan JJN P90 Silencer pickup
1952 Gibson Les Paul “Dorothy”
Amps, Cabinets, and Switcher
Two modified Marshall 1959 Super Lead heads
Marshall 1960A cabinet
Marshall 4x12 cabinet with Greenback speakers
Radial Bones Twin-City AB/Y amp switcher
Effects
Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster Mini
Klon Centaur (silver)
1981 Ibanez Tube Screamer
TC Electronic Polytune Tuner
Strings & Cables
DR Veritas .010-.046 gauge strings
Klotz Cables
Nichols onstage at the "Ozzy Forever: Celebrating the Prince of Darkness" tribute show at the Basement East in Nashville, August 21, 2025.
Photo by Jeff Graham
To help him achieve the album’s tonal range, he stuck with a simple and classic setup—utilizing both his Les Paul and a Marshall. “I have a killer amp that basically does everything I want it to do,” he says. “I could literally run my fucking Gibson, a cord, and a Marshall amp, and it’s all there. What’s cool—and funny—is that it almost goes against everything modern. It’s not a throwback to be a throwback, but it makes you think in a certain way—you’ve got to really dig into what you have available. I have to get all these tones in my head that fit for the song through those. When you listen to ‘Killing Time,’ that intro and all that guitar is the volume set at, like, 7 on my guitar. Then, when it gets to the solo, the volume’s at 10. That’s literally the change of that, tone-wise. It’s a cool way of operating. People would be like, ‘That’s fucking nuts.’ But in my eyes, it’s closer to the heart of what it all is. It’s like a voice going from a whisper to a scream.”
“That ‘Killing Time’ solo is as honest and genuine as I’ve ever played.”
Nichols has repped signature Blackstar amps for years—and he maintains that it’s been a great relationship. But recommendations from fellow musicians ultimately piqued his curiosity. “I started going to my friends like Joe Bonamassa and Zakk Wylde,” he says. “I was like, ‘Hey, what did you use on Ozzy? What did you use on this?’ The thing that kept coming up was, ‘Jared, you have to try a Marshall.’ For the last record [2023’s Jared James Nichols], I borrowed a Marshall from a friend—a 1968 Super Lead plexi, just like Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton would have played. Let me tell you, brother—riding that kind of horse literally puts you in a different headspace. It’s like a wild animal. Not only is it a throwback to the sounds of those records we grew up on, but it’s also like, ‘How am I gonna harness this energy?’ It’s like riding in a muscle car without a seat belt on. You’re like, ‘I better keep this thing on the road.’
“On the last record, it kept really being a thing for me: the Marshall thing, the Marshall thing,” Nichols continues. “I wanted to keep getting closer to the sun. I had the opportunity recently to get some Marshalls and start using them. I’ll tell you what—it’s so exciting for me. On this record, every tone you hear has been powered by Marshall.”
But sick gear can only get you so far—a point Nichols seems especially keen to make these days. Louder Than Fate brings the riffs, no doubt, but it’s also the work of a more mature, expansive songwriter. For yet another example, look to the dust-blown rocker, “Way Back,” which stunned even some of his close friends when they first heard it. “I remember when I started off, I did it in a super country [style], almost as a joke,” he says. Jay [Ruston] was like, ‘Dude, that’s fucking badass!’ I was like, ‘Really?’ I went all-in. [Some friends] gave me this look, like, ‘This is different. There’s more going on here.’”
Nichols continues, “For me, that’s the greatest thing that could happen with this record. People can hear it, dig on these songs, and hear the next evolution of me as an artist—not just as a guitar player, but as an artist.”
Harrison and Clapton hanging out, writing some tunes in the garden with Pattie.
Before it ever reached me, “Pattie,” a dark, mysterious Gibson Style O archtop guitar born in 1913, had already lived through the end of two bands (Cream and the Beatles), the beginning of two solo careers (Eric Clapton and George Harrison), a marriage that fell apart, a romance that was born, the formation of Derek and the Dominos, and at least one friendship that didn’t survive any of it.
I grew up on all that music. At 15, I watched Cream’s final show at Madison Square Garden. By the next year, I was running my first recording studio. By 2010, I found myself on Broadway in RAIN, a jukebox musical featuring the music of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton.
