Ramona Gonzalez is perhaps one of the last great Myspace success stories. Beginning to record under the Nite Jewel alias in 2008, one of the songs posted to her Myspace page, ‘Suburbia’ soon ended up on the soundtrack for Noah Baumbach’s film, Greenberg, and a significant amount of hype followed shortly after. It is easy to see why. Her debut album, Good Evening, is a gem of lo-fi pop song-writing, with Gonzalez’s abilities as a musician distinguishing her from the crowd of fuzzy, 4-track chancers that had sprung up at the time. Clearly in thrall to classic pop radio, the hooks were buried in production that left a lot to the imagination, creating a space for whatever mood you were in to flourish.
There have been several releases since then, but only this year did a second album appear, the altogether slicker and more confident One Second Of Love. The experience of a few years of gigs and the freedom to work in a professional studio, though still with husband Cole M. Greif-Neill on production duties, means that Gonzalez’s second LP is a much more in-your-face affair, truly bringing to mind the big pop productions of Madonna, without ever losing the darkness of her earlier work. As she says herself, this does not sound like what’s on the radio.
“I was just listening to a lot of music at the time that had a certain type of sound and I wanted to get that sound,” she says. “I mean, the record doesn’t really sound like stuff on the radio necessarily, it kind of sounds like productions from an older time. That was kind of what we were going for. We actually had the place to record instruments like that this time, like live drums and stuff like that. I’d never had the chance to do that in the past.”
Despite describing the murky vocals of Good Evening as the product of being shy, Gonzalez shows no hesitation in moving into the ultra-crisp high-fidelity found on One Second Of Love.
“I’ve been a musician for a long time and I’ve recorded in a lot of different ways,” she says. “Good Evening was not the first thing I ever recorded. I’m not one of these hipsters that sat down with an 8-track and that’s the first music I ever made. I’ve been making music since I was five years old so for me music exists in a lot of different ways, like it exists in a church, it exists in a really fancy studio, it exists on 8-track and it doesn’t have a trajectory where the origins happen to be something lo-fi. The lo-fi thing was one blip in a long history for me.”
That history, in some ways, started in Oakland, where Gonzalez grew up. After playing in trashy rock and roll bands for a while, she moved to New York for college, though that didn’t particularly suit her either.
“It’s a little bit, what’s the word I’m looking for, highfalutin or something like that?” she says. “Also the amount of work that I could do in New York was very minimal because it was so expensive. In LA, it’s not only cheap, it’s a place that doesn’t dwell on anything. It’s a live and let live kind of place, and the music reflects that in being sort of light. It’s dark and deep but it’s not pretentious to me. Anyways, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to describe, because we’re still recording in LA so it’s a big part of what we do and it’s hard for me to really say.”
LA has since become an important part of her life, with many friends to call on and work with also living in the west coast city. The history of the west coast is also a source of huge inspiration, with Harry Nilson, Brian Wilson and even New York ex-pat Stephin Merritt coming into play.
“Stephin Merritt,” says Gonzalez. “I used to see him in bars in New York and he was such a big influence on me. I definitely don’t see that as New York music, even though he lived there and I know that’s part of what he is. I feel like Magnetic Fields is totally LA. I don’t know what he was influenced by, but that music is so light-hearted but so well crafted and that to me is emblematic of LA music.”
Brian Wilson is also a vital figure in Gonzalez’s impression of pop music, and a key factor in why she thinks it’s something of an un-tameable beast.
“I don’t think that pop music really cares if some snotty academic looks down on it because it’s making too much money to really give a shit,” she says. “Not only is it making too much money to give a shit, it exists happily in its own realm. That’s not to say that Brian Wilson wasn’t totally worried about the fact that he thought his music was too commercial. He definitely did and that’s why he made Pet Sounds, because he thought it was more experimental and more true to what he felt. I think people, at least certain people, still think Pet Sounds sounds commercial. But for him, he didn’t think so and that’s what’s cool.”
The same feeling runs through Gonzalez’s opinion of her latest album, with the slick production designed to hide the musical curve-balls within.
“One Second Of Love, for me, especially the way it was recorded, is extremely obscure and inaccessible, a lot of the songs,” she says. “But what’s cool is that because I’m not afraid to make pop music or make things straight forward, because I live in LA where lots of music is straight forward and nobody gives a shit, I can make this really weird record with all these really weird songs and I can put it out in the most polished fashion so more people can consume it without knowing it’s pretty strange.”
Trying to maintain the balance between challenging work and pop sensibility is something that can make for stressful artistic situations, no doubt exasperated by working alone a lot of the time. Does the solitude of the solo artist ever get to Gonzalez?
“Fuck yeah! I drive myself fucking crazy. I mean seriously, I’ll go crazy!,” she says. “Especially seeing as I live in a remote location in Los Angeles. I’ve been living here for about two years and since One Second Of Love was released, I’ve been writing a lot of music and I drive myself completely crazy, in my own house mulling over idea. I think that’s just natural in a way actually. A lot of my friends… Like I used to go over to Ariel’s house after he’d been alone for maybe 24 hours and you’d go into his house and he’d just be surrounded by papers and shit. I think it’s a natural thing when you’re alone and trying to make something really great.
Of course, Gonzalez rarely works totally alone and, especially on One Second Of Love, the presence of other musicians is always a comfort and an inspiration.
“Yeah, I mean, fuck, I’m glad to be working with other people because it’s definitely an important thing to break you out of your element,” she says. “Even beyond that, just being with others. I mean, going to parties, going out, seeing shows, hanging out with other artists, it’s exceedingly important, now more than ever. There could be these hermetic, reclusive bedroom artists back in the day and that was seen as something unusual, a person who would never go outside. Maybe like Charles Bukowski or something at one period in his life. You’d go there and there’s empty wine bottles everywhere and it’s very romantic. Now it’s not like that anymore. Now it’s romantic to go out and be around people, that’s the unusual thing.”
