Fresh from his Number 1 with 'Mad World', Gary Jules is out to prove he is not just for Christmas, writes Tony Clayton-Lea
Even if he turns out to be a one-hit wonder whose best-known song is a cover from the soundtrack to a cult movie, LA singer/ songwriter Gary Jules is laughing. Perhaps not all the way to the bank, but certainly to a time-locked vault where he stores large amounts of self-satisfaction and validation.
Four months ago, Jules's version of Tears For Fears' Mad World made the kind of stealthy assault on the pop charts that no one could ever have imagined.
The term "sleeper hit" might have been invented for such a surreptitious journey, but these days Jules - heretofore a jobbing musician selling his self-financed records through the Internet and at his gigs - is very much in the land of the wide-awake mainstream. Aware that some people will be venturing to his gigs just to hear the hit song, he realises the fair-weather contingent will come and go. What he hopes to grasp and not let go are people who have become intrigued by his own music, as evidenced on his most recent album, Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets, and on his rather more muscular début, Greetings From The Side.
Gary Jules is sitting on the window seat at Whelans, the Dublin venue he played recently, perfectly positioned to pose for stray tourists and their handy cameras.
Wearing a Donegal tweed cap ("I'm bald, so my head either gets very hot or cold, and when I'm in a country with extremes of temperatures I wear appropriate headgear," he says very sensibly.)
He is pondering on his recent surprise success: "Is Mad World an albatross or a blessing? Well, it hasn't turned out to be an albatross yet, and to be honest I don't think I'll ever look at it that way. I can't imagine telling you how the success of the song has changed my life as a working singer/songwriter. In the UK and Ireland, there are only so many times you can play without becoming boring to people. In the US, you can play in venues from New York to Los Angeles and by the time you reach LA it's almost time to head back to New York to start all over again. That way you can make a good living."
By no means an overnight sensation, Jules has existed on the fringes of LA's songwriting community for more than 10 years. Starting out with the likes of Elliot Smith, Aimee Mann, Michael Penn and Rufus Wainwright in LA's Irish-owned Café Largo, Jules slowly graduated to a major label signing that quickly went pear-shaped. A long-time friendship with Mike Andrews eventually resulted in his cover of Mad World being included on the Andrews-created soundtrack for the cult movie Donnie Darko. Clearly, serendipity is a word that Gary Jules very much likes the sound of.
Yet Jules comes across as the no-fool type, a person too mature to be sucked into the instant fame game. He realises the kind of instant success his hit single has given him is one of those once-in-a-career occurrences. Aligning the luck/ destiny factor with his own dogged determination, he looks to the future as a means of independent fulfilment rather than taking brazen advantage of his current, quite likely fickle, mainstream success.
"The worst thing about my writing is that I cannot for the life of me write ditty-type songs. I'm not as serious a guy as my songs are - although I find my style of writing is best exemplified in sad, sappy and reflective material.
"When I started writing Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets, I wanted to fulfil my ambition of creating an anti-epic about Hollywood. It stemmed from my love of English literature, with works such as The Canterbury Tales or Paradise Lost. All humanity is in there - life and death, fart jokes, screwing around with your friends, people who are power-hungry and who, once they get power, will exercise that power whether they need to or not. The human condition, essentially.
"I like to skirt the line of duality, and explore the reasons behind why we cry when we're happy, and why we laugh when we're sad. I mean, why do men want women to be angels and whores at the same time? Why is it that, in this world of the super-tech information highway, people for the most part use the Internet to look for and at pornography? The duality between the modern and the primal is fascinating to me."
In LA and every other city in the world, says Jules in an over-earnest manner that is perhaps the trademark of someone who has been trying a long time to be heard, there are corporate buildings where the masters of industry work.
"Yet on the streets below those buildings there are people who sell drugs and sex. Part of us defer to the profound, yet because of our instincts, our nature, we're animals. We hover somewhere between those two levels and we rarely get grounded in either one. Overall, I think there's something quite beautiful about that."
Jules knows it's not such a black-and-white world out there. From a distance, he avers, not every story is beautiful; nothing is only bad or only good. It is this dichotomy in the itchy human fabric he attempts to explore and project in his songs. What is thought but not expressed is for him, he says, exactly what songwriting is about. There are certain things, too, that everybody does but which no one talks about.
"On a fine day," he says, having just smiled and waved good-naturedly to a camera-toting, passing fan, "I'll find one of those and make it into a song." Nice guy makes good for a change? Gratifyingly, sometimes the world awards people who deserve success. He should lose that hat, though.
"And on a perfect day, someone listening to that song will identify with it."
Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets is on the Sanctuary label