Matt Lorenz’s vision, manifest in The Suitcase Junket, developed in the tension between the grand and the solitary. Grand in its imagery, sound, and staging. Solitary in its thrift and self-reliance. What instruments he requires, Lorenz builds from scratch and salvage. What parts five players would perform, he performs alone. The spectacle of his one-man set bears constant comparison to legends of showmanship, brilliance, madness, and invention.
While audiences are captivated by his solitary form and the show itself, Lorenz, who homesteads with rescue dogs and chickens in rural Western Massachusetts, is most serious about the songs. He has been building a catalog, writing a world into existence. Solitary on stage and on the road, his mind is crowded with characters, narratives, voices, imagery, sounds as wide and varied as mountain throat singers and roadhouse juke boxes, plus newsreels of the planet’s destruction and salvage. With his 2020 release, The End is New, Lorenz’s grand vision for the song overrides the how of it.
“The things I value are under attack,” Lorenz writes. “And writing songs and making art are the methods I have for responding. I have tried to use my observations and reflections of the world bent through my fun-house-mirror mind to show what I see; a planet stressed. … We can do better.”
The End is New was produced by trusted friend, producer Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, who produced The Suitcase Junket’s acclaimed 2018 release, Mean Dog Trampoline.
In the strangest of ironies, the production of this album, an artist moving from solitude to collaboration, went forward in a time when Lorenz, Berlin, all their studio musicians, and the entire world were in isolation for the lockdown of pandemic.The End is New is an artist expanding his possibilities, collaborating, matching his lyrical power over eleven tracks with the epic sounds and narratives of his imagination.
The End is New is Lorenz’s sixth full-length album as The Suitcase Junket, his first for Renew Records/BMG. The sound has become more refined and deeper with each release. Lorenz tours extensively and plans to be back on the road for a waylaid release tour for The End is New in 2021. Lorenz is also a visual artist. In the early years he designed all The Suitcase Junket album art and merchandise and made the music videos generated with his songs. He continues to create the visuals for merchandise, and to produce some of his videos, now with collaborators. He gets very excited about coffee, gardening, bees, dogs, birds, mushrooms, tinctures, making his own wine and maple sugaring season.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the video for “Light a Candle,” simmering doom of lost love that is greatly amplified by a guest appearance from none other than Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis. Musically, the song matches the tone of the lyrics as Lorenz greets us with ominous, feedback-laced guitar and his gritty yet soulful vocals. This is accompanied by visuals of Lorenz wandering through the New England woods as if he his living his own dark Henry David Thoreau-inspired lifestyle. Adding to the intensity and drama of the song is the jagged guitar solos of J. Mascis that seem to cut through the darkness while also ratcheting up the sweeping emotion of the song. The solos build alongside the heartbeat percussion, reaching a musical peak before dropping down into a valley.
Lorenz describes the inspiration and process behind the song:
“This is one of my favorite songs on the record. It’s a deeply meaningful track for me about loss and memory. It’s different from a lot of my tunes because nothing much really happens in a narrative sense. It’s made up of momentary recollections, reflections and observations that all occur around a shared cup of coffee. We don’t get to choose our memories and that can add another layer of pain once a loved one is gone. J. Mascis laid down a searing and emotional guitar solo on this one right at the peak of the pandemic in New York. It rips me apart every time I hear it.”
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Photo credit: Joanna Chattman
