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 Gothenburg musician of Argentine descent, stripped it down 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 250,000 coloured rubber balls bounced down the hills of San Francisco, set to Gonzalez's version. The pairing of the song's gentle melancholy with the slow-motion cascade of colour was so striking that people chased down the track for years afterward. 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.