Sound Bites | the matthew show

Matthew Perrault / the matthew show (Uncut interview)

As promised last week, I set my sights on interviewing the talented Matthew Perrault this week, and he turned out to be one of the best Sound Bites interviewees ever.

Matthew is Texas born and bred, so much so that his first album was entitled texas. Looking at his photos on his website, I am struck at his resemblance to a young Billy Bob Thornton. And I mean that as a compliment.

Matthew described his transformation from a kid who had no interest in music into an accomplished performer. “For most of my childhood, I thought I hated music. It turned out that what I hated was the sort of singalong crap that gets called music when you're a kid. Somehow, though, I absorbed the music that was always playing in our house. My parents had a large record collection — mostly ‘70s and ‘80s pop country — but also some weirdo stuff from the '60s like the Mystic Moods Orchestra and Boots Randolph. Plus they had a lot of old comedy albums by people like Bill Cosby, Brother Dave Gardner and the Smothers Brothers.

“Listening to those religiously had me convinced I wanted to be a comedian, but of course those styles were hopelessly out of date by the time I got around to trying them. It's a shame, because I love that stuff. But I digress.

“My dad played guitar sporadically, and was an upright bassist for various jazz and country groups in west Texas during the ‘60s. He's got a few stories, like how [jazz giant] Dave Brubeck once did a show at his college, and somehow ended up without a bassist, so Dad filled in. For a variety of reasons, though, he had largely abandoned music before I was born. Nonetheless, he had many opinions on music — something I inherited — and fairly varied tastes for a lumber salesman. He's actually way more active in the Fort Worth music scene now than he ever was when I was a kid… quite the patron of the arts.”

I thank Matthew for making my job easy. It’s often the case that I have to get out the dental tools to try to get more than one sentence out of an artist — many of them seem to be allergic to self-promotion. It’s refreshing to hear Matthew describe at length how his musicianship grew. “Oh, I'll ramble on for hours if no one stops me,” he grins.

“My mom has always painted recreationally… I'm a bit color blind, so I never took to painting, but I'm a big fan of b&w photography. Walker Evans, Bill Brandt, that era of photo monographs was a huge discovery for me a few years back, and has influenced a lot of my recent approach to melding documentary with music.

“I didn't start thinking I could be a musician until I discovered ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. For me, music was to be mocked, and what better way to mock it than musically? I listened to the Dr. Demento Show every Sunday night with my tape recorder by the radio speaker. That was actually where I discovered Tom Waits, who was sort of an early doorway into the more interesting side of pop music. It wasn't until high school that I discovered more oddball artists like Pink Floyd, Lyle Lovett, R.E.M. and others who pushed boundaries beyond what I and most people I knew had thought of as music. Remember, this was in the late '80s, and a huge percentage of what was on the radio was absolute garbage.

“In the early '90s I started getting into what was then considered alternative music, i.e. the Cure, Midnight Oil, Peter Murphy, Primus and such. In fact, I got into them at exactly the wrong time, because it was with those influences in hand that I started my first band in 1991, just a year before the world went grunge and no one gave a flying s--- about anything else, at least not in Texas. I liked a lot of the grunge stuff, but I didn't feel the need to create any, what with so much of it around. Were I a better capitalist, I would've found a screamy vocalist and cashed in, but alas, there was I with my jangly guitar and songs laden with positive messages, roundly ignored by countless club crowds for the next nine years — though, to be fair, we really weren't that good. Turns out I don't work well in a democracy, and it wasn't until 2000 that I started my own musical dictatorship.” Thankfully, the nearly ten years that he’d spent paying dues honed a lot of skills and experience that he put to work rather quickly on his first album, texas. But more on that shortly.

I ask him about the tools of his trade — what was his first instrument? "My first instrument was saxophone, which I began learning in sixth grade band. At the end of fifth grade they gave us a choice of art (color blind, so no go), choir (singing disgusted me) and band, so I picked the least offensive. My overbite made saxophone a natural fit, and I was a decent player. The last time I played saxophone seriously was in college, where I got my books paid for by a jazz band scholarship. That band was full of amazing players, and it proved to me that I couldn't fake a love of jazz just to get by.

“Jazz still eludes my interest, for the most part. Our college jazz band played mostly old big band stuff, which I could get into because it was so melodic and energetic.

