Matthew Sweet
To Value Your Own Weirdness
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NATN: Can you take me through the process that led to the making of both records?
Matthew Sweet: Yeah, they were made closely together, is the funny thing about it. In that way I guess it's appropriate that they're coming out together, in this country at least. What happened is I got out of my deal finally. After I did In Reverse, I turned in a couple of songs for a best-of thing that I owed contractually and then I was free. That would have been in 2000.
I was flying again ... I did that Brian Wilson special for TNT at Radio City Music Hall, which was the first time I'd flown in like eight years. That was a kind of huge deal in my life, that i was flying again. So I went to Japan in August of that year and I had already turned in shortly before that those bonus tracks for the Time Capsule thing. Then we played this big festival over there. So I was doing interviews saying "you know, I'm totally free; I can do whatever I want" and sort of just being into the idea that I now could stop and think of what a better way to go about it might be.
So when I got back from that trip, I got some emails from people from labels who were interested to put out a record exclusively in Japan. And always in the past, my records had just come through whatever the distributor was for the label I was on. They had never been up for grabs in specific territories. So we worked out a deal with them where they had the record for a year exclusively. And I thought it's so exotic a concept for this other place I'm making it; that allowed me to kind of pretend I wasn't really making a record and just have fun and make it more like I make demos, just doing it at home. That process, turned out to be really fun for me. Because as hard as it was to make myself accept it was done, at least I made a record that I can say is a record, out of my house.
And it was right about then that I went down and did this writing session with Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins and like the week after that they were really really on us to make this record for Columbia. And I was like "Well, I don't really want to get signed there." I had a lot of misgivings about it. But they worked it out well so we were totally free as solo artists, but it still really ended up taking a lot more time than any of us planned. We were supposed to be done with it by like, that fall. But we spent the next two years promoting that.
Anyway, it was right around then, as the Thorns was starting, we were writing songs on this ranch in Santa Barbara. I guess this was summer of 2001. Kimi was finished in May of 2001. So in my spare time, while we weren't doing the co-writes, I wrote this batch of songs in kind of a real blast of junk, you know? And I sort of finished it all in my mornings, when I'd wake up earlier than everyone else and go out in this field and sorta write the words and evertyghing.
And when I got home, there was a nother factor that I upgraded my pro Tools system right after finishing Kimi. So everything sounded about 10 times better to me on the newer HD converters and everthing. So I wanted to try it out really bad, and that gave me the extra impetus to record right when I got back from that writing trip. So Ric Menck and I; I had Ric come over and we made tracks just with acoustic guitar and drums and singing, for all the songs that are on Living Things. And then, Van Dyke Parks ended up coming and playing, cuz I had dinner with him at that time. I had run into him at Brian's ... Brian Wilson had this 60th birthday party. They had a surprise party for him, which I was kinda like "God, he was going to drop dead when they come in and do this!" I couldn't believe they were going to. But he loved it; it was all his old buddies, you know. So I ran into Van Dyke Parks there, and I'd met him a number of times over the years and we always said we were going to record something but never did. So we made a plan for that summer and actually ended up doing it. And he was like 'I want to play accordion on something of yours.' And he actually did end up playing accordion on a song on Living Things. But I really wanted him to play piano and organ and stuff so he came over and spent a lot of time and was just so amazing, just as a person. He was just a very influential person in my life, and he helped a lot with just getting the vibe on Living Things that I wanted -- this weird nature, psychedelic thing but he also added a lot of fun and craziness to it.
So that's kinda how they happened. But I ended up in the studio for the Thorns that fall and I didn't even get to finish mixing Living Things, I guess until a year ago last spring. And then we were out doing touring for the Thorns and I was just waiting to put these out until after that. With Kimi, they were really slow in releasing it after we turned it in. It didn't come out until the next Spring. And that's why we didn't have to wait as long -- we only waited about nine months before we could release a few copies. We released a really small amount of Kimi earlier in the year, just through my own thing, through the indie coalition. And now we've done a deal with Red Eye, where it will have wider distribution. And it's in a digipak, and Living Things will be a digipak too, which I think is a first for me. I don't know if people like those or hate those, but I'm excited to see it; something new.
NATN: So, do you see these two records as being connected?
MS: Not really. Only in the sense that for me, it's unusual to be ... like now I'm talking to you on the phone and I've just started doing interviews for this. And for me, it's not normal because it's not this new thing that I've just finished. It's like these moments for me that even now I have some perspective from, which is unusual. It's great because on the one hand because I can try my own venture putting out my own things -- I have this stuff I can put out without having this "make or break" record to try it out. And also, when I make another record I can just put it out and I want to have this whole machine primed.
