Matthew Sweet Keeps The Power in Pop Humming on ‘Tomorrow Forever’ (INTERVIEW)

In the realm of contemporary power pop, Matthew Sweet distinguishes himself from peers like Tommy Keene and Marshall Crenshaw by emphasizing the power, not the pop. After all, Sweet’s most famous record, 1991’s Girlfriend, echoed the latter-day work of Neil Young and Crazy Horse more than a little (and a collection of outtakes actually contained a live version of “Cortez the Killer” from 1975’s Zuma). And while Crenshaw has explored blues and country influences over the course of his career and Keene has successfully reshuffled the basic elements of this rock sub-genre—hooks, guitars and vocal harmonies—Sweet has used his take on style as a sonically potent means of personal expression equal to his propensity for experimentation in the studio.

Accordingly, no two records of Matthew’s sound alike. Blue Sky on Mars finds him experimenting with electronics as opposed to the live recording approach of In Reverse whereas Altered Beast rocks with a vengeance in accordance with the emotional turmoil contained in the material. The new album, meantime, is Sweet’s first album in six years and constitutes a distillation of his approach on which he offers seventeen uniformly strong songs that, despite subject matter worth more than a little contemplation, are grounded in layered electric guitars and massed voices that never fail to uplift,

In line with the underlying positivism in the album’s title, Tomorrow Forever is resplendent with a joy deriving no doubt from the pleasure this artist takes in the creative process. And certainly to hear Matthew Sweet expounding at length on his methods of recording, the environment within which he does that work and the sources of the cover imagery that encloses the end result, the sheer delight is absolutely unmistakable.

Listening to your new record, it occurred to me that if I want to explain to someone why I’ve followed your music for so long, I could play your new record and they’d know exactly what I was talking about.

That’s great. I haven’t heard a lot of feedback on the record except those in my family and my management. so I love hearing you say that.

In a way, it’s like the definitive Matthew Sweet record. Did you have that in mind as you set out to do it or did you record what came along as you wrote?

In a way, it was a little bit of both. I really wanted to make sure the record was really strong and the way I approached that was by recording a whole lot of songs, figuring the more I do, the best will rise to the top and make for a stronger record.

And also, because it was a Kickstarter record and I had sort of promised the fans I was going to do it, that put a little fire under me as well.  But, in the end, it does come down to what songs I write, on the day I write them and how they all come together. I can’t say I knew I would make a strong or definitive record, but I tried to do those things that would most likely result in one—if that makes sense.

It does indeed. I see this was recorded in a studio you built and this is the first release on a label of your own. You’ve accomplished a tremendous amount with those achievements alone, plus the new album, in addition to moving over the last few years.

I appreciate you saying that. I was really late in delivering the Kickstarter record, but on the other hand, I did many batches of music because I was making every effort to make sure it was really strong. We had a really good reaction from my publishing company, which is Sony/ATV, and they really helped get it around with the other Sony people, at RED the independent distribution wing, where there were fans high up there who really liked the record. That’s how it came about I had a label.

I was curious to know something about the timeline of the label initiative, the recording of the music and the construction of the studio—I presume the studio is at your new home?

The studio is at my new home, but ‘construction’ isn’t really the right word to say because the room really existed as it is in the home we purchased. It works great as a studio room for me—I’m sitting in it now—but I really didn’t actually have to construct anything—it worked as is with a lot of wood surfaces, a stone fireplace at one end of the room (for a little bit of different sound) and the way it’s set up, it’s got a really good space for the console and the computer that I record into and the speakers I listen back on. It was a room that caught my fancy and I thought “That’s where I’ll put my studio;” it really helped when we moved to Omaha that we found a house that worked naturally for that reason.

The way you describe that room (which sounds like a pretty comfortable place to work in), it almost sounds like that was the deciding factor in buying the house?

It wasn’t really. The house itself is really interesting and different from where we lived before. We lived in a 1950’s ranch-style house that was mostly glass in Los Angeles for the last twenty years before we moved here and this is a really different thing. It was built in 1937 and if you look at the front of the house, it looks like a French chateau style (I’ve been told)—to me it almost looks like a Disneyland kind of house or something.

