Billboard, March 22, 1997
By Bradley Bambarger
In Matthew Sweet's new single, "Where You Get Love," there's a
bitter little line that asks "Am I the whore you're working for?"
Probably not the most extreme use of language in a pop song, but nonetheless,
it upset Sweet's biggest fan.
"My mom was very disturbed by that line," Sweet says. "I told her not to worry about it, but she's such an obsessive, psycho fan about my music. She listens to my records constantly-even my old demos. She follows everything, calling all the time, `How was the show? Were there many people there?' It's great, really, but it never stops. I'm constantly trying to remind her that I'm just a regular person, that I'm just her son. Oh, God. I'm talking about my mother. How uncool."
No. 21 on Modern Rock Tracks this issue, "Where You Get Love" comes from Sweet's sixth album, Blue Sky On Mars (Zoo/Volcano). The roots of his stylish pure pop can be traced back to Sweet's Nebraska upbringing. (There's even a PBS special in the works that covers his success as a native cornhusker, culminating in the filming of a recent Lincoln club gig.)
"Lincoln was a nice place to grow up," Sweet says. "There wasn't any crime, yet it was a fairly liberal town, a university town, with a good record store that had cool imports. So I didn't come from a farm or anything, but I think Nebraska does have a certain Big Sky blandness that made me be more imaginative in a way. You're always dreaming there; you're always having to picture the rest of the world."
After stints living in Athens, Ga., and New York, Sweet now resides in
Los Angeles. The sunny clime and proximity to various natural wonders are
what drew him there, as did such cultural touchstones as B-movies and the
Beach Boys (the knowing romp "Come To California" even kicks off
the new album). The appeal of the Golden State isn't lost on Mom, either,
Sweet
says. "She's always threatening to move to L.A."
Daily Sundial Online, April 17, 1997
By Martin Crawford, Contributing Writer
Just moments after performing in 100 degree heat, in front of hundreds of CSUN students, rock star Matthew Sweet chomps down on a piece of pizza in an office in the University Student Union.
He speaks with a soft, easy-going voice. A bit surprising for a performer who has sold millions of albums and spent much of the last week on the talk-show circuit promoting his latest album Blue Sky on Mars.
Sweet rocked CSUN's Court of Community for about an hour, Wednesday, singing songs such as "Sick of Myself," "Girlfriend," "Someone to Pull the Trigger," and "Where You Get Love" from his new album.
"I like smaller clubs and schools," Sweet says as to why he chose to perform at CSUN. "The smaller the audience, the more fun and personal it is. Especially the west coast where the audience is usually smaller. On the East Coast, there is usually a large turnout. It doesn't matter how many people show up at my our concerts, as long as they are real fans who really appreciate our music."
SPACE, the campus-based organization that sponsored the event, paid $4,000 to Sweet and his band to perform the free concert at CSUN.
Sweet says that normally he asks for more money to perform but since he's planning on playing gigs on the west coast, he decided to play at CSUN for a lower price.
Sweet's career has crossed the spectrum. His new album Blue Sky On Mars, centers on a space theme. Sweet says he got the idea from the Arnold Schwarzneggar movie Total Recall. Sweet says he used a lot of errie keyboard sounds to simulate spacedom.
Sweet says many members of the CSUN crowd enjoyed his new sounds, but that his greatest concert memory was a tour date in Chicago.
"There were 100,000 people there," Sweet says with refreshing smirk on his face. "I liked it because the whole audience seemed to be my kind of people."
One of Sweet's sourest concert memories was when he was doing a show in New Mexico and argued with event organizers. He said the director of the show was asking Sweet's band to let Miss Santa Fe get on stage and announce some "community stuff."
Sweet said he didn't think Miss Sante Fe would go well with the theme of the concert and argued until organizers conceded not to let the woman on stage.
"The people there didn't understand what a true rock concert was supposed to be like," Sweet says.
In sweet recent memories, Sweet performed on the Regis and Kathy Lee Show, Friday. He says it was a fun show because he met Tom Arnold and Dolly Parton. Sweet's band performed and even Kathy Lee joined in on the singing.
"It was also a lot of fun because my parents were there watching," Sweet says.