By then, I was certain of one thing: I didn’t like touring. But I was also born too late to rely on the old system recording advances, royalties, and sales. That world had already begun to collapse. So instead, I took everything I had and set out to build something else. In 2011, I took over as the head of the old Victor Talking Machine Company. Through that work, Pattie entered my world. It was originally intended as a working instrument for Victor’s recording arsenal and acquired by the company for its dual use as an Edwardian/Victorian display alongside master recordings of Big Bill Broonzy, a Victor Artist most affiliated with the Gibson Style O model.
We were unaware of the guitar’s full history, though we did know of its connection to Delaney Bramlett, whose estate sold the instrument following his passing in 2008. It wasn’t until 2025 that the guitar’s deeper story emerged, as its former owners (Eric Clapton and George Harrison) were identified through company research. As it so happens, Clapton and Harrison used the guitar in their earliest garden songwriting sessions, and they were photographed using it the day prior to recording sessions for their first co-written hit, “Badge,” which was recorded in Los Angeles in November of 1968. Later, Eric gifted the guitar to Bramlett, who ended up owning the guitar from 1970–2008.
Meanwhile, in 2025, I had been playing the guitar like any other. (I’m 6'4", 240 pounds—I play hard.) I’ve always felt guitars like this are supposed to feel delicate and distant. Instead, this one responded like a fine old tool … one that had simply been used longer than most! Other session and live musicians for the company utilized the fabled instrument, but I certainly commandeered it.
You don’t overplay a guitar like this. It doesn’t reward it; it pushes you toward simplicity. And yet, Pattie remains surprisingly modern-feeling compared to most archtops.
“Delaney often handed this guitar out to friends for impromptu writing and jam sessions—sessions that included close friends Leon Russell, Duane Allman, and others.”
Its real legacy is in composition. Songs like “Badge,” “Here Comes the Sun” (Harrison and Clapton), “Let It Rain” (Clapton and Bramlett), and “My Sweet Lord” (Harrison, Bramlett, and Clapton) weren’t isolated works. They were responses—fragments of conversations happening in real time between artists.
I had no idea of this history during most of my early time with it, which, in retrospect, was probably a blessing. Delaney often handed this guitar out to friends for impromptu writing and jam sessions—sessions that included close friends Leon Russell, Duane Allman, and others. Though these sessions don’t yet have documentation, they still add to Pattie’s mystique adjacent to music royalty.
I’ve used the guitar the only way that made sense: in the studio, on stage, and in writing. At Victor Studios, it sat in sessions alongside modern equipment without issue. At Victor SoundWorks in New Jersey—then called the Victor Vault—it held its own in live performance, not as a novelty, but as part of the show. And in the summer of 2025, I used it to front a symphony orchestra, something none of its previous owners had asked of it (to the best of my knowledge).
Pattie didn’t struggle in any of those environments. It adapted even to the somewhat questionable pickup I temporarily installed just to get it above the cellos and trumpets.
When it came time to write with it, it didn’t make anything easier. It didn’t offer ideas. But it carried a cheeky implication: “At one time, I helped shape some of the best work of Eric, George, and Delaney. If they could find something in me and you can’t, that’s not my problem!” I appreciated the blunt quality of that reality. I couldn’t ever blame the instrument for being incapable of writing beautiful songs!
Pattie remains one of the highlights of my life with instruments. But if you know anything about me or my commitment to Victor’s mission of building a fairer, more functional music industry, you know I don’t like to sit in any one place in music for too long, and nor does the Victor Company. (“I’m much too fast…” as David Bowie once put it.) Given its relatively brief but important time with Clapton and Harrison between 1968 and 1970—and its upcoming appearance at Heritage Auctions Celebrity Instruments Showcase, May 8th, 2026—it seems Pattie doesn’t, either!
Empress Effects has released the Empress Drive, a versatile analog overdrive built for players who want enhanced control over how their gain behaves. Instead of locking players into a single flavor of overdrive, The Empress Drive provides players with tools to shape the harmonic structure that defines how a drive sounds and responds.