“I started messing with my sister's unused synthesizer in late junior high. The discovery of Depeche Mode and Genesis in high school made me spend more time learning keyboards. Guitar was kind of an afterthought, and I only picked it up in late high school when I was listening to R.E.M. and U2 a lot.

“My first guitar was the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen or heard of. It was a gray Cort electric, very pretty and only $100, but wouldn't stay in tune for more than 30 seconds at a time. I've watched old rehearsal videos of me playing that thing with the band, and I honestly don't know how I or they could stand listening to such a foul noise.”

I think refusal to stay in tune is a feature with Corts, not a bug, because the Cort I had circa 1997 was exactly the same way.

After going through a few others, he bought the electric he still uses, a purple Ibanez S Series. “That guitar is still paying dividends, as is the Takamine acoustic I bought at the same time and still use at Second Life shows.”

So I progress to asking Matthew about his first paying gig, always a landmark in one’s career. “My first band got its debut paying show at the West Side Teen Club way out in tiny Mineral Wells, Texas, where we performed in between DJ-spun classics of the time: C&C Music Factory, Whitesnake and whoever it was that recorded ‘Doodoo Brown,’ the song I most associate with that gig. What really sucked was that our bass player got grounded the week before the show, so my friend Dean, who had quit the band after coming to Jesus and finding us too evil, did me a favor and played the bass parts on a keyboard. Quite a disaster, really, but we did make $75.”

I move on to the topic of the first CD. Was the texas CD a self produced project, or how did that come about? “I started work on texas in February 2000 when I bought my first home recording unit. There was a pretty big learning curve, plus turmoil as my wife and I moved to New York from Texas in 2002, so the disc didn't come out until September 2003. I'm surprised that the thing still sounds cohesive to most people, because it was pretty haphazardly assembled. I lost several tracks when the airline beat the recorder up in transit, and had to start from scratch many times. But it did help me prove the justification I used to break up my old band, which was that I could do this stuff myself and get rather more interesting results. Saying ‘myself’ is not quite accurate, though, because I brought in a lot of great people to perform on the disc, including some former bandmates who are blessed with an inherent absence of sour grapes. I was very pleased to get Little Jack Melody, one of my musical heroes, to play bass on one of the tracks, and through him I also got Reggie Rueffer for violin and Brad Williams for organ. They're what real musicians sound like. I just write this stuff,” grinned Matthew.

"The matthew show had next to zero fan base when the album came out, mostly the other players and my family and friends, and I hadn't performed live since my rock band days in the '90s, so I didn't think it would do much good to chase labels. I scraped together a couple of grand and put the sucker out on my own label, Naïve Music. Critically, the response was good, though I didn't make the Rolling Stone. Sold a few here and there and started doing shows, but mostly pursued Internet promotion. The whole iTunes/iPod thing caught fire shortly thereafter, and both word and sales have spread steadily in the intervening years.

“Since entering the SL music scene in August 2006, the online buzz has gradually ratcheted up, and now there are actually quite a few people besides me who give a s--- that this new one is coming out soon. I've neither burned out nor faded away, just sort of built up to a smolder, so I don't know what Neil Young would make of it.

His mention of musical heroes brings me to my standard question about influences. “[They’re] hard to quantify, since sometimes I'll hear a song I haven't laid ears on in 20 years and go, ‘Wow, I think I ripped that off,’” Matthew replies, “But the ones I'm aware of are, in no particular order: Pink Floyd, R.E.M., U2, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, Genesis, Depeche Mode, Peter Murphy, Crash Test Dummies, Dada, Midnight Oil, Natalie Merchant, Aimee Mann, Ben Folds, Rufus Wainwright, Guster, Peter Gabriel, Sinead O'Connor, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Doug Kwartler, Mocha Lab, Little Jack Melody & His Young Turks, Grand Street Cryers, and a bunch of crap I know I'm forgetting.” Quite a diverse and eclectic roster.

Ah, and among that list he invoked the name of the Excitable Boy, a personal hot button. The Zevonite in me has to ask Matthew how his cover of “Mohammed’s Radio” wound up on the Hurry Home Early compilation, a tribute to the late great WZ. It's a damned fine version of the tune. I ask how he got involved with Wampus Records, and subsequently wound up being signed to the label.

“That was a rather fortunate happening. In 2004, I was trolling through the listings on Sonicbids.com, which at that time was fairly new, and spotted a call for submissions to a Warren Zevon tribute album. Wampus Multimedia was releasing it, and I'd never heard of them,” but he was familiar with some of Zevon’s work and thought it might be fun to try. “[texas] had just come out, and I was so sick to death of working on those songs, I wanted to try something fresh.