Sweet's music, a combination of rough-guitar riffs and classic-rock sounds has had many influences like the Beatles. Sweet tends to stick to the basics when it comes to the music. Using a keyboard, lead guitar, bass guitar, and powerful drums rounds off the alternative sounds from Sweet.
"John Lennon is my favorite musician," Sweets say proudly. "His lyrics are about himself and they are not fake. I also likes the pureness of Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys."
Sweet says he also appreciates the works of XTC, Generation X, Elvis Costello, and Neil Young. These were some of Sweet's favorites all through high school.
Sweet's popularity on the west coast has diminished in recent years, in part, possibly because of the the techno sounds that have dominated recent airwaves.
"I don't think the fad will stick," says the Nebraska native Sweet. "Human feel is better as the backbone to music -- not technological sounds. The new techno sounds are just a ...trend, a way to dress things up."
If Sweet hadn't found his niche in the music industry he says that he would have liked to have been a movie director because both jobs require the same duties.
"Like music, movies also take a lot of time and effort to really become serious and successful," Sweet says.
But Sweet says since he has put so much into his music career, he sort of feels obligated to stick with it. So he's going to enjoy it for all it's worth.
He says his new album is good because lots of people can enjoy it.
"It is not as hard to get into." Sweet says. "It is fun and direct."
The album has been selling faster than his previous albums. The video for "Where You Get Love" has received more airplay on MTV than his other videos.
Wednesday's concert was the first of his west coast tour.
He's going to start playing small clubs on the west coast and end up playing large concerts on the east coast. They will also be playing a few dates in Canada. Their openning group is called Sloam.
Fans can also look forward to seeing Sweet on a few upcoming television shows including "Politically Incorrect" and "The Tonight Show."
The Orange County Register, April 18, 1997
By Mark Brown
No offense to any particular musician, Matthew Sweet said, but they can't
really believe putting a sampled drumbeat or hip-hop rhythm behind a pop
song makes it sound modern, can they?
``I mean, the Rolling Stones are working with the Dust Brothers!'' Sweet said with an incredulous chuckle. ``There's a tendency right now to think that's being innovative - to dress up the music in a certain way. I wasn't tempted in that way. If I feel like using a synthesizer or putting a beat box on something, I'll certainly do it. But I've never been into the bandwagon mentality, and that really seems to be a facet of the whole thing - stick a hip-hop beat to Beatle-ey music or whatever's going on right now. It has little to do with the basic importance of the songs.''
Sweet would be a perfect candidate for such bandwagon-jumping; his strong
pop albums have sold well but not spectacularly. An ear-catching beat could
lead to more radio play, to big hits, to multiplatinum albums.
He likes some of the music out there, but ``to me that's something that
can't possibly be some lasting important movement in music - to use samples.
That was new 15 years ago. I don't want to live in the past. If I go back
through history, the one thing (the best songs in rock) don't have in common
is being a certain style. That's just what dates them or makes them sound
like a certain era.''
So fans will find the new Blue Sky on Mars to be classic Sweet. If
anything, it's less high-tech, with Sweet recording some of the songs alone
in his home studio, playing all the parts and giving it a stripped-down
feel. He worked again with producer Brendan O'Brien and purposely went for
a concise, tight album.
The 37-minute disc, though, started out as dozens of demos. Sweet had gone
home to make the record, and O'Brien had gone off to work on other projects.
After a year had passed, O'Brien called Sweet and asked, ``Where's the record?''
Sweet had to admit, ``Uh, I'm kind of finishing the demos right now.''
He had been holed up in his home after a year of touring, taking his time.
``I can see how people end up spending three years making a record,'' he
admitted. ``I made 65 demos or something like that, just some crazy amount.
I think I was trying to kill time. I hadn't been home for a whole year.
Somehow I thought if I keep doing demos forever, I won't have to leave.
``So Brendan called and said, `What are you doing? You have tons of songs,'''
Sweet said.
The two went to the producer's studio in Atlanta and got to work.
``We'd just do a song a day. We'd work on singing and overdubbing during
the day and a mix every night. We'd have a new finished track each morning,''
Sweet said. ``When you work really quickly like that, there's a sort of
spirit captured, a haphazard thing that's missing lots of times from modern
records. There are lots of impressive-sounding recordings now, but they
seem sort of calculated.''
