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Thomas Denver Jonsson: Going Where You Won't Hide
by Dennis Cook

I was ashamed of my face, length,
hands and nose but look at me now.
Barely touching it, open eyes,
shuts down the TV while I'm asleep.
My love, I'm with you all the way.

"I love to try to build beautiful things out of broken parts," says Thomas Denver Jonsson, a luminous singers-songwriter with a trembling honesty that recalls Neil Young & Will Oldham. "People sometimes say I just write sad songs about being ugly and miserable but to be frank it's completely the opposite. Sometimes I suspect that what I'm really trying to do is to write a song beautiful enough to make me all pretty and beautiful myself. I haven't managed to do that yet though."

He comes awfully close on his sophomore album, Barely Touching It, a lump of coal pressed inside his chest that's been shaped by complex love and deferred dreams. The diamond hiding below his ribs is a song cycle you can stack up next to Palace's Viva Last Blues, Neil's After The Gold Rush and Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator). There's a tenderness that's palpable but the softness is balanced by a clear-eyed forthrightness that makes his declarations of love all the more substantive. Love grounded in truth, even when painful, has much richer soil to thrive in.

"Love is definitely a key issue in my songs. It's something to relate to, to remember or dream about," observes Jonsson. "I also think it's a good thing to describe problems and feelings through a relationship. There's someone to mirror the feelings on, someone who's there to see it or someone who is gone. There's many important aspects of a relationship that most music doesn't involve. Love is often described as something instant and perfect and steamy. To me love is more, much more than that. It's about deep friendship, even if passion is necessary."

Jonsson didn't even pick up a guitar until he was 20 but only three years later he put out his first record, the quietly moving Hope to Her, performed with his incredibly intuitive backing band, the September Sunrise. Made up of Fredrik Wilde (guitars, pedal steel), Henric Stromberg (drums, percussion), Tomas Linderg (bass) and Carl Edlom (guitars, piano, accordion, organ, glockenspiel), the September Sunrise embodies the burnished morning light inherent in their name. They elevate and accent Jonsson's songs with graceful, heartfelt playing and inspired arrangements. Jonsson says, "I came up with the band's name September Sunrise back in the summer of 2002. It illustrates very much the feeling I had back then about my music. I had just met Carl and Tomas and we were speaking about forming the band. Then eventually Fredrik and Henric also joined us. The two names, Hope to Her and September Sunrise, were a good starting-shot. It felt good. It felt like something new. I love my band. They are very skillful at not showing off. They only play what's necessary for the songs."

In a popular landscape that rewards mediocrity like Jack Johnson & John Mayer, Jonsson has had to work hard to get his music heard outside of his native Sweden. Tours with Rosie Thomas and Damien Jurado have helped raise his profile amongst indie rock birdwatchers, as did his 2004 appearance at the prestigious South-By-Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. His new album features cameos from two underground folk rock greats, Ned Oldham (leader of Anomoanon and brother to Will & Paul) and Sweden's own Nina Kinert. Oldham lends his smoky backwoods pipes to the Crazy Horse inflected "Silver Boy" while Kinert weaves her almost too lovely voice with Jonsson's on several cuts including "Dreams At The Film Club" a bit of boy-girl loveliness that rivals Gram & Emmylou at their best. His work is often likened to well established, well regarded country rock names like Parsons. It's flattering but also a bit annoying.

"I can understand the comparisons to those artists. People always need references," Jonsson says. "Will Oldham is an old hero of mine and I hold his album I See A Darkness as one of the top albums ever. I also get compared a lot to Neil Young, Ryan Adams and, of course, Dylan. I can understand that you're doing references to the most well known artists in the genre but I wouldn't say I'm a carbon copy of it. I think saying that is unfair and probably a result of careless listening."

"I think my music is like a mix of something vintage & timeless and something contemporary, like a mix of '70s Emmylou Harris, The Band, Palace Music and Wilco. But I'm not really the one to judge, 'cause to me I'm only sound like myself and that could never be as good as one of the artists mentioned. Hey, I'm just me."

