For over ten years, Matt Nathanson has been singing his heart out and touring more than should be humanly possible, logging hundreds of shows each year. With his recent success on MTV and VH1 with the single “Car Crash,” Nathanson is finally gaining the recognition that he has rightly earned. With his new album, “Some Mad Hope” and an opening slot for Lifehouse on a national tour, he has the chance to turn on even more fans.
“It’s fun to be able to turn new people on, but it’s a little bit daunting sometimes,” Matt admitted backstage at the House of Blues in Chicago. “I think I prefer headlining, but it’s hard to keep that up. The momentum of that—you can only do that so many times.”
“I depend on people in the audience, that sort of connection so I don’t feel alone,” he continued, laughing. “It’s kind of like, when we tour, there’s that energy coming back, like ‘aw yeah. I dig you. You dig me. Let’s fucking have a moment.’ Here, it’s a little bit more like ‘I’m going to make you dig me.’”
Nathanson’s live shows are notorious for combining painfully emotional songs with outrageously humorous banter. Sexually charged and laden with pop-culture references, the performances are just as much stand-up comedy act as they are concert. After getting an enthusiastic sing-along going of “Answering Machine,” for example, he stopped the song. Matt stared down an audience member and said: “Sir, you’re not singing. This is our orgy, and you’re in the middle, reading a book.”
When it comes down to the music, though, nobody I have encountered is as passionate as Matt. “I love music,” he says. “It blows my mind. A great song can save my life. All I want to do is figure out how to write songs like that for me, songs that make me go ‘let’s get up tomorrow morning. Let’s go forward.’”
Excitedly, Nathanson shared his latest musical obsession that falls under this umbrella. “There’s this Edith Piaf song my friend told me about yesterday that I’d never heard before, ‘No Regrets,’ and the lyrics are fuckin’ brutal. They’re just so good. When you read that, you get your heart ripped out, but you get it ripped out in the best way.”
A self-described “whore for inspiration,” Nathanson draws ideas for his songs from anything and everything. Some songs, he stated, were written with a kind of “of Lyle Lovett ‘If I Had a Boat’ slash Dylan-y kind of ‘Spanish Boots’” in mind. Others come from unlikely places, such an “an episode of Dawson’s Creek” or “a good Gossip Girl episode.”
As a longtime fan of his, I was curious about the message behind his first top-20 song, “Car Crash.” “That song is a declaration of saying ‘I want to feel this way all the time. How do I feel this way all the time?’ You know, I’ve got all this shit in my brain, how do I figure out how to get to that explosively great moment of being present in whatever is going on. I want to feel the hit. I want to feel alive. There’s so much stuff that gets in the way of that in life, so it’s really a declaration of being like ‘I’m ready to accept this. I’m ready to be.’”
Nathanson is known for his meticulous song placement and album titling, and the construction of “Some Mad Hope” is no different from any of his previous releases. “The record kind of chronicles… a death of a relationship and the birth of something else,” Nathanson explained emphatically. “The rest of the songs are kind of dealing with shit, but that song [“Car Crash”] deals with the epiphany moment of ‘aw yeah. This is what this feels like. I remember this. Let’s do this.’ Then the record, like [the second song] ‘Come On Get Higher,’ gets a little more convoluted and gets stuck in the past, like ‘I wish I could, I wish I could’.”
The question arises: why did this album differ from previous ones? The answer, it seems, was in the songwriting.
“I feel like this record we kind of figured out how—I say “we” because my friend Mark and I kind of write a lot of the songs together— I figured out what I wanted the songs to do, and he helped me do them. It was this thing where before I was at the whim of the song. I didn’t feel like I could really form the songs the way that I wanted. With this record, I really stuck around until I boiled away all of the stuff I didn’t like, and figured out how to make it what I felt was potent. They were like little letters to people, so you want them to be as potent as they can be… I write these songs in the hopes that people hear them and will be like, ‘oh fuck, that’s what that is.’ I wanted to boil it down to this place where whoever heard them, there was no misunderstanding.”
Despite increasing recognition, Nathanson is careful to keep himself grounded. “What really matters is that the records get better and that the shows facilitate the records getting better,” he explained. “More people come to the shows, more people spread the word. We’re able to do this more, to generate that kind of connection, and that inspires the music, and the music inspires the people. That’s the shit that really matters.”