He also realizes he's taking a path where others - even the talented Marshall
Crenshaw and World Party - have found limited commercial success.
``I certainly feel very lucky I've gotten across as much as I have,'' he
said. ``The record company is always thinking, `How do we break Matthew
and really have him sell big?' I have a hard time attaching myself really
seriously to that concept. You go crazy worrying about something like that.''
So he doesn't. He previewed the new songs on an eight-week tour earlier
this year and fans loved them.
``The Rolling Stone review really trashed it, gave it two stars, said I
stole every song from another group,'' he said cheerfully. ``I guess I can't
count on everyone liking it. But I've had plenty of people say they thought
it was their favorite album of mine.''
Indeed, the influences are there, from the Beatles to Cheap Trick. But the
album does contain some of his most affecting writing, from the universal
guilt in ``Behind the Smile'' to the gorgeous ballad ``Until You Break.''
Sweet thought about toughening the album up but decided to go against the
grain.
``I kind of had to have some guts to do it. It got to the point where it
was, `Am I going to be a man and do what I want to do, or worry about what
some critic is going to say?'
``It's an awfully poppy record,'' he conceded. ``The people who want to
hate me will say it's just a wimpy, poppy record. For people who like my
stuff, they tend to really enjoy it.''
The emotion in ``Behind the Smile'' finds him apologizing for neglecting
his friends in these overbooked times.
``It's kind of like an apology song but can't possibly be the apology I
need for all the people I never call. I often feel guilt for not being a
good friend,'' he said.
Besides his signature songwriting, fans will find that Sweet continues his
lifelong fascination with the cosmos in the new album. He irked the record
company by putting a NASA Voyager picture from the surface of Mars on the
cover instead of a picture of himself.
The same way younger music fans wish they'd been around to witness the
Beatles and the Doors firsthand, they also missed out on the era of space
exploration that Sweet and others his age grew up with. They weren't there
to watch a man walk on the moon on live TV, or to see shots from the surface
of Mars, thus the fascination with space and the unknown, from ``Star Trek''
to ``The X-Files'' to ``Independence Day.''
``We knew what it looked like to stand on the surface of another planet,''
Sweet said.
He got to indulge his interest while selecting album art from the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory.
``It's easy for us to get the feeling there's never going to be any progress
when 20 years have gone by without any big progression,'' he said. ``I believe
before too long we're going to be out there more. I'm sure we're going to
find out some more earth-shattering news in our lifetime.''
Edmonton Sun, Friday, April 25, 1997
Singer releases an out-worldly album
By Mike Ross
Matthew Sweet says he keeps "threatening" to bring his theremin
on the road with him.
"I was thinking maybe I could do a solo theremin piece before we play,"
the 32-year-old singer says, only half in jest. He plays the Dinwoodie Lounge
tonight.
A theremin, sci-fi fans may recall, is a musical instrument where the pitch
of its whistling electronic howl is determined by how far you hold your
hand away from an antenna. It's featured in the theme song from the old
Star Trek series.
It's just one of those things from the past Sweet just can't seem to get
away from. He may be a down-to-earth singer-songwriter, a Nebraska-born
talent who became an alternative cult hero earning his initial success during
the "grunge era" (1991-94, RIP). But he used to be a (gasp) science
fiction nerd. He may still be.
The cover of his latest album, Blue Sky On Mars - the title taken
from the film Total Recall - is a shot taken by the Viking I Mars
lander in 1976.
"I called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when I was about 12,"
Sweet recalls, "when the Viking landers first landed on Mars, because
I was real interested in astronomy and space back then."
The JPL actually sent Sweet a copy of the photo, which he's displayed proudly
on his wall ever since.
"Last year, when the whole `possible life in the Martian rock' thing
happened, I just started thinking about it again, thinking about those photos.
People never really realized that we have photos that show what it looks
like to stand on the surface of another planet."
Sweet says he was also looking for a way to introduce a "space"
theme to the new album, which he and producer pal Brendan O'Brien slapped
together in less than four weeks between the two of them (plus a pair of
drummers). Musically, the results aren't really "spacy" at all,
featuring the same simple, guitar-driven, heartland-rock-with-a-cynical-twist
Sweet's been known for since the Girlfriend album came out in 1991.
