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Last year, Tobias Jesso Jr. quietly made one of the best songs of the year. It wasn’t on some forward-thinking “he’s got next” kind of thing. Listening to “Just A Dream” felt like discovering a relic that you weren’t ever meant to hear. It was special. A lo-fi demo with just vocals and an out-of-tune piano, the song struck a powerful chord that you don’t hear often in modern music.
We don’t know exactly what’s coming up for Tobias Jesso Jr. He’s working on an album, but what’s the next step? How do you bottle something like this? It’s like looking at an old photo album, a bittersweet feeling that cuts deep in a beautiful and human way. If you master a song like “Just A Dream,” it surely loses part of what makes it so great. It’s like Photoshopping all your childhood pictures to look brighter and cleaner.
Before any album release or glossy final product, Tobias decided to release another demo. This one is called “True Love,” and it’s proof that “Just A Dream” wasn’t some stroke of luck. Tobias is such a skilled songwriter that he very well may be capable of producing an album full of more polished songs, but to be honest, it’s hard to imagine anything much better than this. In a time when autotuned voices and audiophile-friendly recordings are the norm, Tobias Jesso Jr.’s demos are some of the most compelling songs we’ve got. Here’s “True Love.”