Matt Nathanson
by: Allie Greenberg
Posted on Jun 05, 2008 - 12:49 am | Comments (0)
For over ten years, Matt Nathanson has been singing his heart out and touring more than should be humanly possible, logging hundreds of shows each year. With his recent success on MTV and VH1 with the single “Car Crash,” Nathanson is finally gaining the recognition that he has rightly earned. With his new album, “Some Mad Hope” and an opening slot for Lifehouse on a national tour, he has the chance to turn on even more fans.
“It’s fun to be able to turn new people on, but it’s a little bit daunting sometimes,” Matt admitted backstage at the House of Blues in Chicago. “I think I prefer headlining, but it’s hard to keep that up. The momentum of that—you can only do that so many times.”
“I depend on people in the audience, that sort of connection so I don’t feel alone,” he continued, laughing. “It’s kind of like, when we tour, there’s that energy coming back, like ‘aw yeah. I dig you. You dig me. Let’s fucking have a moment.’ Here, it’s a little bit more like ‘I’m going to make you dig me.’”
Nathanson’s live shows are notorious for combining painfully emotional songs with outrageously humorous banter. Sexually charged and laden with pop-culture references, the performances are just as much stand-up comedy act as they are concert. After getting an enthusiastic sing-along going of “Answering Machine,” for example, he stopped the song. Matt stared down an audience member and said: “Sir, you’re not singing. This is our orgy, and you’re in the middle, reading a book.”
When it comes down to the music, though, nobody I have encountered is as passionate as Matt. “I love music,” he says. “It blows my mind. A great song can save my life. All I want to do is figure out how to write songs like that for me, songs that make me go ‘let’s get up tomorrow morning. Let’s go forward.’”
Excitedly, Nathanson shared his latest musical obsession that falls under this umbrella. “There’s this Edith Piaf song my friend told me about yesterday that I’d never heard before, ‘No Regrets,’ and the lyrics are fuckin’ brutal. They’re just so good. When you read that, you get your heart ripped out, but you get it ripped out in the best way.”
A self-described “whore for inspiration,” Nathanson draws ideas for his songs from anything and everything. Some songs, he stated, were written with a kind of “of Lyle Lovett ‘If I Had a Boat’ slash Dylan-y kind of ‘Spanish Boots’” in mind. Others come from unlikely places, such an “an episode of Dawson’s Creek” or “a good Gossip Girl episode.”
As a longtime fan of his, I was curious about the message behind his first top-20 song, “Car Crash.” “That song is a declaration of saying ‘I want to feel this way all the time. How do I feel this way all the time?’ You know, I’ve got all this shit in my brain, how do I figure out how to get to that explosively great moment of being present in whatever is going on. I want to feel the hit. I want to feel alive. There’s so much stuff that gets in the way of that in life, so it’s really a declaration of being like ‘I’m ready to accept this. I’m ready to be.’”
Nathanson is known for his meticulous song placement and album titling, and the construction of “Some Mad Hope” is no different from any of his previous releases. “The record kind of chronicles… a death of a relationship and the birth of something else,” Nathanson explained emphatically. “The rest of the songs are kind of dealing with shit, but that song [“Car Crash”] deals with the epiphany moment of ‘aw yeah. This is what this feels like. I remember this. Let’s do this.’ Then the record, like [the second song] ‘Come On Get Higher,’ gets a little more convoluted and gets stuck in the past, like ‘I wish I could, I wish I could’.”
The question arises: why did this album differ from previous ones? The answer, it seems, was in the songwriting.
“I feel like this record we kind of figured out how—I say “we” because my friend Mark and I kind of write a lot of the songs together— I figured out what I wanted the songs to do, and he helped me do them. It was this thing where before I was at the whim of the song. I didn’t feel like I could really form the songs the way that I wanted. With this record, I really stuck around until I boiled away all of the stuff I didn’t like, and figured out how to make it what I felt was potent. They were like little letters to people, so you want them to be as potent as they can be… I write these songs in the hopes that people hear them and will be like, ‘oh fuck, that’s what that is.’ I wanted to boil it down to this place where whoever heard them, there was no misunderstanding.”
Despite increasing recognition, Nathanson is careful to keep himself grounded. “What really matters is that the records get better and that the shows facilitate the records getting better,” he explained. “More people come to the shows, more people spread the word. We’re able to do this more, to generate that kind of connection, and that inspires the music, and the music inspires the people. That’s the shit that really matters.”