"I'm get inspired by so many artists and I'm very colored by them in my own music. I try to emulate good things from many artists. Call it stealing, call it borrowing, call it getting inspired. If I had to choose one I would say M Ward, who in my opinion is really a musical genius. He's like the new Dylan but at the same time something really unique. Apart from his Wardness, I'm very inspired by female vocalists like Emmylou Harris and Nina Kinert. I really love the female voice and I'm trying to involve that feeling in parts of my singing as well as I can. I also have a lot of admiration for Antony & The Johnsons, My Morning Jacket, Dylan, The Beach Boys, Townes Van Zandt, and my favourite Swede, Bjoern Kleinhenz (who Jonsson occasionally plays with as The Topeka Twins, who gave us 2003's grand I Never Heard Her Sing EP). I could go on forever really."

Jonsson's voice is a winning mix of the gentle wildness of Hank Williams, the naked passion of Neil Young and a newly hatched bluebird, all wrapped around slightly warbled English. "Many elements have formed my singing and hopefully it has something special on its own, too," offers Jonsson. "On the other hand, hearing M Ward sing 'Paul's song' or 'Fuel for Fire" or Antony & the Johnsons do "Fistful of Love" I mean, there's no way I could ever do that. I can't see where it's coming from or how it's built. I just hear the magic and the song. I hear those artists singing only for me at that moment. To strive to give that feeling to someone when listening to my music is also one of the most essential inspirations for me."

Having released two albums and three EPs in just two years, the idea that the creative well may run dry at this pace does crop up.

"I see that situation both as a little scary and as something natural," says Jonsson. "Sometimes I doubt it's really healthy thinking about a song all day - humming it or feeling you haven't got time to eat or sleep 'cause your writing on something new. But that's the way I'm working and it has good sides, too. In the back of my head something tells me that if I just can find the right combination of harmony and meaning, some great things can and will happen. It'll make me happy about myself, people will want to listen to my songs and I will be able to go out touring, right?"

"The ironic thing is that I tend to only notice good things happening when looking back on them. When I'm working on something I'm just too afraid of failing or too goal-oriented or too focused to notice the good. I still have a very hard time realizing that I've actually released some records."

Yet, he has released two albums that carry the same promising vibe as Bob Dylan's early releases, where you know they're very good but what really twists your ear is the sense of what's ahead, the possible masterpieces lurking in his subconscious. One almost hesitates to mention it for fear of spooking the poor lad but a recent back-to-back listen of the new Dylan Bootleg Series release, No Direction Home, and Jonsson's debut only further cemented the impression for this writer.

"From the start I wanted to make Hope to Her a country charm, an introductory record with both a classic evergreen touch and a lo-fi feeling of controlled spontaneity. Basically an album of old and current loves and sweethearts, pictured as guardian angels," recalls Jonsson. "That's still the best idea I ever had for an album. Hope to Her still means a lot to me and I'm actually proud of it."

Taking nothing away from his first release, his second album is deeper, thicker, knottier in several respects. Moving seamlessly between spare acoustic tracks and plugged-in wide vista material, Barely Touching It, is a damn sight more mature than Jonsson's 25 years warrant. Maybe he's one of them old souls you hear folks talk about.

"My thought with Barely Touching It was to make an urban record, and a record more focused on me," observes Jonsson. "I wanted the contents of the two albums to unveil each other. I'm not really sure I managed to do that completely but I like to see them as sister albums. Of course a lot of things happened to me during the two years Barely Touching It took to make from songwriting to recording. That colors the songs on the album. I've experienced both very good and some not-too-good times during the last years. I wanted to make a both feminine and masculine album of personal feelings, of happiness and isolation, and about the appreciation of happiness but with the problem of feeling it's complete luck. It's kind of a happy album for sad people and a sad album for happy people."

Soon he's starting a 7-inch label with his girlfriend, and work has already begun on his third album, tentatively titled Welcome aboard, Crickets and Cats. He says, "I want to show more of my acoustic solo side than on HTH & BTI but I still want to have the band playing on some or all the songs. I think we got some witty things and black humor going on Barely Touching It and I want to make something more out of that. I think the most touching music is the music that's haunting, sincere AND a little twisted. I miss that combination in Swedish music. There's a twist and turn missing."

"It's my strongest conviction that 2006 and 2007 will be the time for me to climb up another step on the ladder. Even if I stay unknown, or become even more unknown, I need to be more honest to myself, to focus on what's important to me, personally as well as musically. I hope the band and I will maintain our integrity. I hope we'll be able to increase the focus on our songs & music and less on our faces and lives. And that we'll still be the friendliest band around that really cares for our fans. In the end, it's very hard to neglect the fact that doing something that touches another person is a feeling that really can't be described in words."

Thomas Denver Jonsson website