JOSÉ LOBO’S DEBUT LP, IN ALL GOOD HOPE, OUT TODAY VIA VICTORY POOL RECORDS
BUY / STREAM IN ALL GOOD HOPE HERE
WATCH / SHARE “QUIERO ESCULPIR MI VIDA” HERE
ANNOUNCES LIVE PERFORMANCE DATES
Photo Credit : Colin Medley // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Today, José Lobo’s debut LP, In All Good Hope, is available everywhere courtesy of Victory Pool Records. To mark the occasion, Lobo is sharing one final track from the album, “Quiero esculpir mi vida”. “It’s a song based on the word main-tenant in French which when separated means to hold hands and I thought of this idea of holding hands with the present, to be the sculptor of one’s life, the lyrics are about accepting what I have while searching for what I want and always being able to be present which is really hard at times,” says Lobo. “The song is quite simple in that it is mostly guitar and later joined in by strings, synths, and piano. My album comes out with this song and this song hopes to be a summary of a lot of what the album represents, of all the memories it holds.”
The song arrived with a video that was made in parts with the footage made by Alfonso Briceño at a show Jose played at the lost church in San Francisco this April and parts from the bank of memories of Jose’s phone going as far as spring 2019. “Recently I accidentally deleted my WhatsApp which contained twelve years of pictures, conversations, etc. Since then I have been more and more adamant about returning to my bank of memories and decided to edit a music video for the first time,” says Lobo. “The interlude for the album is a recording I made of a VHS tape of my grandmother Hilda Arria singing a bolero she wrote. She was always singing when I was a kid and unfortunately, by the time I picked up music, she was entering her last days. During the lockdown, I found this VHS tape of her singing and decided to record myself on top of her singing so I was able to sing with her in her future/my present. This is the first time I put clips of my family in a video as well so this video represents a big withdrawal from my bank of memories. I hope people can see their own memories in the idiosyncrasies of my own. In all good Hope."
WATCH / SHARE “QUIERO ESCULPIR MI VIDA” HERE
BUY / STREAM IN ALL GOOD HOPE HERE
MORE ABOUT JOSÉ LOBO AND IN ALL GOOD HOPE
In All Good Hope, the debut album from singer, songwriter, and musician José Lobo, is a masterclass in intimacy, everything about it exuding a sense of closeness. From the highly personal lyrical themes and sparse, delicate instrumentation, to the singing, which sounds like a friend whispering a secret into your ear, the experience of listening to In All Good Hope is akin to entering an inner sanctum, or what Lobo aptly refers to as “a reverie of the quotidian.”
Originally hailing from Venezuela, Lobo has spent the better part of the last decade in a somewhat nomadic mode, splitting his time between his current homebase of Montreal, San Francisco's Mission District, Paris, and also Hamilton, Ontario, where much of the album was recorded.
Tellingly, In All Good Hope opens with a creak, perhaps an old chair or some well-worn floorboards, and easily maintains this relaxed, cozy sense of presence as Lobo weaves through these hushed, multilingual songs. The bulk of the album is centred around his nylon-string guitar and mellifluous vocal style, which is always mixed right up front, capturing every breath and nuance. The astute listener may pick up a strong scent of bossa nova, which is no accident, as Lobo developed a great love for the '60s Brazilian genre while living in the city of Belo Horizonte during his teenage years. There are also shades of Tropicalia, bossa nova's slightly more adventurous younger sibling, and to that end, one might recall the similarly inspired singer Devendra Banhart and the warmly psychedelic ‘freak folk’ movement of the '00s, Brazilian legend Caetano Veloso, fellow nylon string player José Gonzales, Toronto-based singer and producer Sandro Perri, and contemporary Brazilian artist Rodrigo Amarante, whose solo and band work has provided deep wells of inspiration for Lobo.
WATCH / SHARE “TBTBNM (todo bien todo bien nada mal)” HERE
And though the album is a veritable linguistic bouquet – sung in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English – its themes create a cohesive through line. “The album is sort of like a book of short stories,” Lobo says, “made up of day-to-day moments and observations of my surroundings.” The opening track “se deter pra entender” acts here as a prologue of sorts, asking the listener to stop and “understand that the syllables count”, while gentle cascades of harp, synth, and softly strummed guitar float beneath. For Lobo, the song – and indeed the album as a whole – is about “the weight of our words, words that remain inside us and those that exist in the world.” Written largely over the course of 2020, the songs were Lobo's “attempts to find some magic in my day-to-day life, as it became more and more routine and closed off by the pandemic.” A perfect metaphor here is the song “agujeros”, which paints a picture of Sasha the family dog, whose daily quest for little slivers of sunlight around the house “was a fundamental part of keeping my family sane.”
WATCH / SHARE “SI VALE LA PENA DECIR QUE SI” HERE
Though the album is largely a solo affair, there are key collaborators at play throughout. Lobo became familiar with Hamilton-based singer-songwriter Scott Orr through mutual appreciation and the magic of Bandcamp, and the core elements of the album were recorded at his studio, largely through a vintage 1950s ribbon microphone. Alongside Montreal-based producer Victor Zhang, Lobo fleshed out the rest of the album in his bedroom with warm, hazy synth pads, and judicious sprinklings of hand percussion, bass, flute, harp, and string arrangements. Many of these elements were recorded remotely by guest musicians from around the world, and their international provenance speaks to Lobo's years of travelling and connecting with like-minded artists. After graduating from university, Lobo lived in San Francisco's Mission District for a spell, and his time there was fruitful, leading to work in theatre penning the music for Andreina Maldonado's Our Work Our Dignity, a play exploring the realities of immigrant workers in the city. But it was his friendship with songwriter and social activist Diana Gameros that initially drew him there, and in a neat full-circle swoop, she contributes the elegant second vocal on the track “lista pa la carrera”.
Lobo says that many of the songs were written as “an homage to the morning, my favourite time of day,” and like those slivers of sunlight that Sasha chased around the living room each day, In All Good Hope will warmly illuminate whatever situation it may occupy, making good on its title (borrowed from poet Ralph Waldo Emerson's sign-off in his letters), and Lobo's vision of “holding hands with the present”, an image he found “so soothing, but also really hard to attain”. This album will make that just a little bit easier.
BUY / STREAM IN ALL GOOD HOPE HERE
JOSÉ LOBO LIVE PERFORMANCE DATES:
November 10 - Montreal - De Stiil Bookstore
November 17 - Hamilton - The Printed Word
November 24 - Toronto - Tibet St Records.
IN ALL GOOD HOPE TRACKLIST
01 se deter pra entender
02 TBTBNM (todo bien todo bien nada mal)
03 pajarita
04 lista pa la carrera
05 abuela canta su bolero y yo la acompaño en su futuro / mi presente
06 nuevos dias
07 Quiero esculpir mi vida
08 meteors
09 agujeros
10 si vale la pena decir que si