With pre-overdrive mid shaping, flexible boost routing, clean blend, and post-mix EQ, the Empress Drive can move from classic edge-of-breakup tones to saturated, harmonically rich drive, either enhancing the character of a guitar and amp or taking a rig somewhere entirely new.
Designed as a complete gain-shaping platform, the Empress Drive combines overdrive, boost, EQ, and noise control into a single, flexible pedal. The circuit is based on Empress’ earlier Germ Drive, which simulated the breakup characteristics of an old Tweed amp. The new Empress Drive is an asymmetrical hard-clipping overdrive but cleans up by varying your picking dynamics and guitar’s volume knob.
Key features of the Empress Drive include:
Tube-like overdrive with advanced tone control
Sweepable Midrange for precise harmonic shaping
Mix control to preserve your amp’s natural breakup
Active Bass and Treble shelving filters
Up to 30 dB of pre- or post-clipping, footswitchable boost
Built-in analog clipping meter with selectable LED color
Adaptive noise gate
The Empress Drive carries a street price of $299 USD. For more information visit empresseffects.com.
Dawner Prince Electronics announces the release of the Eclipsa Triple Rotary, a rotary cabinet emulator inspired by the famous Yamaha RA-200 system. Unlike traditional Leslie-style designs, the RA-200 is based on a unique architecture combining three independently driven rotating drivers with additional static speakers, resulting in a distinctive and dynamically evolving spatial character. Eclipsa recreates this behavior through detailed DSP modeling, capturing both the tonal response and the complex movement of the original system. The design also incorporates an analog solid-state version of the Alembic® F-2B tube preamp, known for its warm yet articulate character.
Built as a complete, performance-ready unit, Eclipsa features full MIDI control with up to 127 presets, a magnetic contactless true bypass system, and stereo outputs via three virtual microphones.
Features:
Rotary cabinet emulation based on the Yamaha RA-200
Integrated Alembic F-2B–style preamp
Full MIDI control with 127 presets
Magnetic, contactless true bypass switching system
Line/Instrument input selector
Stereo output via three virtual microphones
Expression pedal input
Low-noise, efficient design (~140 mA)
Custom CNC-machined aluminum enclosure
Availability
Eclipsa Triple Rotary is priced at $589.95 USD (MAP). First batch is available exclusively through the Dawner Prince Electronics web store, with broader availability at dealers worldwide from late May.
Don’t be fooled. Yes, José González’s mellifluous folk-pop, powered almost exclusively by Spanish acoustic guitars, sounds like it must have been a breeze to make. But if it were, a lot more of it would exist. As things stand, the acclaimed Swedish singer, songwriter, and guitarist (a child of Argentinian parents who emigrated to Scandinavia in the 1970s) has managed to put out just five solo albums in the past 23 years. Because his work is truly a solo production—González plays, sings, and records all the parts either at his home in Gothenburg or in a private studio space nearby—he has nobody to blame for this but himself. And as he explains during a recent Zoom interview with Premier Guitar, a key issue is that he starts the creative process for each of his albums intending to attain a noble ideal, of which he inevitably and invariably falls short.
“The first ambition always is to do everything, the whole album, with one guitar and one voice,” González says. “But then I’ll have a song that I feel will still be good enough for the album [that way] but I’ll just try adding one more guitar, or some vocals, or some clapping, or some looping. It’s cheating,” he acknowledges, “but you know, I’m old enough to not care that much about it. So that becomes part of the new ambition, which is to make it all sound like it was done with just one guitar and one vocal.”
A bemused grin flashes from behind the 47-year-old González’s dark, scraggly beard. “But then I run into another problem,” he continues, “which is that if the album sounds like it was done with just one guitar and one vocal, it’s a bit too homogeneous and boring for many people. So that’s when I start pushing each song in different directions, adding echoes and reverbs, changing the style of guitar playing. When I put my producer’s hat on, then it’s a different ambition: to make the album more interesting.”
González in recording mode.
