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Matthew Sweet no blue skies Now here's someone I've wanted to meet for a long time. I've enjoyed Matthew's work going back to his appearance on a Golden Palominos album back in the mid-'80s (I think it was Blast Of Silence). Not long after that, his debut album (Inside) was released on Columbia, followed by some label-hopping and lots of obscurity (you should get his 2nd LP, Earth, if you can find it!). You all know about the career-saving Girlfriend CD and things have been looking up from there. His latest album, Blue Sky On Mars, wasn't a big hit, but it turned out to be a pretty strong album. This interview happened in the back of the Matthew Sweet tour bus (impressed?) back in the summer of 1997. Thanks to Karl Munzel for making it happen. (Note: In case you didn't know, Matthew's also a veteran of the mid-'80s Athens scene as a member of the bands Oh-OK and The Buzz Of Delight. I used to listen to those bands in my college radio days without having a damn idea who Matthew Sweet was! If I knew then what I know now...) Smartass: You've got a Mars theme on the cover of the album. Are you a big sci-fi fan? Matthew: I am, kind of. I'm into natural sciences as well. I was into astronomy when I was a kid. I called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory the first time we had landers on Mars in 1976, when I was 11, because I wanted a photo of the surface of Mars. So I've had this big panoramic photo of Mars over my desk since I was a kid. I got it in my head last year when the possible life in the Martian meteroite thing happened. I started thinking about those photos again. I thought maybe I'd put them on my album cover as a tribute. I went over to JPL-I thought it was cool they were sending another lander-although they've lost a lot of missions to Mars. There are a bunch of Russian landers that never made it. There was a billion dollar one called Mars Observer that went a couple of years ago that never made it. I wasn't banking on it getting there on the Fourth of July, but it was exciting when it did. I felt that it somehow validated my album cover. People think it's weird and confusing. I'd like to think that maybe now, some people know it's the surface of Mars. People look at the whole thing and they don't realize that's what it is. SA: You got Roger Dean [he did album covers for Yes] to do the lettering. How did you get him? Matthew: Well, think how much people would have been bugged if I'd gotten him to do the whole album cover! I was a big Yes fan when I was in sixth and seventh grade. I learned to play bass from Chris Squire bass lines. The Yes thing gets reinforced by Brendan and Nick, my co-producer and engineer. Nick is a giant Yes/prog-rock fan. He's exactly from that era, maybe a couple of years older than me. Nick brought in some of their albums to the studio and we were talking about how great Roger Dean was. I thought maybe I could get him to do logos for me 'cause I really wanted to get an organic, trippy sort of writing to go with the stark sceince photos. I thought a lot of people won't really know too much about Roger Dean The people who do will go "oh, Roger Dean!" I think he was sort of bugged that he didn't do the whole album cover. I was interested in him doing the whole thing, but as it turned out we were in such a time crunch by the time he got working on it, he wouldn't have had time to do a painting, anyway. By that time I was really into the Mars photos-I had it all in my head. SA: Did you have space as a theme? For example, "Missing Time" which is something that UFO abductees experience. Matthew: It's definitely a play on that whole thing. In fact, it was writing the song "Missing Time" that made me think "maybe I could make a whole space vibe for my record." I don't think it's really a space record. I've always put things I'm into in the artwork and all that. I felt that it worked anyway with some of the little synthesizer sounds and things. SA: Talking about synthesizers [pulls out a copy of Inside], there are a lot of them all over this record. Matthew: But not cheesy, goofy synthesizers-more like those modern mid-'80s synths. But I haven't listened to that record in a long time, so maybe it's closer to the '70s than I think. SA: It really does have that late '80s sound. Compared to what you do today, it's very much of that time. Matthew: When I first got into getting record deals, I was programming all the drums on the computer. I wanted to live in my time and be futuristic. I was really into Scritti Politti when they did their ultra-high-tech records. I wanted to be new and fresh, so I was interested in technology. Over time, I grew bored with it. When I started doing stuff that was really raw and direct-guitar, bass and drums-it just felt really great to me, novel at the time. That's where Girlfriend came out of, me just getting into being totally organic. Then there was a "no keyboard" rule, it could only be acoustic piano for a few records. I started to get intersted in really old synthesizers, and started to think they sounded cool. I figured I could play them by hand and it would still be organic. SA: They fit in pretty well with the new album. "Where You Get Love" and "Come To California" for example. You write a lot