With his latest album, Some Mad Hope, Matt Nathanson wants your attention. You might know him as that funny dude who has a few good songs that comes to town every now and then. You go to his concerts to hang out, listen to him tell funny stories, or maybe have one too many Bud Lights. Nathanson knows this, and he’s ok with it. But there’s also part of him that wants to be known for writing songs you love. In other words, he’s not Adam Sandler’s long lost cousin.
The good news is that Some Mad Hope is the singer-songwriter’s best album to date. It’s filled with striking melody, honest lyrics, and Nathanson’s clear vocals that deliver on every track. Want pop? Listen to “Car Crash,” “To the Beat of Our Noisy Hearts,” or “Come on Get Higher.” Need to rock? Try “Detroit Waves.” How about emotion? It doesn’t get much better than “Bulletproof Weeks,” “Still,” or “All We Are.”
Sure, Nathanson is still funny, and he’ll remain that way in his live setting. But it’s probably time to listen more closely to his talents as a writer, guitar player, and singer. I recently had a chance to talk to Nathanson about his latest album, San Francisco, Boston, and Jeff Tweedy.
I saw you once in St. Louis at Washington University.
Oh yeah, at the Gargoyle. Does that still exist?
I’m not sure. Definitely not the best place to catch a show.
No, it’s almost like being in a Fight Club situation. There’s like fluorescent lights, and blood on the walls (laughs). The bummer is that there was a great club in St. Louis called Mississippi Nights that we played last year, and that’s gone. . I’ll probably be in St. Louis next spring.
Yeah, they are making room for casinos
Dude…that part of St. Louis…they love their casinos there!
Yeah, they finally tore it down.
That’s wild. St. Louis is the bomb, I always have good shows there. Even at the Gargoyle, where, my pants ripped once. It was onstage…my pants like totally ripped onstage! Dude, it was hilarious! Like crotch to fuckin’ …like crotch to the end of my pants.
No way!
Totally, like in the middle of a faux rock moment, where sometimes I’m lookin’ to ham it up and bust into like an Ozzy tune or something. And I was doing it as a joke and I put my leg up…it was sort of like a reverse Spinal Tap moment. It was like Spinal Tap by osmosis. Like, I wasn’t really playing metal, but I had all the effects of the metal. But I fuckin’ ripped my pants, and then I had to announce to that room, “Hey, anybody got any fuckin’…(laughs)”. It was awesome, it was totally a highlight.
I’m sure that can get you closer to your fan base.
They felt like my best friends after that, it was great.
You’re able to interact with your fans during your show. How important is that for you?
Yeah, I think it’s important for my sanity. I feel like if I got up there and just played songs…the idea is to have more like an event for me, a party. ‘Cause the songs are so heavy, that it would be weird to get up and kind of just play them all straight and say, “Now this is an emotional moment I had.” No, fuck that, let’s just hang out, and in between hanging out, we’ll play these songs. I do it more for myself and it just happens to be that the crowd digs it.
You mention the content of your songwriting as being heavy, and there’s a lot in there. Do you think you get enough credit for being a talented songwriter?
It’s funny…I kind of get a little tired of the whole, “He’s…he’s like a comedian and a songwriter!” No, a comedian/singer-songwriter is like Adam Sandler. You know what I mean? You can’t get too bummed about it, but I do really like when people are like, “Wow your songs are great” instead of “If this thing fails, you should be like a comedian!” And it’s like, “Awesome! Thanks! Do you have a gun I could put in my mouth?” (laughs)
But it’s cool, you know. I’m psyched that people don’t think I’m a fuckin’ idiot when I get up there. But it’s nice when people recognize the songwriting.
Especially on a song like “Bulletproof Weeks”, I especially like that one. What was going on in your life when you wrote that one?
The way that the record works, it moves like a story—I didn’t really mean for it to—but it moves like a relationship. The intent of how great you want it to be and how alive you feel. And then kind of having it dip back down and head back in a more realistic way, kind of like fiction to reality. “Bulletproof Weeks” is kind of the moment in the record definitely at the bottom of the barrel. Like when you’re now realizing, “Fuck…I….I’m not going to get this back. It’s gone.” And whatever is going to come out of this is going to be significantly different than what it is now. So “Bulletproof Weeks” is kind of that resignation moment of like, “Ok, this is where it is, and it’s not coming back.”