NATN: So is the relatively quick way of making records something you're attracted to now?
MS: Well, one of the things I've hated about being on big labels is you're always waiting on someone or something to decide whether you're doing something that they'll bother with or to let you go ahead on whatever, and there's so much uncertainty at those companies that I feel like I've wasted so much downtime. You sit around and you feel kind of bad and you worry. I'd like to get to more of a point where I'd be like a painter or a potter, where I just make my thing and I put it out and it doesn't have to be everyone in the world that wants it -- if enough people want it that I can survive actually making money from it. What's amazing is how little you can sell and make more money than I've ever got from labels.
I sold maybe two and a half million records, and I never made a dime of recouped money from it. I got some advances, but I guarantee you it wasn't like money compared to what they made. Although they spend a lot of money too, so you never get to the point where you recoup, because you share in all the expenses. And so, when I sold records last January, I get 10 bucks a record. It's like, I made the money from the record I made -- it's awesome! And so I just got to thinking, what if I was just at home and could record as much as I wanted. I don't want to get to the point where I put something out every four months and everybody's sick of it and can't tell the difference. But on the other hand, I think I can naturally accumulate things and put things out every year, or almost that often, and I think that would be healthier for me to keep something going and have fun with it. It's not something where I know I want to make every record I do forevermore at home alone, but it's something I'd like to explore a lot more. I think when you get a moment in time, fun stuff can come out of there.
NATN: Yeah, I guess it just opens up the freedom.
MS: The freedom feeling. Yeah, I just had this conversation with somebody from my management the other day, and they were like "Matthew, you never did anything anybody else wanted you to do -- you totally did what you wanted to do always." But I said "Yeah, but they make you feel that." It's like you feel bad about it; you feel the pressure. You still have to hear everybody say "make the right record." I mean, what the hell is that? What's the right record? One that's more like Britney Spears or something? So, that's why the record industry doesn't have a lot of people like me in it so much anymore. Unless you're just a lot like something else and really of the moment, it's all kind of fabricated now. I mean I guess there's some young bands who take off just on the basis of youth and hipness or whatever. But at this point, I want to be an artist. I want to do unbridled, cool weird things when I feel like it. And so, that's the exciting thing to me about these records -- they represent that I can do whatever. And there doesn't have to be someone who said it's ok or whatever.
NATN: These two records seem sonically very different -- Living Things is adorned with a bunch of, I guess, Van Dyke Parks stuff, you know bells and whistles so to speak, while Kimi is much more drums-bass-guitar.
MS: Yeah, I think of Kimi as being a much more traditional-me record. When it came out in Japan, they were all excited cuz they thought it sounded like Girlfriend. I still thought it was its own thing, but it didn't try to be in an oriental style or anything. As for Living Things it was much different. Actually even more spontaneous than Kimi. It was very of-the-moment; not really stopping to think or edit a lot. And I guess I was getting into acoustic instruments doing the Thorns stuff, so I decided to stick to all acoustic as much as possible, except for some of the keyboards and maybe a little bit of Greg Leisz's slide guitar, it's probably all acoustic instruments. Well, I guess the bass is electric, but there's an acoustic bass on all the choruses too. It went after a different kind of sound and feeling pretty aggressively. So in my mind I think of them as being pretty distinctly different. So I guess more than anything that shows how I might do something drastically different if I thought it had a chance in the world. And my interest is really in how to break the mold at this point. I'm interested in making things more exciting. I've been learning about other art forms and I think it really helps me see what I do in a different way. I mentioned pottery -- I've been learning to throw clay on a wheel and make pots and glaze them and fire them; my wife has a setup in our garage. And I think that's really helped me in understanding how to let go of thought and with just the feeling create things. And I think that helps me with music in a lot of ways, to discover different ways of looking at it.
And we've collected all these big-eyed art paintings from the '60s, like all these original oils by artists like Keane and Maio and everybody, and we have a book that's coming out -- kind of biographies of these people that collect them for the first time ever. And even in doing that, which wasn't exactly a creative venture for me -- more to the side of the collector mentality -- I still learned from that I think how one person like a painter, when they do something, their stamp is totally on that thing. And I think it used to really drive me crazy that I couldn't be different and not like me, and I felt like I was lame so I couldn't be good. But now I think I've learned more to value the weirdness of myself and seeing how that's what defines people over time, if you've left anything (even though I believe now that nothing matters at all and there's nothing you can even leave that matters really), still it's nice to think you can sort of fit with history.
NATN: Is there something about a song in particular that might lend itself to being decorated sonically in a particular way?