Photo by Ellika Henriksson
José González’s Gear
Guitars
Estevé Adalid 11 classical acoustic
Estevé 9CB classical acoustic (one with spruce top and one with cedar top)
D’Addario Pro Arté EJ46 Silverplated Wound/Nylon Core
Shubb C2 capo
Pickups, Mics, & DI
Fishman Prefix Pro Blend pickups
Neumann U 67 and SM 69 microphones
Radial Engineering Firefly tube preamp/DI
Recording Software
Logic Pro
Universal Audio plugins, including A-Type Multiband Dynamic Enhancer, EP-34 Tape Echo and Precision De-Esser
Does González foresee a time when he might actually achieve his first ambition of making a literal solo album? “That could happen,” he says. “I don’t know, there’s many things I want to do with life. If I look into my future, when the kids [an eight-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son] are older and they move from home, I might play every day and all of a sudden have 10 songs that are amazing and just put them out on an album like that. But then again, I might just be happy on my porch by the water. And I might not have an audience that wants to see this old dude.”
One has a hard time imagining the latter situation ever coming to pass if González keeps making music that matches the consistent quality of his latest release, Against the Dying of the Light. Like its four predecessors, the new album sounds simple at first, quiet alt-folk spotlighting González’s gentle, reedy voice and mellow nylon-string plucking. But it reveals greater complexity the more closely you listen: in the tricky rhythms that course through each song, derived from West African, Caribbean, and Brazilian sources; in the harmonic richness of the chord progressions; and in the advanced philosophical concepts referenced in the lyrics.
“The first ambition always is to do everything, the whole album, with one guitar and one voice.”
Indeed, Against the Dying… could legitimately be called a concept album—not in the rock-opera sense, but in the more basic definition of a linked group of songs that explore kindred ideas. The album opens with “A Perfect Storm,” which presents a problem: Human consciousness and well-being are threatened by artificial intelligence, algorithms, memes, and other human creations. The implications of that problem are examined more deeply as the album progresses, until 13 songs later, we arrive not at a solution but at an awareness with which a solution might be found—an awareness of our own humanity. The closing song, “Joy,” concludes with these words: “As we cognify everything/We’re still conscious souls/Who can’t help but sing.”
Each song on Against the Dying… flows into the next one naturally, like the evolution of an argument or the telling of a tale. Some of this is the product of post-facto track sequencing, but sometimes González wrote the songs with their order in mind from the start. For example, the lightly skipping “For Every Dusk” is followed by the more introspective “Sheet” because the songs were originally written as two sections of the same composition. The former track, with three subtly interlocking guitar parts, is also the one that strays farthest from its author’s opening play-it-all-on-a-single-instrument mission.
Onstage in Cleveland
Photo by Robert McCune
According to González, “For Every Dusk” was composed in a manner similar to the way he writes most of his songs, but ended up sounding different due to certain performance realities. “I always start with guitar,” he says, “and then I start humming. And then I start writing, and when I start writing I do the words and the melodies, partly on their own and partly by sitting with the guitar. That’s the part where I give up sometimes, because I raise the bar a bit too high for myself. With some songs, I’m not able to play that well and sing at the same time. I could sort of lower the bar for the guitar part, but usually I record the guitar separate. ‘For Every Dusk’ was one of those songs. I basically did full takes and felt like they had some highlights, but none of them were good enough, even if I tried to edit them. It sounded way better if I just put two of the takes together [running simultaneously]. Then it sounds like two guitarists hanging out. The guitars are almostplaying the same thing, but you get these variations that are nice, and they also sound similar to the music from Mali, where usually a couple of people with guitars are playing.”
“It became obvious that people were liking my acoustic guitar and vocals. That was what I was doing best.”
González has been a fan of Malian music for the past two decades; guitarist Ali Farka Touré and kora player Ballaké Sissoko were his gateway drugs. “Later, I got to hang out with [fellow guitarist] Sidi Touré and Bombino [Omara Moctar] from Niger. It was a pleasure to see how they play, and it’s just fun to jam with that sort of music. And I recently sang on a track for [Saharan “desert blues” band] Tinariwen’s new album—I’m really happy with how that turned out.”