But he did include a tune on Blue Sky On Mars called "Missing
Time" - on which he used the aforementioned theremin.
"Missing time is a term that's become popular lately," he explains.
"It's used to describe the period where you don't know what happened
to you when you're abducted by aliens."
Sweet denies he's still a sci-fi freak, although he does have a lot of out-worldly
thoughts.
"I don't know every sci-fi movie and I don't read a lot of sci-fi books
in my adult life. I did when
I was in my early teens," he says. "I think it's that the idea
of discovering a little more about where we came from, what we're doing
here and what the universe is, is something that profoundly compelling,
to me, at least.
"I almost feel that there's sort of a parallel. You have the space
traveller, the guy going out to explore the universe. And to me, it closely
resembles any person's life where they're in this strange world and predicament
they found themselves in after they were born and they're trying to find
meaning in it. It tied in somehow really closely with my feelings about
life."
Tickets to Matthew Sweet, with Bloody Chicletts opening, are $23 at
the door.
Sorry, there will be no theremin - this time.
Now, May 22-28, 1997
By Kim Hughes
By rights, singer and songwriter Matthew Sweet should have a swollen head.
Fortunately, he's either unaware of the sweeping critical appraisal of his music as some of the most affecting, intelligent, come-hither, guitar-centric pop ever recorded, or he has the humility of a monk.
Releasing albums that promise only iridescent, alluring snapshots of his life at that time, Sweet writes songs that - pardon the clunky metaphor - make discerning chunks of the whole world sing.
With the squinty-eyed precision of a master marksman, Sweet has hit the target bang-on virtually every time he's booked a studio and plugged in a guitar (or bass or keyboard) since his major-label debut in 1986 at age 22. And the wealth has been generously spread.
Sweet has contributed songs to a plethora of movie soundtracks and sundry compilations, at once feeding his pop-culture junkiedom and reaching potential fans who might otherwise fall through the cracks.
Course stayed
Pundits may dismiss his earliest work as overproduced, or grumble that his Altered Beast disc in 93 was too smudgy and bombastic to properly frame his glorious, knock-kneed bursts of pop/rock confection the way his widely acknowledged 91 opus, Girlfriend, did.
But varying instrumental accoutrements and big-sound rock producers like Brendan O'Brien and Richard Dashut have never swayed Sweet from his upbeat course.
Neither has heartbreak or self-loathing, though those themes have characterized Sweet's work, creating dynamic tension between the music's luminous surface and its bleak underside. For Sweet, an astute listener is his best customer.
It's hardly surprising, then, to hear the perennially modest Sweet describe the 12 slim songs on his latest, grooviest, keyboard-drenched Blue Sky On Mars disc as his "most new wave," while summing up the tasty, bloopy lead-off track, "Come To California," as "such a dumb, simple song."
Relaxing, post-sound check, in his idling tour bus outside Minneapolis' famed First Avenue club, Sweet, as expected, is earthy, accessible and as self-deprecating as the guy who intoned that he was "sick of himself" on 100% Fun.
Simple songs
"I kind of worry. I mean, on a surface level, 'Come To California' is such a simple tune, although it does have a darker side to it if you read all the lyrics," frets the man who recorded "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?" for the Saturday Morning Cartoons' Greatest Hits collection and gave the celluloid version of Flipper its signature song.
"Now when I go to the doctor, the nurse's eight-year-old kid is, like, 'Are you the Matthew Sweet from Flipper?' Yep," he cracks, "getting those fans for 20 years from now."
Getting back to "Come To California," "People really focused in on it. Even Brendan (who produced Blue Sky On Mars and 100% Fun) was like, 'It's the feel-good hit of the summer!'
"There's always pressure with new records," Sweet admits. "Because I've only ever had gold records, there's this pressure of 'Why isn't he platinum?' To me, it's like spinning the wheel every time."
Alas, those magnificent songs are just one aspect of the Nebraska-born, L.A.-based Sweet's boundless appeal. He exudes genuine warmth and a kind of aw-shucks charm from the stage. He consistently attracts great players, too, guys like Richard Lloyd, Robert Quine, Ric Menck, Nicky Hopkins and, once, bizarrely, Mick Fleetwood.