MS: Well I think in terms of Living Things in particular; I was really stressed out cuz we were doing the Thorns and it was real uncomfortable for me but we did this music and people were really reacting strongly to it so I didn't want to abandon this thing I did...so I had a lot of these really conflicting feelings at the time, and I think that left me in a raw state emotionally. I wasn't sleeping well, so I think I was in a wacked-out state and what popped in my head when you asked that question, I think of the song "Dandelion," and I remember sitting in the field and I was thinking, "what if I was the dead flower there" -- it was just this weird concept, and I had this feeling of how everything is overcome and destroyed and taken back into the earth; whatever. So when I brought it to life in the song, everything served that feeling. And when Van Dyke played piano on it, he knew it was the chaos of how things happen; you can't make it orderly. That sort of thing is so hard to verbalize, but it's what's most special about any art...in fact when I think to myself "why can't it work with companies and labels in a better way than it does?" I think there's just this conflict -- I want to do songs where I'm not sure what they mean. And I mean I figure there's people on labels making songs they're not sure what they mean, but the pressure is to make something people can understand. It's very difficult to be unusual and survive in today's music business unless you're going to do it on your own.
NATN: How did you discuss with Van Dyke all of these hard-to-describe qualities of the songs?
MS: Well first of all Van Dyke is an incredibly intuitive guy and really really intelligent. He probably just heard the songs and got what was happening. In fact, he turned me on to this naturalist poet from Nebraska named Loren Eisley, which is just some of my favorite stuff I've read in my whole life as far as understanding me and the world. Like religion doesn't work for me -- I've figured out over time "no, I just don't really think this is the case" as far as religion and God and that sort of thing -- I think a lot in my music I just desperately look for how I can find hope and peace out of the terror or whatever. And I think Van Dyke just sorta picked up on that angst in my music and he sort of turned me on to things that dealt with that. So get this guy Loren Eisley, I just feel so strongly about his stuff. The first book he wrote in the '50s, I forget the name of it, but you've got to read it...just about mortality and life and all that. So I just think Van Dyke is just a genius and he is able to read into to stuff like that.
NATN: How important is your relationship with Ric Menck to your ability to pull off these records?
MS: Oh, very important. As drummers who've played with me live over the years who aren't Ric can attest, it's really difficult for the drums to feel "right" to me. I want them to be a certain way; I really don't like when they're really perfect. I like when they get a little crazy. So Ric knows how to do that. At this point, it just works. It's like Keith Moon and the Who. And no one could love seeing what I'm doing than Ric does. He belongs to a group of my friends who before I even put out my first record on Columbia many many years back, 1987 I guess...all my friends just wanted me to put out my demos. They kinda liked those demos better than the record I created, even though they weren't "pro" and they didn't "fit in". I think maybe if I'd had the guts when I had some success, around the time of Altered Beast, I should have probably gotten into doing this more then. But I think I just didn't have enough confidence in myself and I didn't see the possibilities in it as much. Someone like Ric being around, he can come in my home situation and I'm never uptight and stilted around him. And same him with me. He's not used to being a session guy all the time. But he comes over and we do everything now. The latest stuff we've been recording it's just like one or two takes, and I've been more and more getting into the sound-art aspect of things and trying to preserve the spontaneity of things.
NATN: What essentially drives you to make music and how has that changed over the years?
MS: I don't think that's changed. I think there's multiple sides of it. Now in my life I really value it more than I ever did. I had a facility for it; it was just natural for me. I kinda had an ear for it -- I didn't have lessons or anything. And that always horrified me. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to have Greg Leisz teach me all the chords and the different voicings and I just can't retain it that way. I'm not bad at math, so I don't know why that is, but for me I could just do music by feel. Pick up an instrument and then after a while I was just playing it, kinda. But I think as far as wanting to make songs, it comes from an unsettled anxiety, a crying out kind of of the human spirit, where you just want to move something or change something about the world. But now I find I have more joy in it; it'll really make me get excited or have a happy feeling. It's one thing I've thought about about modern music and how excitement happens in it. From records I love in the '50s or '60s or whatever, there's a human element of excitement that's really gone, because records have gotten to the point where they're really fixed up and super perfect. But I think when things aren't together, an excitement can develop; a vibe that's just unnameable and it's therefore guaranteed to be unique. Like I think if the Beatles did "Strawberry Fields Forever" it's a lot like making some pot on the wheel. It's that exact unique pot. There's not going to be another one like it forever. And looking for that -- that sense of discovery -- is I think now what keeps me going.
NATN: Can you say a few words about what Robert Quine meant to you?
