This week, we’re dipping into the interview archives for a chat that I had last year with 90s alternative veteran Matthew Sweet.
I’ve done a couple of interviews with Matthew over the past couple of years. When I spoke with him in 2014, he was in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds for his new album. During that interview, we talked about his plans for that new album, and touched on some choice moments from his past history, including the Girlfriend album and also the follow-up, Altered Beast. We also spoke about his friendship with J.J. Abrams and the art that he was working on using 3-D printing technology.
At the time that we talked, the Kickstarter was heading towards completion and he still had a ways to go as far as raising the necessary funds, so he was understandably a bit nervous. The day after the interview, USA Today mentioned his Kickstarter in a story online and within 24 hours, his album had successfully funded.
That brings us to the interview you’re going to hear today, which was recorded in June of last year and I had the chance to get up to date with Matthew on the progress that he had made on the new album. We also spoke about the direction of the new material and I asked him for his thoughts about working on an album with a Kickstarter deadline where you know there are all of the people who pledged for the album waiting on the other end of that deadline, and how that compares to working with a traditional record company deadline.
Beyond that, we spoke about some of the things that he’s struggled with personally and how he balanced dealing with those things while still working as a professional musician and in the closing moments of the interview, he shares the story of how he became involved with Tim Burton’s Big Eyes movie.
His new album is one that I’m eagerly anticipating. He just did an interview with Stereogum and it sounds like things are edging closer to completion. He’s been recording with his usual bandmates, Ric Menck and Paul Chastain, but in the Stereogum interview, he reveals that he’s also been working with longtime collaborator Greg Leisz and Gary Louris of the Jayhawks.
Additional recording sessions currently in progress will find him collaborating with Val McCallum, who some of you might know from Jackson Browne’s band and he mentions Al Jardine from the Beach Boys and Rod Argent as a couple of potential participants that he is still hoping to get on board.
It looks like he’s presently hoping to release the new album this summer. We’ll be looking forward to that.
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Enjoy!
Lost Together with Matt Wardlaw, Episode 7: Matthew Sweet
P.S. If you’d like to hear some more Sweet interview goodness, our friends at Dig Me Out had a great chat with Matthew that you’ll really enjoy!
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