In conversation, Sweet cheerfully blathers on about B-movies, Japanese comics, obscure pop groups and, lately, his role as Sid Belvedere, shag-tastic bassist in pal Mike Myers' fictional Austin Powers-led band, Ming Tea. True to form, Sweet co-wrote and produced Ming Tea's soundtrack entry, "BBC."
He's also pals with the Kids in the Hall and - surprise! - donated a song to the Brain Candy soundtrack. Did we mention the soundtracks to Ace Ventura II and teen witch flick The Craft?
"Believe it or not," says Sweet, "I do turn stuff down."
Sweet's omnipresence is easy to forgive because his work is solid and he's so up-front about it - and everything else. He readily admits that soundtrack work helps pay the mortgage. He fesses up to experimenting with hypnosis in an effort to overcome his fear of flying.
He even reveals that he did (gasp!) a Coke commercial, just like Van Dyke Parks, with whom Sweet shares an obsessive preoccupation with sonics. It's hard to imagine any of Sweet's contemporaries copping to such commercial endeavours, and ironic that such a pure-pop writer should have to.
The surest way to rankle him is to damn him with faint praise of the "Gosh, you're so critically successful, how come you're not a superstar?" variety.
"This critical success thing does kind of irk me," Sweet admits with an easy smile as Mrs. Sweet and members of his current band mingle in another part of the bus.
"Recently, we were playing somewhere in New England and this local writer had written this glowing little piece about our upcoming show.
"At the end he wrote something like, 'The new record isn't likely to change Sweet's status as a cult figure' or something like that. And I'm like, 'C'mon, give me a chance. Maybe it will.'
"It's not my main goal. I've had enough success to keep on making records. I never envisioned myself as 'Matthew Sweet, rock guy' who sells tons of records. I always just wanted to get into recording studios and make music.
"At this point," he allows, "I guess the only reason I could want larger fame would be to make more money, so that when things get really bad - which they inevitably do - I can make it through those times. The indicators for this record have been good so far, so I'm optimistic.
"But every time is like a fight, and we're out playing and trying to get people into it. It's like, you'll have a super day at radio and feel like you're on top of the world, and then the next night you'll have this really grim show with a lousy crowd." He laughs. "So I try not to get too wound up in the whole fame and success side of it because it'll drive you crazy."
Apart from ongoing dilemmas presented by radio stations that will add a song only if he flies in to play one of their promotional shows - not to mention worries that his first-time-purchase house will be swallowed whole by the San Andreas fault - Sweet has arrived at a comfortable point in his career.
Trippy Mars
Reportedly whittled down from a pool of 65-odd homemade demos, and recorded mostly in Atlanta, Blue Sky On Mars is a trip.
Juxtaposing icy sci-if imagery (with actual cover snaps of Mars!) and vaguely ambiguous lyrics against a massive, dirty guitar sound and freewheeling keyboard squelches, a mix of teary ballads and flat-out raves - all in an economical 36 minutes, 38 seconds - it rocks. Three songs - "California," "Into Your Drug," and "Where You Get Love" - form a lethally catchy triptych.
Naturally, there's touring. Lots of it. Sweet hit the road for seven weeks prior to the album's March release and he continues barrelling down the highways of North America, playing to sellout crowds like the one awaiting his arrival at the Phoenix Tuesday.
If touring once again raises the pesky but crucial issue of money, Sweet has of late discovered a spiritual wrinkle amid the job's workaday demands.
"Touring has been a big part of my breadwinning, but it's also become a really big emotional thing for me as an artist. I was really nervous to come out on this tour, thinking, 'Gosh, will anybody be out there or will it be really tough, like starting over?'
"And it's been really amazing how great the crowds have been to us and how well the people know all the songs. Even songs that weren't particularly big hits act like hits now.
"For whatever big successes I've never had, I do feel there's a cumulative thing going on where the fans really do care about the songs, and there's so many of them now that it's hard for us to play the songs everybody wants.
"It's fun, and in a way it makes me feel kind of old because I have all these records to pull stuff from. But it also makes me feel more... solid, because I have this legacy."
