Throughout the first half of the ’90s, Matthew Sweet was perhaps the preeminent purveyor of left-of-center pop, generating a rabid fan base and racking up a pair of gold records with 1991’s Girlfriend and 1995’s 100% Fun. A decade later, in a radically altered musical climate, Sweet has no record deal and likes it that way. In late 2003, Kimi Ga Suki* Raifu, an album he’d made specifically for Japan—and the first LP he’d produced, engineered and mixed himself—came out in extremely limited quantities through the Coalition of Independent Music Stores and sold 3,500 copies. Ironically, it was the first time in Sweet’s career that he’d made any money off record sales, but such is the nature of the mainstream music business, wherein the only artists who recoup are those who sell in the millions.
Encouraged by the CIMS experience, Sweet is putting out Kimi Ga Suki* Raifu and its similarly created follow-up, Living Things, in September on Superdeformed/RCAM, the label he formed with his longtime manager, Atlanta-based Russell Carter; these will be his first albums of new material since 1999’s In Reverse. “Living Things is step two in my homemade vision,” Sweet says. “I’m just gonna release it, and I don’t expect people to rave about it, or to sell tons of it, or for anyone to play it on the radio. I don’t expect any of those things.”
But Sweet may get more than he bargained for. The two albums recall Girlfriend and the 1993 cult classic Altered Beast in their fusion of smart, heartfelt, irony-free songs and inspired, spur-of-the-moment performances. Both feature his longtime cohorts Ric Menck (drums) and Greg Leisz (guitars). Kimi marks a reunion with Television’s Richard Lloyd, who was once Sweet’s primary guitarist (along with the late Robert Quine), while the largely acoustic Living Things features the legendary Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson’s co-author on the storied Smile album.
The records will be nationally distributed through Redline, and if their combined sales do one tenth of the total of In Reverse, his lowest-selling album, Sweet will be able to live on the revenue for a year or two. Given the present reality of the business, it’s understandable why so many onetime major label artists are contemplating self-employment.
It isn’t just the potential bottom-line that Sweet finds alluring about his new DIY approach, it’s the creative liberation that goes along with it. On a summer afternoon at his gear- and art-filled house in the hills above Hollywood, which now doubles as his studio of choice, he speaks with unbridled enthusiasm. What follows is a continuous passage prompted by a seemingly routine question about how he used Pro Tools in the recording of Kimi and Living Things. During the monologue, which flows naturally from digital methodology to reinventing himself as an artist, I’m unable to get a word in edgewise—but there are times when the best thing an interviewer can do is just zip it and keep checking to make sure the tape recorder is working properly.
“It’s all done in Pro Tools,” Sweet begins. “The variability of it makes it possible for me to do free-form things, because I can take raw stuff and there’s nothing I can’t correct. If I need to make something work or take a section and use it in two places or whatever, the editing is really comprehensive. In Pro Tools, I can select a little piece and cut it out in one second, and then a drum take that might’ve been thrown out becomes a keeper. I also use it to tune things. What’s great is I can play some crazy slide part that’s really inspired but gets out of tune in one spot and I can tune that section so it isn’t horrible—or I’ll just leave it if it doesn’t bug me. So Pro Tools really affords a level of tweaking, but it’s all little things that I tweak; I don’t make it the grid. That makes stuff really boring and mechanical.
“The cool thing about Living Things in particular is that it was done with no pressure to be normal or acceptable to anybody. Not that I ever tried to make something that way, but there was no pressure at all from outside. So I think of it as an arty record that I would never try to push as something that should have songs on the radio or anything like that. It was purely an expression of my feelings in making music and what I went through at the time. I was excited about making Living Things and the musicality of it; I think the musicians picked up on that and played in really loose, free kind of ways. There’s just something about raw.
“And so it stands now for me as a really artistic effort,” he continues, “but it stands more for how I want to approach doing work in the future. Any work I do, I want it to be more from an artistic standpoint. I just think the way the music business got really made us feel terrible about music and made me think the wrong way about it. The more I get away from the music business, the more I can see that I can still make music as vibrantly as I ever could—and not only that, I feel free of the shackles of pressure from the world. Now, whether I’ll be able to live over time and sell enough of my little records on my own to make
it work, I don’t know. But I’m a lot less ready
to do things the old way.” At that, he finally
takes a breath.
Sweet’s varied interests extend to Japanese anime, B-movies and big-eyed art—he’s nearing the completion of a book on the latter—and lately he’s beginning to see parallels between his new direction and the attitudes of artists in other mediums. “I learn about other kinds of artists—painters, ceramicists, just different things I’m interested in—and like, they just do their thing and it gets put out into the world, and whatever happens, happens. The more I can think of my thing that way, the better. If I deem something to be good enough to put out into the world, I just want to be able to do it, come what may.”
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