“At the time, the only Zevon record I had in my apartment was a best-of, and I was initially going to do “Desperados Under the Eaves,” but it turned out that someone else (Phil Cody) was going to do that one. I liked the melody of “Mohammed's Radio” and thought it would lend itself to a stripped-down rendering, which honestly was all I could afford to give it at the time. I'd never actually performed the song before, so I wrote down the lyrics and rehearsed it a few times, and just threw it down on tape over a couple of hours. I enlisted my friend Paul Gwynne-Craig (then Shapera), who works under the moniker Mocha Lab and who had contributed a great deal to texas. He added some meat on those bones one night with a keyboard bass, piano and some great backup vocals. As haphazardly as it was put together, I'm happy that it seems to sound like we knew what we were doing.

"Mark Doyon at Wampus liked the track, and in 2005 the album came out. It was dubbed Hurry Home Early [after a line in Zevon’s song “Boom Boom Mancini”], and damned if there weren't some fine covers on that thing by people who weren't me. Robbie Rist's “Mr. Bad Example” completely floored me, so much so that I got him to do some backup vocals for me on my new album. That guy's done everything: He was the infamous Cousin Oliver on The Brady Bunch, and voiced Michaelangelo on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, plus he's a great musician to boot.

“Mark and I kept in touch after the record came out, and he even put out this little e-book that my wife and I wrote called 'The Empty Pockets Guide to Moving to New York City,' which actually sells a bit now and then. I started finishing my new album up last year, and fresh with the memories of going it alone with the last one, I sent Mark what I had and it turned out he was interested in releasing it on Wampus. It's a nice little label, and it's good to have some backup this time around."

The new CD is entitled February. Tell us about how that project came together?

“When I first met the aforementioned Paul shortly after both of us had moved to NYC, he bummed me a disc that he'd finished but hadn't released called 'The Coffee Cellar.' A few years prior, he got stranded for a few months in a small Pennsylvania college town, and spent a lot of time hanging out in a little joint called the Coffee Cellar. He started recording conversations people were having there, regulars just talking about whatever. When he finally extricated himself and started working on new music, he started peppering it with snippets of those conversations, and soon they started taking over. What emerged was sort of half-documentary, half-music, which really intrigued me.

“Shortly thereafter, I went to a photography exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art called “Few Are Chosen.” It featured photo monographs from the '30s and '40s by photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Bill Brandt, among others. These people had gone out and photographed life as it was happening, in homes, subways, on street corners and other places no one takes much of a second look at. They'd put the photos all together in book form, sometimes with words, and the result was captivating to me. They were making these cohesive statements, essentially using found objects, accidents of time and place that nonetheless spoke volumes. As with 'The Coffee Cellar,' they were melding documentary and art.

"This all occurred while I was entering my thirties, a time when you start to make assessments of yourself and see just what the hell it is that you've been doing with your life. In these introspections, I was less than happy with what I found, and these feelings expressed themselves through my songwriting. I had enough tunes in that vein for a full album, but I really didn't want to make it a matthew pity party, because there's too much of that kind of crap out there.

“I originally wanted to collect strangers' thoughts online through some kind of groovy website and hire actors to read the good stuff, but my limited technical abilities stymied me. So I started asking around among my thirtysomething friends, seeing if other people I knew might be having the same thoughts. I sat five of them down for recorded conversations, and the sorts of things that came up were both similar and different to my own experiences. I put bits of these conversations into and between the songs, and now, far from being a pity party, the album actually gives me a great deal of hope when I hear it. I'm calling it docu-pop."

One other thing that crosses my mind: where did the concept of "the matthew show" come from? “For some reason, my RL last name is very hard for many people to pronounce, so I was looking for a nom de guerre that would more easily promote word of mouth. I initially wanted to just be ‘matthew,’ but I found out there was a band with that name already. I can't remember specifically why ‘the matthew show’ popped into my head, but it seemed to make sense, given the weirdo stuff I was trying to do. Some have accused me of ripping off The Eminem Show, but I had picked the name before that album came out, and thus far, Mr. Mathers hasn't sent any litigators my way.”

Visit Matthew’s website at www.thematthewshow.com, and Wampus Multimedia at www.wampus.com.