Studio 360

Jose Gonzalez actually covered that song, Heartbeats. it is originally by another Swedish (and awesome) group called The Knife.

Hi Valerie,

Thanks for writing - I did know that the song was a cover, but didn't have time to mention it in the piece. (when I said "his song" I meant in the sense that he performed it, even though he didn't write it) I agree that The Knife is awesome! So many Swedes so little time...

Leital

Hello Leital,

I appreciated the concept of this piece but feel you made a huge error in attributing "Heartbeats" to Jose Gonzales. I was at studio with five swedish design colleagues here in New York, and your gaff had everybody literally yelling at the radio.

:D

The creators of the original version of this song, brother and sister duo, The Knife have been much more INFLUENTIAL to the international music scene over the past few years—their vocalist Karin Dreijer appearing on a track of a recent Royksopp album, the remix of which also jumpstarted mega crunchy techno Danish DJ Trentemoller's career.

(cont'd)

If anything, the arrangement Jose Gonzales did of heartbeats was a much safer, pared down acoustic piece (which I guess made it perfect for an American commercial broadcast spot). It was about as inspired as John Mayer or that other soft singing guy, Jack Johnson they lampooned recently on SNL. The real reason this the cover version was a hit is because of the melody and doesn't have much to do with Jose Gonzales' skills as a songwriter.

To anybody in Europe (most notably in the music capital BERLIN), The Knife version is much more recognizable. There was a time a couple years ago, where every Scandinavian musician I knew had this lush, raspy electro pop masterpiece on heavy rotation of their ipod. You could have gotten much more to the root of things here. I really think you missed an opportunity!

I know your heart was in the right place, but please realize that you just did the equivalent of attributing "I Saw Her Standing There" to Debby Gibson.