Sad songs for sad lovers

Why can’t you just love me?” begins Tobias Jesso Jr.’s Without You, an aching plea of a song that contains all the probable questions and dispirited introspections a rejected lover could have. “Should I move on or should I wait?/How’d you get so high above me?” he asks although without a hint of desperation but with equal amounts of concern and exhaustion. He just wants to know so he can finally put this thing to rest.

All the sad boys and girls of the Internet — or just about anyone who likes walking on a cloud of melancholy — hailed Jesso as the new patron saint of heartbreak when he released his album Goon earlier this year. The record is a catalog of failures yet the progression of each track feels like a slow step towards acceptance, beginning with a tale of loss “Can’t Stop Thinking About You” to a relationship that’s slowly going up in flames (“Tell the Truth”). The weight of Jesso’s emotional baggage never leaves each track, essentially making the album a smattering of his own faults and deficiencies. Although this sounds like another morose album from a sad guy with a piano, Jesso’s ‘casually imperfect singing voice’ adds a layer of brittleness that lends an air of hushed intimacy to an otherwise snoozy melodies about grief.

Comparisons to Randy Newman, Todd Rundgren, and Harry Nilsson have been thrown around and it doesn’t hurt that Jesso occupies the same confessional spheres of Father John Misty and Matthew E. White, a trend that Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson called “The Return of the Male Balladeer” or “[...] an image that took hold during the ‘60s hangover, when baby boomers traded youthful dreams and started becoming their parents, a little less certain with each new season that they were, in fact, still crazy after all these years.”

Jesso is a six-foot-seven guy who sings and writes about being the world’s biggest hopeless romantic

Jesso has had a crazy couple of years, much of it became fuel for Goon. He moved back to his native Vancouver after a string of rejections (a breakup and failed attempts at being a songwriter) in LA. Back home, he worked as a furniture mover and at night, he turned to his sister’s piano to let out the remains of his dreams. The product became “Just a Dream,” which became his ticket to producing Goon after Girls producer Chet White heard the track (Jesso emailed it to him) and called him out to San Francisco to do a proper full length. Goon included a host of indie producers such as The Black Key’s Patrick Carney, The New Pornographers’s Joon Collins and Ariel Rechtshaid, who has worked with HAIM, Vampire Weekend, and Carly Rae Jepsen.

In interviews, one of the things Jesso couldn’t stop talking about was his love for Adele. The British singer eventually tweeted his song Hollywood (“Maybe I came up in her Google Alerts, because I always talk about her in interviews,” he told the Times) which led to a collaboration, When We Were Young. “He’s my new secret weapon,” Adele wrote of Jesso in her interview with him in The Guardian. “We met up in LA and I absolutely loved him; his vibe, his humour, the way he plays piano — so felt. The music he makes is romantic, with a ’70s vibe.”

It makes total sense that Tobias Jesso Jr. would go on to write a song with Adele. Both artists have made some of the most painfully eloquent songs about the agony of heartbreak and their collaboration,  When We Were Young, which appears in Adele’s 25, seems like a culmination of sorts for their anguished voices. The song is just as poignant with the combination of Adele and Jesso’s expert maneuvering of the byways of a lost love. Its hook also contains possibly the most devastating line from a song this year.

Vulture is quick to declare Jesso as pop’s new boyfriend. Suddenly, this sad, dejected guy who couldn’t even fulfill his dreams is now the music industry’s new darling. Though he’s had a bit of fame prior to the release of When We Were Young (he was featured in a Saint Laurent ad, he dated Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough, and was linked to Alana Haim and Taylor Swift), this newfound recognition only validates pop culture’s love for the fallen underdog. And it doesn’t help that he’s a six-foot-seven guy who sings and writes about being the world’s biggest hopeless romantic.