Top
Ottawa Sun, Wednesday, May 28, 1997
Hot artist has a penchant for mixing his musical sounds
By Rick Overall
For Matthew Sweet, the surest route to making great music is to synthesize
what he loves best about other people's records.
Sweet's an unashamed purveyor of a brand of contemporary pop music that
celebrates a marriage of crunchy guitars and sensual lyrical swirls, all
within the context of a single collection of songs.
He says he comes by the sound through his genuine love for "good"
music, be it new or old.
"I think if you play a lot of different instruments like I do, the
sound is just borne out of whatever your particular bent is.
"It's really been a backwards process for me to find out what my influences
are.
"People would come up and say this reminds me of that and then I go
listen to it and realize I was into whatever "it" was -- and it
was then the influence would take hold," he says with a laugh as he
readies for his concert at Barrymore's tonight.
Rather than a specific artist, Sweet thinks it's more how something feels
that burrows into his creativity.
"The style I do pulls in everything from the full blown poppy stuff
like Beatles, Big Star, Byrds and Beach Boys, all the way to the country
rock of Gram Parsons.
"When I was a teenager, I just loved the British New Wave like Elvis
Costello and Nick Lowe.
"And then every once in awhile I'll just slide into stuff like '70s
Elvis and other oddball stuff, so what I'm all about really comes from all
over the map."
Sweet's latest, Blue Sky On Mars, throws those different levels at
us again, from the distorted chomp of "Where You Get Love" to
a murky simmer on "Hollow," offering an amazing diversity.
"I've always cared about songs that are both melodic and melancholy.
But I came out of an era that was a little harsher back then.
"I think the fact that you hear this combined with a louder guitar
sound is simply a reflection of when I began to play live and I just really
got into being able to crank that amplifier."
Sweet is careful to add that he rarely patterns his creations after specifics.
"There seems to be a conception out there that I've spent a lot of
time studying music and learned how it's made.
"I've never thought of it that way at all. The exception to that rule
might be the "Neil Young" drumbeat on Girlfriend, but it's
rare to find something in my music that's been knowingly borrowed."
Miami Newtimes.com, 6/12/97
By Rob O'Connor
Music Vessel, July 1997
Matthew Sweet owns a vinyl copy of the first Buckingham Nicks album that features the prettiest couple of the mid-70s looking very teen, sublimely sexy, and, well, pretty. That’s taste.
And so is Sweet, who shouldn’t just be an acquired taste. It’s been said before, and now it’s said again: if there was any justice in the slavish world of music - which, of course, there isn’t - this 32-year-old Nebraska-born songwriting genius would be a pop icon and sold millions of his shimmering pop delights that surface with glorious regularity every 18 months to two years. He’d like to put out more, but touring and promotion these days don’t permit the 'excess of' an album a year.
More’s the pity. In the 12 years since Sweet debuted on CBS with Inside, he’s crafted a haze of insouciant melodies and harmonies that have delved into dark corners and toyed with noise as much as they have whipped out endless perfectly crafted pop joys that reminds you of Elvis Costello, Brian Wilson, Alex Chilton, even Cheap Trick and Gram Parsons. Critics love the cheeky faced little guy to death; the public seems to have a problem getting his take on the essential nature of song as both the great communicator and just simple, pure, fun.
His records - particularly the last four, Girlfriend, Altered Beast, 100% Fun, and the new stick of dynamite power pop Blue Sky On Mars - have all sold well enough without ever threatening to bust the world open, which is a pity because Matthew Sweet is better than nearly all the so-called contemporary pop giants of his times. Take the opening burst of five or six songs on Blue Sky on Mars: "Come To California" is the best whacked out, rocked out, chunky Beachboys number in years; "Back To You" has a chorus you’d kill for and Elvis Costello at his most Attractions written all over it; "Where You Get Love" has a guitar motif going on in the background which reprises Cheap Trick’s "Dream Police"; "Until You Break" is the most gorgeous ballad you’ll hear this year - and it’s intelligent, as well; "Over It" defines the two-minute pop song as it was once practiced. And for all those comparisons, each is distinctly Sweet and his collection of guitars - Epiphone Casino, Rickenbacker, eight-string bass, paisley Telecaster and more - ringing, chiming, jangling away.
