‘Justin Bieber is an insanely brave artist’: Tobias Jesso Jr. talks about how he became a songwriter to the stars | Pop and rock

gOn, the 2015 debut album by Los Angeles-born Canadian musician Tobias Jesso Jr., was one of the revelations of the 2000s. An album of honest, earnest songs in the style of 1970s singer-songwriters like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, it instantly established Jisoo as a rising indie star and was one of the most popular records of the year. The problem was that Jisoo didn’t care much for attention: he struggled to feel like a real performer, which led him to drink heavily before shows, and felt like he was playing a version of himself in interviews. “I had to do all these things that I wasn’t really confident in,” he says. “I was like…I don’t know what I’m doing anywhere.” So, at the end of his breakout year, he canceled all future performances and, in essence, put his career on hold.

In the decade that followed, he remained behind the scenes, and in the process became one of the world’s most successful and in-demand pop songwriters—thanks, in large part, to his focus on simple songwriting that prioritizes emotion. He co-wrote Adele’s “When We Were Young” and a handful of songs on Dua Lipa’s 2024 album Radical Optimism; She has collaborated with Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, FKA twigs and Haim; In 2023, he won his first Grammy Award for Songwriter of the Year.

Now, a decade after his first record, and without warning, Jisoo has released Shine, an equally heartfelt follow-up. Speaking via Zoom from his home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, he seemed as surprised as anyone to be back in the spotlight. “When you get into songwriting, you learn all these tricks of the trade,” he says. “I had to forget all that and say, ‘What do I want to say? How do I want to say it?'” I knew that if I was really going to get behind him, I had to do this. [it] The uncompromising version of myself.”

Featuring only eight tracks, totaling less than 30 minutes in length – all of which again feature just Jisoo and piano – Shine is a mediocre album. But things run deep, affecting his mother’s dementia diagnosis as well as paternity – Jisoo shares a young son with his ex-wife, Australian songwriter Emma Louise. He started to feel like he wanted to write for himself again after his breakup earlier this year – a feeling he hadn’t experienced since he was writing Goon.

“I love to share my stories [songwriting] “Sessions and I use things from my life to fill in the gaps, but I never felt like I had a whole song to say,” he says. “Before this album, I was doing sessions and going through a breakup, and I had a lot to process. I found myself not wanting to share private lines or things that might come to me because they were too ingrained for me. I had this intuition that I knew I needed to write these songs myself.”

Around the beginning of May, Jisoo took six weeks off his schedule — the longest break from his daily songwriting work ever — and got to work writing Shine. Some of the songs on the album are completely new. Others have been reworked from Jesu’s massive tome of unused ideas that he has collected over the past decade. The first song he finished was the album’s opener, “Waiting for You,” a searing post-breakup ballad: “I was upset / Every morning / Like a sharp knife / You got me dancing on the edge,” he sings.

In recent years, pop music has been dominated by pop music that tempts listeners to try to understand the real-life story behind the songs: think Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License, which is about a real-life love triangle, or the recently released and much-discussed song West End Girl, which is all about her divorce from actor David Harbour. Jisoo says he “didn’t want to fall for any tricks” when it came to writing about his personal life. “I didn’t want to use names or any dates or little things: I wanted to make it me, a song that I felt would convey exactly where I am and what I’m going through,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful… when I finished [that song]I was like, ‘Man, I just wrote one of my songs again, holy shit!’ It’s amazing that I did that.

One of the songs on the album — the dramatic, intense “I Love You,” which spirals into a raucous swirl — had a less traditional origin. While reading for Wendy L’Belle-Tividad, a psychic in Los Angeles whose client list includes a number of high-profile musicians, Jisoo was told that there was a song missing from Shine, which was “really dramatic.” The next time he sat down at the piano, he wrote “I Love You,” undoubtedly the loudest and most dramatic song he ever wrote, building to an intense, unsettling climax that sounds like a door slamming shut again and again. “This is my favorite song I’ve written so far,” he says. “But here’s the thing: I wonder, was it the beginning or was it a psychic reading?”

