Iain Matthews is a British-born singer/songwriter and musician who came of age in 1960s London and was swept up into Fairport Convention as a vocalist for their first two albums before moving into other solo and band work. His path eventually led him to the United States in the 1970s, and one of his most long-lived projects, Matthews Southern Comfort (MSC), continues to tour. In 2018, he also released his autobiography, co-written with Ian Clayton, Thro’ My Eyes: A Memoir, an account of his life in the music industry. Right now, he’s about to release a solo album with a full band sound, titled How Much Is Enough, on October 25th, via Sunset Blvd. Records. The album’s title is particularly appropriate because it marks his 53rd or 54th solo album (he’s not totally sure which).
Something that’s kept Matthews songwriting across so many albums is his preference to turn to the outside world for topics and inspiration, and many of the songs on How Much Is Enough reflect the digital age, the contentious feelings of conflict that loom over the world, and a concern for the future. But they also share humor, curiosity, and an honest look back over his life for Matthews. Having played strings of shows both in the UK this summer and in the USA this autumn, Matthews was also able to observe the ways in which these new songs engaged audiences. I spoke with Iain Matthews about the diverse songs that make up How Much Is Enough and the sonic elements and ideas that continue to bind them together.
It seems like you were quite busy just before the pandemic period, including playing out, so it must have impacted you when the Covid shutdowns happened.
I live in the Netherlands these days and I have a Dutch version of my band, Matthews Southern Comfort. We’d been playing shows, and we had a new album out in 2020 when the whole thing hit. We’d been in Europe, Holland, Germany, The UK, and France. All of the sudden, there was nothing. And when things opened up again, there was nothing for a quartet. It was like we were started over again, so I started playing solo again, and that led to writing songs. It was a weird time.
I hadn’t heard that exact feedback before, but it makes sense that everything needed to be streamlined when things started opening. That’s a big shame.
Yes, it was about the size of the venues and the number of people that you could get into the venues, with regulations at the time. And that affected the fees you could get. A lot of fees couldn’t support a quartet. I think we’re almost back to normal now. I don’t feel that’s happening anymore.
I know a lot of people did solo gigs right after things reopened, even those who hadn’t played solo much before.
I’m lucky because I have a couple people close to me who I can pick and choose about who I go out with, so I could also go out as a duo.
Were you testing out these new songs back then, when you started going out, or are they a bit of a time capsule from that time?
I didn’t play any of them before I recorded the album. It’s only since I’ve recorded the album that I’ve started playing them live. Some of these are lockdown songs, but I kind of got it out of my system early-on when I formed a duo with one of the guys from Matthews Southern Comfort and during lockdown, we wrote together, via e-mail. Almost every song that we wrote then was about one aspect or another of lockdown. I put that album out about two years ago, Distant Chatter. There are only really a couple on this record that deal with that.
Is the person who you were writing with BJ Baartmans?
Yes, BJ and I have been pretty close for about 20 years, ever since I moved to the Netherlands. He lives about 15-20 kilometers from where I am. He has his own commercial studio, and he’s a Producer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and performer. It was a very easy process to get together with him, both to make the album and get out and play.
It’s wonderful to share some geography with someone else. You’ve been friends for so long and have played together for so long, but do you have the same musical inclinations, or would you say that you have some helpful differences?
We share a lot of likes, but there are some differences, too, where he’s into Rockabilly, too, which is not my bag. We balance each other out very nicely. It works out well. We like similar sounds, and can talk about how we want a record to sound. We know what the other person is talking about, without getting too deep into it. It saves a lot of talking.
Do you speak English or Dutch with each other?
I don’t speak Dutch; It’s too difficult! I’d been in Holland about a year and a half when I got married, and we have two daughters. The deal is that I speak English with them, and my wife speaks Dutch to them. Both have grown up speaking really good English. But most people I know in the Netherlands speak English.
You lived in America for significant periods of time, too, didn’t you?
Yes, I moved to the US in January of 1973. I came over to make an album and ended up staying for 27 years.
That’s a big compliment! You must have liked America a lot to stay that long.
You have to submit to the culture. [Laughs]
You were always pretty keyed into American music, weren’t you?
Yes, and that’s the real reason that I came over. Ever since I was in Fairport, back in the late 60s, I began listening to the singer-songwriters that were emerging around that time, and that seriously turned me on to American music and American songwriters. By 1972 and 1973, I just wanted to be part of it and amongst them.
That’s got to impact your immersion in music to go to the place where that kind of music comes from.
I think so. Up close and personal is the only way to learn, and I really wanted to study my craft and feel that I was as good as my contemporaries. The only way to do that was to come over to America and stand in the middle of it.
What sorts of music were you looking at the most once you came to America?
I began in the late 60s listening to Tim Hardin, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and all the obvious people. Richard Farina has remained a strong source of inspiration for me, up to the point where, about ten years ago, I made an entire album of Richard Farina songs. I think around the time I came over, Jackson [Browne] was beginning to make record, and Joni was evolving into something else. Bands like The Eagles were forming. I was influenced by The Byrds and that whole Folk Rock, Country Rock movement. That made a big impression on me at the time.
That makes sense to me when I listen to this music on How Much Is Enough, because even though I’m sure these songs can be played stripped-down and solo, you do have a band focus and sound on this album.
