Jose

“Excuse me, who is singing this song?”, the shop assistant looked at me as if I were pointing a shotgun at her. Annoyed that I am not at all interested in the clothes they're selling, she threw a quick unamused glance at the lap top on her desk. “Jose Gonzales”. After months of trying to figure out whose is the soft voice from the Sonny Bravia commercial, I got a name that did not but least match my expectations. I thought she got it confused with some Spanish folk singer. I stepped out of the shop and continued my walk around the center of the small Catalan village of Vic trying to remember, just in case, this peculiar Spanish name. Five days later, I was already installed in my new apartment in Barcelona and Jose Gonzalez was exactly who she said.
Connecting music and places has become a habit, a way of seeing music and capturing the sound of cities. Songs often take me places around the world, crossing a boulevard, biking, laying on a beach, going to school, shopping at Alber Hijn.
Two years after Barcelona, Jose Gonzalez leads me back there to those first weeks in the Catalan capital, walking and walking and walking all day with a constant Veneer soundtrack. Each and every song from his albums is a street name, an afternoon walk on the beach, 10 minutes of waiting for somebody at Liceu. It is the bohemian I became in this southern city and the bohemian I cannot seize to be because of it.
Jose Gonzalez in my years right now. Barcelona all around me hundreds of miles away.
Just like Beirut is Amsterdam sometimes and Macau pours out from Empire of the Sun.
One day Edinburgh will be...
We are all drifting.