Another highlight of Against the Dying…, “Ay Querida,” features an ear-grabbing alternate tuning. With a nod to legends Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, the guitarist cranks the low E string of his Estevé Adalid 11 down, waydown, to B. That, however, is the song’s only deviation from standard. González employs several similar tunings, all of which share a minimum of retuned strings. “I never retune the A, D, B or high E,” he points out. “It’s only the low E and the G that go down, or up—there are many songs that are E-A-D-A, for example. But it’s fun to have those downtuned songs. The first one that became popular was ‘Far Away,’ that was used in a video game [Red Dead Redemption]. And since then, I have a couple of songs that are in that tuning. They’re really fun to play live, because you have a P.A. with subwoofers, and when you tune down, all of a sudden you’re not playing guitar, you’re playing bass.”
Photo and Makeup Credit: Laura and Mateo, ages 8 and 4
Besides the transglobal rhythms and the altered tunings, the most distinctive elements of González’s guitar style are what he plays (nylon-string acoustics) and how (always with a combination of the flesh and nails on his right-hand fingers, never a pick). That’s the way he played when he first took up the instrument at age 13; he even studied classical guitar for a while in his youth. “I went to a private teacher here in Gothenburg,” he remembers, “and I asked him, ‘Could you teach me jazz guitar?’ He told me, ‘No, I can’t, but I can teach you classical guitar.’ So I started learning all these Spanish classical tunes, like [Francisco Tárrega’s] ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra,’ [Isaac Albéniz’s] ‘Asturias,’ some Bach even. I went to see my teacher once a month for a couple of years, but it took too much time to learn. So I let that go, but I learned a lot during those years.”
It wasn’t long before González had made a significant stylistic break from his early classical studies. By age 15, he was playing bass in the first of three hardcore punk bands that occupied his spare time for most of the ’90s, eventually switching over to electric guitar. “The hardcore songs weren’t bad,” he says now, “but they weren’t that good, either. And we didn’t have much success with them.” His next band, formed in 1998, was Junip, a trio that reunited him with the classical acoustic in a new indie-rock context: “It became obvious during those years that people were liking my acoustic guitar and vocals. That was what I was doing best.”
“I always start with guitar, and then I start humming. And then I start writing.”
Five years into Junip’s career, González released a solo seven-inch single, which unexpectedly hit No. 4 on the Swedish pop chart. The band proceeded to go on the backburner (though it reconvened for albums in 2010 and 2013), and González dropped his university studies—he’d been working toward a PhD in biochemistry—to focus on music full-time. “All of a sudden, I was famous in Sweden,” he recalls.
And the nylon-string guitar had played a major role in making this happen. “At that point it became a thing for me to not switch to steel-string, even though that would have meant louder sound when we were playing live,” González says. “My sound engineers were trying to get me to play steel-string, but to me that sounded like what everyone else was doing. I wanted to do what I liked, and in a way that wasn’t new either, because in the ’60s and ’70s there were Spanish guitars everywhere, in the folk traditions and the protest singers and the music that I listened to when I was young.”
Against the Dying of the Light is González’s fifth studio album, and first in five years.
That vintage sound has informed not only González’s writing and playing but also his approach to recording. Although he works strictly in the digital domain with Logic Pro, he’ll add analog-style ambience to his tracks whenever he deems it necessary—which is most of the time. “I’ll record through a tube amplifier, so I get that distortion that you can’t really take away later,” he says. “After that, I’ll add some saturation in different steps, depending on the type of song, and some tape emulator. And then, one of my favorite things to do is to add noise. The Universal Audio A-Type plugin has a noise generator that’s pretty round in its sound. I’ve got some nice mics—on the new album, I used Neumann’s SM 69 stereo mic a lot—but I don’t want things to be too bright or hi-fi, so I try to make it sound more old-school.”
Add every hour spent looking for just the right kind and amount of tape-style distortion to every hour spent struggling with the relative complexity of guitar arrangements, and you begin to understand why it generally takes five-plus years for a José González album to be completed. And of course, those aren’t the only things that can eat up a lot of time. “I’ll tell my label, ‘The album’s almost done, I have all the demos so I’m gonna start recording soon,’” González says. “So they start booking tours and setting up interviews. But then, you know, life catches on. Someone in the family gets sick, and I’m not rehearsing guitar as much, and then I need another month, or two more months. But eventually,” he concludes with a shrug, “I get to a point where I feel like this is good enough.”
He’s being humble here. For most listeners, José González’s “good enough” is way more than that.