Yes, that was a conscious decision. My last couple of records have been really stripped-down and acoustic, and I wanted to make a bigger sounding record, so that I could look around and find a record company in the USA that felt the same way about the record as I did. Sunset Blvd. came along and said they loved the album and wanted to release it.
I’ve spoken with artists from Sunset Blvd. before, and I can see some of the same sensibilities there as I see in your work. Certainly, there’s a focus on craftsmanship.
They had a couple of people on the label, like Peter Case, and Danny O’Keefe, who I really admire as songwriters and I wanted to be in the same stable as them. That was a big motivation for me, too.
When you’re approaching an album, knowing you want to do more of a band sound, does that impact your writing, or is that something the collaborators contribute to later?
It doesn’t really affect the writing for me at all. It happens before I make the decision about how the record is going to sound. What you really have to do is make sure that these songs will adapt to that sort of sound. I went into this recording process with twice as many songs as are on the album. Some fell by the wayside, some worked very easily, some we had to wrestle into working. There’s a couple that are more stripped-down because they couldn’t really handle the rockier sound. In general, I think we ended up with a pretty diverse collection of songs that all work within the same sound.
There’s an interesting balance between how many ideas each song carries and the sound that’s built to carry them.
We fly by the seat of our pants a little bit on any record that we make together. If we know that we want bass and drums on it, that’s where we begin. We lay down a track with bass and drums, and maybe an acoustic guitar guiding the song along. Then we just try stuff on top of it. If it works, we leave it. If it’s obviously not working, we move on. On one of the songs, there’s a banjo being picked, and it seemed like a wacky idea at the time! In retrospect, it’s this wonderful little sound where you wouldn’t expect it to be. That’s “Ripples in the Stream” in the second verse.
There’s also finger-picking on some of the other songs, so I think it can blend in a little with that.
The finger-picking stuff is more of an anchor. Everything else fits in around it and boosts it.
I saw that your philosophy of songwriting tends to be outward turning, to look at the events in the world and take inspiration from that.
I think it’s important to write outside of yourself and to point out your observations. Another song on the new album is called “Turn and Run”, and I was watching the news on CNN when the Americans and the Brits were leaving Afghanistan. They were leaving behind all the interpreters and informers who helped them out. I thought, “I need to write a song about this. I need to point out that this happened.” So I wrote the song from the point of a view of an interpreter who has been left behind. I think it’s good to write outside of yourself. It’s good to show as much of a worldview as you can.
One of the very sweeping songs on the album is “Rhythm and Blues”, which covers vast swaths of musical history with a lot of love and devotion. Did you know in advance you were going to write something so epic?
I knew that I was going to try. That was my mission, to try to encapsulate it. I’m not sure that I succeeded, wholly, but I’m very happy with the way the song turned out. That’s probably my favorite song on the album at the moment.
It seems like it would a good one live, though it might be difficult.
Well, it’s a co-write where a friend of mine in Norway wrote the music, and I wrote the lyrics. He’s primarily a keyboard player, and a very schooled musician, and it took me forever to figure out what he’d actually done. Even now, as much as I’d like to do the song live, I hesitate, because it’s quite complex!
It’s very ornate. You need multiple vocals really, too.
I can do that. I have a pedal board that I work with on stage, and one of the effects is a vocal harmonizer. I’m working on it! [Laughs]
Have you been playing the title track, “How Much is Enough”?
Yes, I’ve been playing it.
I’m so happy to hear that you’re playing it, because that one really does dig deep into your life history. I think it has a lot of observations and feelings about life.
It does. I write the lyrics first, and the lyrics dictate for me what sort of music goes with them. I really was staring at the ceiling, laying in bed, and I thought, “This is the beginning of something. I need to get a pen out and I need to start writing this.” I went ahead and wrote some of it, then I took a shower and got dressed, and went outside. I sat in the backyard, and the dogs really were fussing at the backyard gate. It just all came together. It came together slowly, not all in one sitting.
I played a show, and my wife came along. Then I really was standing in the spotlight, doing my thing, and I couldn’t get the audience to sing along, so I thought, “Here’s another verse coming up.” In a break, I wrote that stuff down. Within a week, I had this whole thing. I dropped about four verses, because it was quite long. I wanted it to end up letting people know how I was feeling “now.” I thought, “What better way to do that than to talk about my relationship and how much that means to me?”
I think it’s really useful when people share perspectives on life from different viewpoints along the way, like way-stations. You’ve been making music for a long time and observing life, so that perspective is going to be there for the audience.
People really relate to it.
I think the image of the cracks in the ceiling and the idea of a leak are very archetypal. Any homeowner will wince when you say that.
[Laughs] Yes, I think everyone can relate to that. You do follow the cracks and wonder, “Is this where the rain comes in?”
It’s confessional. You’re admitting things that some people might not want to admit, like having stage fright.
Writing my memoir got me into that place. I think, before I wrote the book, there were a lot of things that I wouldn’t reveal. Writing the book taught me that it’s okay to do that. It’s almost like therapy, writing a book. You have to be prepared to reveal things, to reveal the negative stuff, as well as the positive things. I think a lot of music biographies don’t do that. They deal with the music, but they don’t really reveal too much about personal lives. But I love the ones that do. I love the biographies that are more revealing.
I think people are drawn to the mythology of music, but it’s the human beings who make the biggest impact on them.
Exactly.
