Heartbeats

Heartbeats is not a Jose Gonzalez original. It was written and first recorded by the Swedish electronic duo The Knife as a pulsing synth-pop track. Gonzalez, a Swedish musician of Argentine descent, stripped it down for his 2003 debut album Veneer to a single nylon-string guitar and a close, almost whispered vocal, and in doing so found something the original had kept hidden. What turned a quiet cover into an international moment was an advertisement. In 2005 Sony released a commercial for its Bravia televisions in which countless coloured balls bounced down the hills of San Francisco, set to Gonzalez's version. The pairing of the song's gentle melancholy with the cascade of colour was so striking that the cover climbed to number nine on the UK Singles Chart. The story is a small lesson in how songs travel. The Knife wrote it, Gonzalez reimagined it, and a television advert carried it around the world, to the point where many listeners have no idea the hushed acoustic version they love is a cover at all.