MUSIC INTERVIEW: JUNIP
José Gonzalez & Tobias Winterkorn Talk Soft Music & Hard Drinking
After Swedish singer-songwriter José Gonzalez found fame around the world as a solo artist through his albums Veneer and In Our Nature, and as a featured vocalist on Zero 7’s The Garden (alongside Sia Furler) he took the path much less travelled and followed up on his success by reforming Junip, the group he first began playing music with in Gothenburg back in 1998. All of which means that when Junip’s debut album, Fields, was released this year, it came more than a decade after Tobias Winterkorn, Elias Araya, and José Gonzalez first starting playing music together…
Scott Roon: This is kind of the second coming of Junip, right?
Jose Gonzalez: We’ve been around for a really long time. We started around ’98. We met up and started playing with organ, moog, drums, and acoustic guitar, so during these 12 years we’ve been pretty inactive—we put out a 7” and an EP… We did like 30 shows before this year, and now, since May, we’ve done like 70.
Tobias Winterkorn: We’re catching up…
JG: So it’s our first album that we’ve released—Fields—and it’s our first proper tour that we’re doing.
SR: Exactly how long has it been from inception to the creation of this record?
TW: We sat down in 2007, just before José released In Our Nature, and we just decided, “Let’s do this.” We started to record in 2008, and it took about half a year to get everything done, from scratch to finished product.
SR: Having been a band before - having been together and obviously knowing each other for quite some time - did you have all these songs created, or it was a two-year process because you were constantly rewriting and reworking…?
JG: We decided to start from scratch, so in many ways it feels like a new band. We just kept the name, and it’s the same three of us doing the songs…
SR: Where is that third member of the band right now?
TW: He is probably asleep. He doesn’t like to do interviews. Elias Araya—he’s the drummer.
SR: Was there a particular moment in the studio with Don Ahlsterberg that stood out when recording Fields? Were you guys partying too much…? [laughs]
TW: No, it’s really soft and controlled. We were maybe working four or five hours a day, and Don Ahlsterberg helped us to actually get the mikes in the right directions and the little tape here and there, and we just jammed and improvised for hours and hours, so we got a lot of material, then we took the best parts. We have some great moments, I guess. When we did “Don’t Let It Pass,” when I did the moog—the synths, melody—me and José just…it was a really great moment of creativity.
SR: I want to ask you about your songwriting process - it has such an organic feel - Does it feel like you’re just jamming and then… Is that how it all comes together for you guys?
JG: We decided to record everything on a computer, so when we were jamming, we would press record and just leave it recording…or if we were jamming and found something we liked, we just press record so we could gather as much material as possible. That’s why I think many of the songs have this linear style. It’s only in the last minute that I write the melody and lyrics, so many times we would have the song structure already done before that’s finished.
SR: What are you most proud of about Fields?
TW: For me, it’s the whole album. We didn’t think about a thread going through the whole album, like a topic or anything, so I’m really proud that it turned out to be… Actually, I’m not for bragging, but I think it’s really good. It feels like we just nailed it.
JG: It’s fun because the style of the songs are pretty different, and it feels like, with the sound, it makes it cohesive.
TW: That’s true.
SR: Let’s talk about “Always”—the music video. Where did that idea come from? I absolutely love it. It’s so engaging…
TW: It was Andreas Nilsson. He actually recorded our first video for the Black Refuge EP, and he also did a lot of others. He just emailed us the plot of the story that we were going to film—to be in the World Championship Air Guitar, and with a magician that tells us not to use proper instruments. That’s the whole short scenario for the video! We actually thought this could be really awkward and not so fun to do, but we actually went to the north of Finland—it was really cold, but it was almost summer…
JG: Two really surreal days…
TW: It was really surreal…
JG: Hanging out with the air guitar world champion, Hot Licks Houlihan...
TW: From San Francisco…
JG: And the magician is a famous contemporary dancer, Alpo Aaltokoski.
SR: You must have had a certain amount of trust with Andreas to do this…
JG: We said no at first, and then all of a sudden, he sent us this amazing script with very weird stuff…
TW: It was so weird. And I ended every day drinking hard liquor, and I never do that, so I think I was hung over for a week after we shot that. It was very surreal.
SR: Let’s move from recording and packaging your music to your live shows: How do you prepare to play live?
TW: We rehearsed a lot this spring, and tried out a lot of different things. We actually have a bass player, playing with us live, so I guess that was to get everything together with the percussion and the drum pads and bass… it took time to make it sound like we wanted to, and we’re still working on some parts to make it sound good.
SR: On the road, away from the stage—What do you guys do to keep sane?
JG: TV series.
TW: A lot of TV series.
JG: I watched the documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil. It was a hard rock band, sort of like Spinal Tap but real.
TW: I haven’t seen Dexter yet, so I just watched the first season. I really liked it. It was really good.
SR: Coming out of Sweden, how did you guys manage to not play death metal?
TW: I did, when I was 16.
JG: Elias did—the drummer…
TW: The band name was Spontaneous Combustion. I played bass. It was fun. I still like death metal and black metal—in a fun way. Not like “yeah, rowr, I feel the darkness growing inside me...” Just really fun music. And then we took it from death metal to hardcore music.
JG: We both played in hardcore bands. It was pretty close to death metal.
TW: Screaming and that sort of thing.
SR: How did you guys get from there to here musically…did it just progressively get more eclectic…?
TW: I played a lot of other music during the death metal period, and before that, like jazz and progressive rock and stuff like that, so it was just being inside a lot of different types of music for me, so it wasn’t a big switch to start playing soft music… but I think actually I was really tired of the hardcore metal scene, so it was kind of a relief for me to start playing soft music again.
JG: For me, I was playing acoustic guitar and classical guitar during the same time that I was playing bass and listening to other stuff.
SR: José, what is it like now being with the old band again? What are the differences between being the solo, ‘everything’s on José’ kind of thing, to now being part of a group again?
JG: It’s different in many ways, everything from getting together to write the music, to producing, to be out on tour, to play on stage… When you go off stage, you can hug people…
TW: [Laughs] High fives.
JG: When I’m solo, I go to the mirror… [Laughs]
TW: [Mocking] “Thank you, José.” [Laughs]
JG: “Good show. Next time, you know that part in that song? You should look into it.” [Laughs] So yeah, it’s really nice. We’re almost nine people on tour, so it’s a good amount of people—good friends.
SR: Have you guys managed to avoid some of the rock star pitfalls? What kinds of crazy stuff happens to you guys? Or do you keep it pretty chill?
TW: It’s interesting, because I try to stay as calm as I can because I like to get in shape and stuff like that, and try to hold that. I run a lot at home, but you see I don’t have the time to do it all the time. And then sometimes, when there’s a party…
JG: Maybe once a week…
TW: Yeah, like a real party once a week… waking up in someplace that I don’t want to wake up… in a bush or something. Actually, it happens, but I try to take it real easy.
JG: The other day, the electricity went out on the bus, and you were super drunk and you went in there and got our food and stuff, so when we got there, there was food everywhere—soy sausage, crackers—like a crime scene. We flashed with our phone and then we went to your bunk and you were… [Laughs]
TW: Actually, I did manage to fix a proper sandwich, but I remember that I took some yogurt and tried to drink it in the bunk, and it was missing my mouth all the time. So I woke up with yogurt everywhere and I just felt like [sigh] ‘this is not good at all’.
JG: But I’m surprised, actually, because it’s the first proper tour for it to be us and Elias, so I thought it would be mental every day—free booze and stuff, but no…
TW: No, can’t do that.
Junip’s ‘Fields’ is out now on City Slang/Mute Records
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