In 2012, a mostly-unknown musician in Los Angeles named Tobias Jesso Jr.got dumped by his girlfriend. Shortlyafter, he washit by a car while riding his bike.He survived; the bike didn’t.The next day, he found out his mom had cancer. He put his instruments in a storage unit and bought a plane ticket home to Vancouver to be with her. While there, he started writing songs at the piano. And, practically the minute he put them out into the world, they got praised by the big musicblogs,Adele, and Jimmy Fallon:

Jesso’sstory is made even more unlikely when you consider that he was a novice at the piano. “My sister had a piano at my parents’ house,” he says. “When I got the impulse to write a song, I just sat at the piano and note-by-note figured it out.” Nevertheless, the songwriterimmediately felt more comfortable on piano than he had as a guitar player. “It was a lot easier, because it was sort of a more linear type of understanding,” he says. “Bottom to top. Guitar never made much sense.”

Jesso’s first album, Goon, is out now, and critics have drawn comparisons to John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and a host of other 1970s singer-songwriters. But Jesso had never really listened to them. He’s more of an Adele fan, which made herenthusiastic tweetabout him that much sweeter.