of songs with nice, poppy melodies but the lyrics: "Someone To Pull The Trigger" or "Sick Of Myself." Matthew, what's wrong? Matthew: I don't know, I write a lot of songs about feelings about life and different ways of looking at it. I get melancholy now and then. I suppose most people do. If you have much awareness about your life and what's going on as you get older, you're filled with horror and depression and everything. I've always expressed those things when I'm feeling them. That's just what feels real to me. I think that my new record is more positive. Since Altered Beast, they've gotten a little more positive. Maybe as I've gotten older, I've really tried to enjoy my life. I don't want to be miserable all the time! Having said that, whenever I get in one of those modes when I'm all happy and positive about things, I'm always set up for the giant crash. Like when I made this record I really thought "it's a fun record, it's cool." And then the first thing I read, it's completely trashed in Rolling Stone, who have always been pretty nice about records of mine. That was a big bringdown. In a way, this whole years has been weird. I've really swung back to complete melancholy, more so than I think I expected to. It's more like "God, what was I thinking that I could really be positive?" But on the other hand what can you do? I think I'm writing more melancholy songs now than in the last couple of years. SA: One review of Blue Sky On Mars mentioned disappointment about how short it was. Matthew: It's one of the things I loved about it! It's a lot longer than Sgt. Pepper; it's like 10 minutes longer! [laughs] Not to compare it to Sgt. Pepper. Someone else pointed it out to me: "Don't feel bad, all records used to be short, back when they were good!" This is one that came together pretty short. I was glad. I was like "wow, all right, I made a concise record!" SA: Who do you have playing on this record? Matthew: It's all people I've played with before. There's Ric Menck and Stewart Johnson, who play all the drums on the record. They were both on 100% Fun and Ric's been on all my records. Other than that, it's me and Brendan [O'Brien] and Tony [?] plays bass on a song. It's my least-other-people record. I got attacked a lot for Richard [Lloyd] and Robert [Quine] not being on it. Robert was so jealous of how much Richard was on 100% Fun that he hasn't talked to me since then. In Richard's case, I love him and we're still friends, but it was time to do something different. SA: I wanted to ask you about the Best Buy single that was released. How does something like this happen? Matthew: There was another one for Circuit City that had some different songs on it. This one is funny because they gave Ric wriitng credit on "If It's Happening You'll Know It." I didn't have a lot to do with the CD. I probably said "what do we have?" Out of all the stuff on there, "If It's Happening," I just wanted that song to see the light of day. "Vicious Circle" is a demo from this album, but we never recorded it in the studio. I have 50 demos of songs that I didn't use on this album. SA: You've been on Zoo/Volcano for a few years, and they seem to be treating you pretty well. Before that, you were jumping around a lot (Columbia, A&M). Was that out of frustration with the whole process? Matthew: It was more like not keeping deals because I wasn't selling any records! Volcano is really only for this record, it's basically a whole different label [from Zoo]. I think that it's likely before too long that I'll be going to another label. I'm near the end of my deal. I get the feeling that it's time for a clean slate, try something different. I'm not convinced that a bigger label will necessarily be good for me, but I feel like we gotta try it sometime. I dream of being on the tiniest indie label where they don't make me do anything and I don't have to be in the rat race so much. But then, how would I make my living and pay my mortgage? I guess I have to just keep trying. SA: I wanted to ask you about Buzz Of Delight. Any plans to rerelease the Soundcastles EP? Matthew: I don't know. I'm not so sure it's not still available from DB Records. Over the years, they would make more and put them out. It's a thing I really don't know too much about. We talk a lot with Danny Beard, who started DB Records, about putting out a Buzz Of Delight album. There's two versions of an album that came after this. We talk about making a big CD with all that stuff on it, but we've just never gotten to that point. It's one of things that we'll do someday, and it'll really be ancient history then. There are two versions of the album that aren't all the same songs. It never came out. The second version was what I got my deal with Columbia from. SA: So it was squashed by the label? Matthew: Well, they said "we think you should be a singer-songwriter and use your real name and we'll give you money to move to New York for a year to write songs." So my whole thing changed then. I was just saying to Bob the Volcano rep the other day "what if I could just stop being me and just have a title?" Get away from the meanness of it. It might be too late to do that. Interview by Rob Galgano, originally printed in You Could Do Worse magazine. |
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