MS: Well Quine is a great person to talk about in light of what we've been talking about, because he was such an artist player. I mean his thing was inspired when he did it. It was an explosion of feeling and color and sound. He was an interesting guy because people think of him as such an art-rock player in a way. I remember when Fred Maher first told me about him; now I knew Quine cuz I was such a huge Voidoids fan, so I knew who he was. But it was really Fred Maher who first suggested I get Quine to play with me when we were first working on something together. I guess it must have been my second record. He said "Quine is very good at real beautiful, jangly voicings of chords." And you know I thought of him as much more crazy, angular spurts. And in fact, Quine did come and lend a lot of those open-ended chords that made the chord structures much more interesting. And what I loved was copping solos from him and just finding crazy moments and putting them together. And really we did that with both Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine -- just let them go crazy throughout the track and then just sorta pick out cool moments. So they didn't have to think about it. So in a way even then I understood you can let people go crazy and their best art would come then. I just didn't apply it to myself!
But Quine was a little bit like a professor, and I became really good friends with him during that period and for a few years afterward. We spent a lot of free time together and he wholly turned me on to music before the '60s. He turned me on to the early Elvis records and Roy Orbison, guitar players like Mickey Baker...he just was a funny, great guy.
Unfortunately, he also had a really mercurial personality. He would have this thing where he would sort of go through periods where he would be friends with people and then sort of turn on them, in a really kind of crazy, rabid-dog sort of way. And I watched him do it. He did it with Lloyd Cole, who was a good friend of ours together during that time, he did it with Fred Maher, and everybody I know who we were friends with at that time, he did it with. And we used to talk about it; he'd say "you know, one day it'll be you." And I would say, yeah, but the difference is I'm not going to come groveling back to you like these bastards. And sure enough, one day Quine flipped out, after we'd made 100% Fun. He didn't feel like he was on it enough or he was loud enough or something, and he started calling and leaving all these nasty answering machine messages, like saying things about my wife..it really pissed me off. So I never worked with him after that. However, we did kind of make up through Lloyd Cole.
And in recent years, he had been in bad shape, with his drinking and such. The craziest thing of all about his death, to all of us, was "Bob Quine Dead of Suicide Heroin Overdose" was just so un-Quine. He was never a junky. Especially back then. As I understand it, after his wife dropped dead all of a sudden, and it was right before they were gonna move down to North Carolina and retire together, he just became so despondent I guess he became a junky and was really a mess. And he had kinda planned to kill himself -- he had been telling people who were talking to him. But you know, Quine just said so much crazy stuff all the time, I guess while nobody is really surprised he did it, you're kinda surprised he did it. He always says real dark stuff; it's part of his humor. When I heard he died, I was really said, and I had to deal with a lot of feelings that I hadn't really dealt with when we had a falling out.
However, I'm so glad I have all these records that he went crazy on. In particular, Altered Beast is the record that I really let Bob play a lot on it, and I used a lot of what he played. And really, Living Things reminds me the most of Altered Beast of other records of mine, in that same way: a lot of intertwined, organic stuff. It was an arty record, and he was a big part of that. When I talk to Ivan Julian on the phone, we had big talks about it, and Fred was traveling at the time and Lloyd was, so we were the first ones to talk about it, and we said to each other, "let's make sure people know what a cool artist he was." And so that's why I stress that side of him. He wasn't a guy who could play every chord in the world at the Holiday Inn, you know what I mean? He was the antithesis of that guy. He couldn't play some normal thing if you spent all day trying to teach him how to play it. But he could come up with all kinds of really cool, amazing stuff on his own. So that's what I valued about him.
NATN: Well, Altered Beast is my favorite record of yours, so that's good to hear.
MS: Oh that's cool. Shit, well it's all gonna get like that now! You're gonna like it all.
NATN: Can you tell me about the title of the Japanese record?
MS: Yeah, a friend of mine in San Francisco helped me come up with the title. It was difficult to do, because I wanted it to be like, when you go to Japan or when you buy things from Japan -- anything that's involved in Japanese animation or anything like the Hello Kitty mentality -- they'll use bits of English, and often times they're really wrong, but they'll have this sort of weird quality about them because of what they say. It's kind of hard to put your finger on. So I decided that I wanted a Japanese title that's sort of like that; that's wrong, but when they it it sort of makes them smile or laugh. What it translates closest as here is "'Love You' Life," but how it reads in Japan has to do with the characters are written in a way that makes it kind of awkward or weird. And when some of my fans heard it they tried to talk me out of using it -- like, "that's wrong." But I wanted it to be wrong! So I had to ignore them. I've never figured out what they think of the title. I think they think it's sort of cute, so it must be cute.
TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.