‘Justin Bieber is an insanely courageous artist’: Tobias Jesso Jr on how he became the songwriter to the stars

Goon, the 2015 debut album by Canada-born LA musician Tobias Jesso Jr, was one of the revelations of the 2010s. An album of heartfelt, earnest ballads in the vein of 70s singer-songwriters such as Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, it instantly established Jesso as a rising indie star and was one of the year’s most acclaimed records. The problem was that Jesso didn’t care much for the attention: he struggled to feel like a genuine performer, leading him to drink heavily before shows, and felt he was playing a version of himself in interviews. “I was forced to do all these things I wasn’t really confident in,” he says. “I was just like … I don’t know what I’m doing, anywhere.” So, toward the end of his breakout year, he cancelled all future shows and, in essence, put his career on ice. In the decade that followed, he kept himself behind the scenes, in the process becoming one of the world’s most successful and in-demand pop songwriters – thanks, in no small part, to his focus on simple, emotions-first songwriting. He co-wrote Adele’s hit When We Were Young and a handful of tracks on Dua Lipa’s 2024 album Radical Optimism; has collaborated with Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, FKA twigs and Haim; and in 2023 won the first ever Grammy for songwriter of the year. Now, a decade on from his first record, and with little notice, Jesso has released Shine, its equally heartfelt follow-up. Speaking over Zoom from his home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, he seems as surprised as anyone that he’s stepping back into the spotlight. “Getting into the songwriting thing, you learn all these tricks of the trade,” he says. “I had to forget all those and go: ‘What do I want to say? How do I want to say it?’ I knew with this, if I was really going to stand behind it, I needed to make [it] the uncompromised version of myself.” At only eight tracks, totalling less than 30 minutes – all, once again, featuring only Jesso and his piano – Shine is a modest album. But its waters run deep, touching on his mother’s dementia diagnosis as well as fatherhood – Jesso shares a young son with his ex-wife, the Australian songwriter Emma Louise. He began to have an inkling that 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 like to share my stories in [songwriting] sessions and use things from my life to fill in the gaps, but I never really 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 to process a lot. I found myself not wanting to share special lines or things that would come to me because they were so rooted to me. I just had this gut knowing that I needed to work these songs out myself.” Around the beginning of May, Jesso blocked six weeks out from his schedule – the longest break from his day-to-day songwriting work he’d ever taken – and set to work writing Shine. Some of the songs on the album are brand new; others are reworked from Jesso’s huge folder of unused ideas that he’s amassed over the past decade. The first song he finished was the album’s opening track, Waiting Around, a scorching postmortem of his breakup: “You were upset / Every other morning / Like a sharp knife / Had me dancing on edge,” he sings. In recent years, pop has been dominated by tabloid-baiting pop that tempts listeners into trying to work out the real-life narrative behind the songs: think Olivia Rodrigo’s Drivers License, about a real-life love triangle, or Lily Allen’s recently released, much discussed West End Girl, a tell-all about her divorce from the actor David Harbour. Jesso says that he “didn’t want to fall on any tricks” when it came to writing about his personal life. “I didn’t want to use names or any little dates or stuff: I wanted to make it for me, a song that I felt like 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 fuck! It’s amazing that I did that.’” I want to find the artists who want to get a little bit more unique, not just chase something that’s already been done One song on the album – the dramatic, intense I Love You, which builds to a clattering maelstrom – had a less conventional genesis. During a reading from Wendy L’Belle-Tividad, an LA psychic whose client list includes a number of high-profile musicians, Jesso was told that there was a song missing from Shine, which was “really dramatic”. The next time he was sitting at the piano, he wrote I Love You, undeniably the loudest and most dramatic song he’s ever written, building to an intense, alarming climax that sounds like a door slamming over and over. “That’s my favourite song I’ve written to date,” he says. “But here’s the thing: I’m like, was it inception or was it a psychic reading?” While Shine does bear great resemblance to Goon – which definitely has something to do with Jesso’s distinctive, pleading timbre – it’s also undeniably the work of someone who has been in the pop trenches for the better part of a decade, in part because of the poppy structure of the songs and in part because of credited collaborators such as Tommy King and Julian Bunetta, fixtures of the LA pop scene. While Jesso says that, for the most part, he tried to ignore his big-budget pop instincts, he credits Justin Bieber, with whom Jesso worked on his recent albums Swag and Swag II, as a bolstering force. “The sessions with Justin were right before I wrote this stuff, and he is the most insane, courageous artist – [he’ll] just get on a mic and start singing something, and it sounds like a song. It just happens so naturally,” he says. “[Working with him] was so raw compared with these pop sessions where they’re like: ‘What’s on the Top 40?’ – there was no trickery. It was mind-boggling that at his level, he was doing something that I was scared to do. It changed my perspective on a lot of things.” Those kinds of sessions, he says, are rare. “I’m still disenchanted with how a lot of pop music gets made – it’s a little bit of a cop-out. I’ve been party to it as well, so I can safely say I also am embarrassed about being party to it,” he says. “I feel very grateful for [being] able to work with artists that I don’t feel like would ever put themselves into that sort of deplorable writing; the artists I choose to write with would also kind of cringe at a few of those Top 40 songs.” He continues: “I’m not dogging anyone for writing pop songs in any way, you know? Write all the pop songs you want. Maybe it is about money.” Jesso does not name names, but it’s easy enough to conjure the kind of music he’s talking about: disposable, trend-chasing pop that’s heavily reliant on samples or references, or which simply rehashes older, well-trodden ideas. “I want to find the artists who don’t agree with that and maybe want to get a little bit more unique and push a little bit 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, the Brit School graduate whose second album, The Art of Loving, released in September, is one of the year’s genuine breakout records. Dean recently sold out four dates at the O2 in London, with two more on their way there; Man I Need, a 70s-ish lounge single co-written by Jesso, peaked at No 5 on the US Hot 100 chart. “Olivia is a great example of … Some people you just meet and you just go: ‘You got it – you’re a force,’” he says. “You can see when someone carries their own integrity and their own assurance of what they’re doing, and for a songwriter, that’s the most exciting thing. Somebody who’s very strong in their opinion is like a godsend to me.” Even so, Jesso says artists such as Bieber and Dean are probably outliers. “I don’t know that the pendulum seems like it’s gonna swing back to like, 70s-style songwriting or quality – putting it in for the craft – with AI and everything that’s happening now,” he says. “It’s gonna get a lot worse. People are already using AI for everything, so it’s like: cool now it’s not even gonna be human.” Although Jesso prefers to be the only songwriter in a room with an artist, there are exceptions where he doesn’t mind being one of a handful of credited songwriters, as was the case when working on Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism. “Going in with Dua and getting to work with Dua, and getting to work with Kevin [Parker of Tame Impala], getting to work 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, working in France with Bieber and his collaborators. “Usually when you see 10 names on a song, you’re going: ‘Probably four of those didn’t do shit. Or just changed a word.’ But those motherfuckers put themselves on the line for all of those songs – every name on there is a name that should be on there.” Working on Shine hasn’t changed the fact that Jesso still wants to keep his day job as a behind-the-scenes songwriter, though he’s due for another upheaval. He’s about to move to a farm he owns in Byron Bay, Australia, where he plans to spend half the year in order to be close to his son, who’s about to start school there. “I’ve got a few close friends close by, which is really good, but it’s going to be a big new start and a big change. I guess there’s a lot of space for not really knowing if it’s going to be filled with joy or sadness,” he says. “Over the last five years, I’ve tried 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 just all work – it was an obsession, almost. This is sort of a big test: can I handle months of life without too much work?” Shine won’t require too much of the stuff he hated circa Goon – he’s doing few interviews and will probably only play one or two shows, “just to show people the songs … like, three-song sets”, he says. “I don’t know that performing will ever be me; it just doesn’t feel like something that’s ever me. I don’t think I see myself in front of an audience,” he says. “I’m getting ready and prepared for the move, but you know, if I’m like, depressed in Australia, I’m gonna have my piano – maybe I write a bunch more songs, maybe I don’t.” Or, to put it even more succinctly: “I think 10 years away for me is pretty comfortable.” Shine is out now.