But then when you go inside, the style of the actual architecture in the house is sort of a  mixture of craftsman and Art-Deco and it has these very interestingly shaped rooms, a couple of which remind us of honeycombs—which is where I came up with the name “Honeycomb Hideout” (for his independent record label).

The studio is down in the basement of the main house, but you can exit it at the back of the house at ground level. It has almost this vibe like a ship because I have a number of wooden sculptures made back in the Sixties: they are like a tiki heads, lamps and wall hangings, one of a mermaid that gave the room this aquatic theme when it’s otherwise like a log cabin. It’s sort of like a submarine!

It’s like in Los Angeles: I never built a studio per se, it was a room in my house that worked as a studio and that was mentioned when we sold the home; ‘a recording studio built-in.’ I never really had to build a recording studio because I’ve always had good environments to do the recording.

It almost sounds like you plant the seed(s) and the studios grow up around you where you go!

It is almost like that. The fun is in decorating the room where I work and giving it a whimsical style.

I’d be interested to know if you did all the recording for all the tracks, including the ones you eventually chose (for Tomorrow Forever), in that location or did you bring some with you?

We did all the recording, especially the basic tracks, here in this studio. I would record drums, bass, guitar and do some singing here, then send that track to a player over the internet, saying do whatever you feel. And pretty much anything anyone did I really liked, so it was little bit like Christmas, not knowing what to expect, But it was fun getting the parts and not knowing what they were going to be:  Some of the guitar players sent in their parts from afar.

John Moreman did a lot of his parts from San Francisco where he lives, though at one point, he did come out here and record on a few more songs here with me. Then there’s a guy from New York named Jason Victor (he’s going to be touring with me this year) who played a bunch of lead guitar as well; it was even more cryptic with him: we would leave each other two-sentence emails, and we never really spoke or met in person until a while after we worked together—eventually I met him in New York. Another one of the guitar players, Val McCallum, played a lot of the beautiful slide parts and some more novelty sounding parts that he did in Los Angeles in his own studio and that worked wonderfully as well.

It just feels natural to do it that way. For instance, that’s how (keyboardist) Rod Argent from The Zombies plays the piano on two songs; he recorded his grand piano in his living room in England and had an engineer come in so he could play along to the tracks that I sent him and he then sent me those parts. It was so exciting to receive them and hear what he’d done: he’d been so creative and heartfelt about it. A lot of the overdubs, lead guitars and things, weren’t done right here, but everything else was.

That’s a testament to all the musicians involved. From track to track, it sounds like a band playing together in a room.

There’s always that basic thing when I guide (drummer) Ric Menck, who plays drums on most of it and who has played drums with me for so long. Debbie Peterson from The Bangles also played on one batch when Ric couldn’t do it, but there’s always that basic thing when I play with a drummer and guide them on guitar; for some of it we had Paul Chastain here, who plays bass in my band and played guitar on the record, so we get that feeling of being live in the way we do the drums.

We generally don’t use click-tracks, we’re generally free-form and that gives it that feeling even more. That’s really always how I’ve made my records: I’ve almost never recorded with a bunch of people live in one room, it’s almost always been me guiding someone to get a drum track, then I’ll play bass and guitars on it, going from there as far as who else plays.

It only stands to reason if you’ve got a foundation that swings, it’ll carry everything that’s added on to it and layered on over it.

That’s what we hope, that we get some sort of a feeling that comes out of it.

I can’t resist asking where the cover art and imagery for the new album came from…

Those are paintings that I actually own. They’re almost life-size, some forty-eight inches tall and I’ve collected them over the years from eBay and flea markets, antique shows and shops. They’re by an artist named Maio, who comes from the school of ‘Big Eyes’ artist Margaret Keane: we saw it as really iconic art of its time: there’s something really compelling about those harlequin girls, almost surrealistic in the cover image and the one used as the gate-fold.

It’s well-chosen I must say. The images are evocative in and of themselves, even more so as they enclose the music and, in turn, echo the title of the album. As a whole, it gives new meaning to the oft-cliched phrase ‘complete package.’

I was really pleased with the way it all came together.