José González gave Mesa’s rowdiest a light in the darkness

At the intersection of melt-your-face Spanish guitaring and angel-feather lullabies you’ll find José González, looking back at you from a solo stage with his crop of curls back-lit. On his Against the Dying of the Light Tour, which brought him to the Mesa Arts Center on Sept. 18, he continues to hypnotize as a one-man road show. If you missed it, I am sorry for you, because his is the sort of talent that will have you believing damn near anything is possible with a microphone and six strings, especially when you can sing in English, Spanish and Swedish, and your voice sounds as pure as fresh frost against a windowpane.

The set was brisk, probably not 90 minutes. Latecomers perhaps accustomed to straggling in during an opener were caught stumbling in by cellphone light to shuffle down the rows. González, in dark jeans and a dark jacket, tapped his boots on the wooden stage and sang alone, with occasional bits of backing audio, before a wall-sized scrim depicting the cover of his latest of five solo albums, “Against the Dying of the Light,” which came out in March.

Notwithstanding the light pluck and carefree whistling of his Spanish-language “Pajarito,” about a little bird’s journey away from the nest, the rest of González’s set tilts heavy, lightened only by his virtuosic guitaring and his unmistakable tenor. He played “Lovestain,” and “Down the Line,” whose refrain — “don’t let the darkness eat you up” — has made it a staple of González’s catalog for nearly 20 years, and a fit against newer tracks such as the pulsing “Losing Game (Sick)”: “When did we get distracted? / When did we lose our grip? / When did we turn on each other?” 

González offers more questions than attempted solutions, a strong lane for a musician. While no one ever seems to overtly sign onto the pro-dying of the light camp, 2026 does seem an apt year to release an album whose title decries it. González’s music doesn’t skew as overtly political as, say, Nipsey Hussle’s. Rather, his success as the child of immigrants who fled Argentina’s Dirty War in the ‘70s. Sweden took them in; González was born there; and he is Argentina’s loss. He’s now a world-class genius at songwriting, singing and guitar-playing who might by now have a doctorate in biology had he not dropped out to pursue music.

Among his many gifts are the ability to distill bangin’ tracks by his electropop and trance contemporaries into the more haunting, enduring versions. On Friday he played his cover of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” and the Knife’s “Heartbeats,” both of which surpass the already exceptional originals. His stripped-down renditions peel away the bass and synths to reveal the gorgeous melodies at their core, and one resonate voice and a single guitar carrying them. You may not have lived through the regime of a Christian-values military dictator who purged left-wing political opponents by having them kidnapped, blindfolded, and shoved out of cargo planes two miles above the Atlantic Ocean. Nonetheless, during your current political situation, you may feel a kinship with people like Argentinians of González’s parents’ generation, or Americans of past generations, who stood up to feverishly violent-minded killers who claimed to be the light even as they commanded the darkness.

The thousand-or-so-strong audience in the Tom and Janet Ikeda Theater ate it up. People screamed out between songs, calling with a sort of cowboy-inflected Arizona yowl that borders on ululation. The enthusiasm buoyed what could’ve felt like a sober set. González at one point gave a small “thank you, Mesa,” and then paused. “It feels weird,” he continued, “to say ‘thank you, table.’”