advertisement
Home.News.Features.Reviews.Blogs.Calendar.Audio/Video.Store.







Pages tagged “matthew sweet”

Matthew Sweet plays the Paste studio

|
matthew_sweet_av.jpg

On Thursday afternoon, the Paste staff was treated to a performance by Athens, Ga musician and potter, Matthew Sweet. Although worried about his ability to hit his signature high notes, due to a mysterious road illness, and the feeling his “lunch might come up a little,” Sweet dazzled us through a great mix of songs, both new and old. His set included “Byrdgirl” and “Room to Rock,” from his latest album, Sunshine Lies, and classics such as “Sick of Myself” from 1995’s 100% Fun and “You Don’t Love Me” from 1991’s Girlfriend.


You can catch Sweet on tour all over the U.S. until Thanksgiving. Be sure to check back soon for video of his Paste performance!


A/V

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs recording new album

|
When we recently caught up with prolific pop rocker Matthew Sweet, he revealed to Paste he will reunite with Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles for the duo's second album of covers, due out sometime next year.

Articles

Categories:

Catching Up With... Matthew Sweet

|
Since the release of his third album, Girlfriend, in 1991, Matthew Sweet has remained one of the beacons of power pop, stretching the boundaries of the genre without sacrificing big guitars and ringing melodies. In 2006 he took a detour in teaming with Bangles star Susanna Hoffs to record Under the Covers, an album of '60s classics, but now he’s back with a proper solo outing, Sunshine Lies.

Articles

Categories:

Matthew Sweet: Sunshine Lies

|
Not-so-sweet Matthew rages and rocks on 10th studio effort

Bob Dylan may have famously said “you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows,” but Matthew Sweet knows different.
Atmospheric and emotional pressure builds on this new album as the tightly wound singer/songwriter alternately rages and slogs through one predicament after another, questioning everything. Like Edgar Allan Poe before him and Noel Gallagher after, the Lincoln, Neb., native uses climatic conditions to measure his state of mind—which careens wildly between consternation and audacity, eventually ending up at acceptance, and a kind of psychic rebirth as he works through his own cycle of grief and confusion. Along the way he conjures sunlit days that are far from idyllic, for in the Sweet-ian universe, light obscures more than it reveals; it’s in the dark parts of the heart and mind that true revelation exists. Nobody else makes uncertainty sound half this good. His best outing since 1999’s In Reverse

Articles

Categories:

Matthew Sweet to let the Sunshine out this summer

|

On July 22, Shout! Factory will release Matthew Sweet's 10th studio album, Sunshine Lies, with tour news reportedly on the horizon.

“When it rocks, it rocks hard with lots of attitude,” Sweet told CMJ, speaking about the upcoming album. “Then again, it's really very melodic overall, with plenty of dreamy jangling psychedelic poppiness.”

It's been 17 years since Girlfriend propelled Sweet out of the Athens, Ga., music scene and onto the charts. Aside from his most recent offering, Under the Covers, Vol. 1, recorded with pal Susanna Hoffs, Sweet seems to be proficient at creative dabbling.

His artistic endeavors in ceramics and offering said breakthrough album as a score for a musical (called—naturally—Girlfriend) are only Sweet's most recent activities of note. Back up to 2003, when Sweet teamed up with Shawn Mullins and Pete Droge for a spell to create '90s-alt-rock supergroup The Thorns. Not to mention the album he wrote entirely for fans in Japan, or his incredibly brief stint (alongside Hoffs) in pseudo-psychedelic rock “outfit” (the kind of outfit Austin Powers might enjoy, perhaps?) Ming Tea.

All puns using his last name considered (and hereafter banned from this article), be sure visit Sweet's MySpace to check out a badass new track. No, really: it's called "Badass."

Sunshine Lies tracklisting:
1. Time Machine
2. Room To Rock
3. Byrdgirl
4. Flying
5. Feel Fear
6. Let’s Love
7. Sunshine Lies
8. Pleasure Is Mine
9. Daisychain
10. Sunrise Eyes
11. Around You Now
12. Burn Through Love
13. Back Of My Mind

Related links:
Matthew Sweet on MySpace
TheThornsMusic.com
Paste: Feature: Meet the Thorns

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.


Articles

Categories:

Production Notes: Matthew Sweet

|

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.”


Articles

Categories:






Paste Magazine issue 48 (Of Montreal)
advertisement
 

Contests.






 


 
 


Non-U.S. Addresses | Privacy

Give the Gift
of Music


11 magazines
+ 11 CDs
+ the priceless joy of finally having someone to debate good music with

Give Now >

Paste offers a variety of subscription services online to best serve you.

Order Paste
  Subscribe
  Gift Subscriptions
  International Subscriptions
  Back Issues

Your Subscription
  Account Maintanence
  Address Change
  CD Sampler Sleeves
  Contact Us
  FAQs
  Pay Bill
  Renew Subscription
  Where to Buy

Paste Magazine Culture Club.

Podcast Feature.

Episode 70
August 19, 2008

We're bringing you some of the artists we think are the best of what's next. Featuring selections from Slow Runner, Janelle Monae, The Spring Standards and more!
// More Info
// Download

Subscribe in iTunes.