I kind of sense a theme of reacting to the moment and moving on in this record.
I think it’s like the first record that I’ve actually had that concept come into my brain. I feel like I’ve been stuck for the last few records trying to write the same kind of song. And this record was the first time that I kind of dislodged that idea. Kind of like, pushed it through. The record definitely feels like, at least for me, that by the end of it, you’re completely at a different point than the beginning of the record, but it’s a much more realistic point of view.
Do you still view San Francisco as a good place for your music?
You know, it’s not particularly fantastic. There’s great folks there, but San Francisco, at least starting out, for sure…it’s really kind of a hip scene. As a singer-songwriter, starting off, it was like, “get opening slots for Richard Buckner or Mark Eitzel,” who I love. But it was definitely like an identity crisis for me of like, “God, I don’t sound anything like these fucking people.” I want to, but I’m just not, so what do I do? I played to a lot of thick-glasses wearing indie rock kids who were like, “Who are you?”
For me, San Francisco is real fantastic to live in, but in terms of like a scene, the music that I play kind of like, when it really started to catch, was playing in the Northeast and the Midwest. That was when I started to find the audience for it. But San Francisco is rad, it’s just kind of a strange little scene, it sort of stays kind of precious in indie rock.
Well, you’re originally from Boston. How do you still keep that a part of you?
It’s funny, I feel like Boston’s always going to be like a low hum in my life. Whenever I meet someone from Boston, my accent comes out, I get very buddy-buddy with people I hardly know (laughs), But Boston…those were my years of when I was really kind of…that age, up until 17, the stamp of who you are. I feel like this record is still that kid but I’m like finally getting rid of parts of that kid that aren’t working.
You got to open for Jeff Tweedy a few years ago in Chicago…
Yeah, yeah, that was great. Dude, that was one of my highlights of my life, pretty much. Because I was an enormous, enormous Uncle Tupelo fan. I saw them in college a couple times, and then when Son Volt and Wilco happened, I was more of a Jay Farrar and Son Volt guy. I didn’t really pay that much attention to Jeff Tweedy on A.M, like I didn’t dig it. And then, you know, I started paying attention to Summerteeth and Being There; Summerteeth I started to go, “Holy Shit!”–lyrically. And then Son Volt at that point was dead, Jay Farrar was stagnant. And then I really got taken by Wilco, by the production, by the writing.
So to be able to kind of fly in and play that show in Chicago at the Abbey…downstairs there’s this kind of one big room, and Jeff and I just sat around, and Jeff’s the nicest guy on the planet. Music is pouring out of him, and we’re just talking guitars. And then I got to watch him play for two hours. It was transcendent, one of the highlights of my life, really cool.
When you get to have moments when you’re crossing paths with people that are your heroes…like two weekends ago I met Suzanne Vega, and I’m an enormous fan. And then meeting like David Lee Roth—it’s totally fun. A nerd’s dream come true.
So what do you want this latest album to be for yourself and for your fans?
When I made the record, it was like this idea…there’s always been records in my life, maybe something like Achtung Baby, records that I couldn’t stop listening to the year they came out. Like Lou Reed’s New York, Jeff Buckley’s Grace…records that I could not have lived my life without…every time I make a record, and I don’t mean this to sound arrogant, I wanted to make the kind of record that if I were a kid, or a guy, or gal, buying this record in a store, that I’d be like all the way through, “Cool, there’s not a moment where this song doesn’t need to be here.”
Music now is so easily accessible, that it’s almost like the currency of it has actually dropped. And so, for me, all the way down to the artwork. I really wanted to make a record where, people who liked my records, would say, “Oh, fuck. This is a nice step forward.” Or something they can hold onto. Or, in terms of other folks, instead of people saying, “You just gotta see him live!” I want people to be like, “Dude you gotta hear this record!” And that was the goal on this record—let’s give people something to spread the word with that they dig.
Glide Senior Writer Jason Gonulsen lives in the St. Louis, MO area with his wife, Kelly, and dogs, Maggie and Tucker. You can e-mail him at: [email protected].