While Shine bears a strong resemblance to Goon — which certainly has something to do with Jesso’s distinct, pleading timbre — it’s also undeniably the work of someone who’s been in the pop trenches for the better part of a decade, partly because of the poppy structure of the songs and partly because of credited collaborators like Tommy King and Julian Bunetta, fixtures of the Los Angeles pop scene. While Jisoo says that, for the most part, he has tried to ignore his big-budget pop instincts, he credits Justin Bieber, with whom Jisoo worked on his recent albums Swag and Swag II, as a supporting force.

“The sessions were with Justin right before I wrote this stuff, and he’s the craziest, bravest artist – [he’ll] Just use your microphone and start singing something, and it will sound like a song. “It just happens naturally,” he says.[Working with him] It was very difficult compared to these pop sessions where it was like: “What’s on the Top 40?” – There was no deception. It was mind boggling that at his level he was doing something I was afraid to do. “It changed my perspective on a lot of things.”

These types of sessions are rare, he says. “I’m still disappointed in the way a lot of pop music is produced – it’s kind of condescending. I’ve been party to it too, so I can safely say I’m also embarrassed to be party to it,” he says. “I feel very grateful for that [being] Being able to work with artists that I don’t feel would put themselves through this kind of unfortunate writing; The artists I choose to write with will also be embarrassed by a few Top 40 songs.

He continues: “I’m not chasing anyone to write pop songs in any way, you know? Write all the pop songs you want. Maybe it’s about the money.” Jisoo doesn’t mention names, but it’s easy to conjure the kind of music he’s talking about: trend-chasing pop that relies heavily on samples or references, or that reworks old, well-trodden ideas. “I want to find artists who don’t agree with that and maybe want to become more unique and push a little more, and not just stay in the zone where you’re chasing something that’s already been done.”

One such artist he’s worked with recently is Olivia Dean, a BRIT graduate whose sophomore album, The Art of Loving, released in September, is one of the year’s great records. Dean recently sold four dates at the O2 in London, with two more on their way there; “The Man I Need,” a 1970s single co-written by Jisoo, peaked at No. 5 on the US Hot 100 chart. “Olivia is a great example of… some people you just meet and say, ‘I get it — you’re a force,’” he says. “You can see when someone brings their own integrity and assurance to what they do, and for a songwriter, that’s the most exciting thing. Someone so strong in his opinion is a godsend to me.”

However, Jisoo says artists like Bieber and Dean may be outliers. “I don’t know that the pendulum feels like it’s going back to the ’70s style of songwriting or the quality — with the AI ​​and everything that’s going on now,” he says. “It’s going to get worse. People are already using AI for everything, so it’s like: Great now, it won’t even be human.”

Although Jisoo prefers to be the only songwriter in a room with an artist, there are exceptions where he doesn’t mind being one of a few credited songwriters, as was the case when working on Dua Lipa’s song Radical Optimism. “Getting in with Dua and working with Dua, working with Kevin [Parker of Tame Impala]working with Danny [L Harle]And all these people, it’s like a dream. “Having names on the board doesn’t matter if they’re all people you really want to work with,” he says. It was a similar experience, he says, while working in France with Pepper and his collaborators. “Normally when you see 10 names in a song, you’ll say, ‘Maybe four of those didn’t do anything.’ Or just change a word. But these bastards put themselves on the line for all those songs — every name in there is a name that should be in there.”

Working at Shine hasn’t changed the fact that Jesso still wants to keep his day job as a songwriter behind the scenes, even though he’s set to face further turmoil. He is about to move to a farm he owns in Byron Bay, Australia, where he plans to spend half the year to be close to his son, who is about to start school there. “I have a few close friends, which is really good, but it’s going to be a big new beginning and a big change. I think there’s a lot of room for not knowing whether it’s going to be filled with joy or sadness,” he says. “For the last five years, I’ve been trying to find a way to bring more life into the mix, more than just work, because I think for a long period of time in my life, it was all just work — it was almost an obsession. This is kind of the big test: Can I handle months of life without a lot of work?”

Shine won’t require a lot of the things he hated about About Goon — he does few interviews and will probably only do one or two shows, “just to show people the songs… like three-song sets,” he says. “I don’t know that the performance will ever be me; but it doesn’t feel like my thing at all. I don’t think I see myself in front of an audience,” he says. “I’m preparing and getting ready for the move, but you know, if I was depressed in Australia, I’d get my piano – maybe write more songs, maybe not.”

Or to put it more succinctly: “I think being away for 10 years is very comfortable for me.”

Shine out now.