With Brendan O’Brien (who produced the set) joining in on keyboards - just hang on the sinuous, little atmospheres, the two spook and snake through some of the tracks with a battery of monophonic synthesiser and mellotron (try Into Your Drug), while Ric Menck (of the excellent Velvet Crush) and Stuart Johnson hold down an open-ended tough-but-flexible bottom end. And there’s that weird wonder, the theremin. “Oh, I love the theremin,” Sweet enthuses from his plastic fantastic LA home. “Brendan and I both ordered theremins that Bob Moog was making when we made 100% Fun and they came in the year after that. “I used mine last year on a song, Dark Secret, for the Craft movie soundtrack - the teen witch film on Disney Pictures, and on two tracks on the album. I went on a bunch of television shows with the theremin after my last record came out as I’d received it by the time it hit the stores. It was just a novelty thing and showing people how to play it. If only our bodies were a little bit more exacting it would be the ultimate instrument; it’s so pure - the way you play it without touching anything and just moving your body through the air."
"There are people who can play it amazingly but not very many of them. I can play it really poorly and I’m like the best person I’ve met at playing the theremin. There’s not a ton of great theremin players out there.” He laughs at the absurdity of the notion. But then this guy is always easy going, seemingly mostly happy. He’s been with the same lady for as long as I can remember. A couple of years back they spent their time collecting fossils out in the Badlands when he wasn’t touring or recording. Just fill up the old van and go dig. Since then they’ve changed habits. “Hmm, we haven’t actually done much fossil digging recently ... More like we’ve collected a lot of 1970 era furniture which is a little bit like digging for fossils.
We bought a home last summer and did it completely in like ’68-’72 era stuff. I’ve been collecting it for years but we really got to do it totally in our home. That’s the hobby thing we’ve gotten into it.” We’re talking plastic here, right; rather bright, oddly-shaped plastic. “Oh yes,” he laughs, “you know it. People are like a bit shocked when they walk inside, they’re like ‘oh’; it’s like they’ve stepped into the past, into a different era. We have a lot of cool plastic things. I have a stereo egg-shaped plastic chair that’s one of my favourite pieces, and tons of really odd stuff, and musical things that are cool looking and go with it.” We end up spending the next five minutes talking about the original flatbed masters of the classic Jimi Hendrix albums, released recently for the first time the way they were supposed to be heard. Sweet’s literally drooling. “I’m a big fan of the old Jimi. I’ll just have to get them.” And if you’re talking guitarists and the conversation swings to pop, well, naturally his love of Lindsay Buckingham-era Fleetwood Mac and his solo albums has a place in things. Sweet rattles on cheerfully about how he finally got to meet Buckingham while recording "Dark Secret" on which Stevie Nicks’s ex ended up laying lead, and how it bugs him that Buckingham’s next solo set has been put on hold while he does the class of Rumours Fleetwood Mac reunion thing. “I’ll tell you what, it makes me feel a lot better about the prospects of that record knowing that Lindsay’s involved. It makes the odds much better that it’ll be good. I’ll be watching like any fan for its release. I just love the freak pop stuff he did on Tusk."
"Appropriately, or isthat fittingly, we end up the surface of Mars, pictures of which coat the cover and inside slick of Blue Sky - a nice analogy for the journeys we all make. “Wow, you got it, “ he says. “I’ve been spending all my time trying to explain that to people who say ‘so why’d you do that then?.’ For some reason, no matter how simply I explain it, some of them still don’t get it. I don’t know it doesn’t seem such a hard thing to grasp. “When I was 11 I called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when those explorer craft landed."
I was just really into the concept of the surface of Mars, being able to know what it looked like, the imminence of space exploration. I remember that I even built a model of the craft that took those photos, when I was in fourth or fifth grade for a school project. “I used egg cartons for the curvy parts like the gas tanks on the side, so this was a chance for me to relive that moment for myself. When I decided to use the photos on the cover I got to go to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory instead of calling them from Alaska. “I actually realised I lived 20 minutes from them,” he bursts into laughter, “so I went over there and was able to dig through their archives and find photos I liked. It was my own little thing and it ended being the way the album is dressed up and the whole notion of space”. A few minutes later he’s talking about the classic sci-fi flick The Forbidden Planet, Lost In Space, a host of black and white b-grade gems, some archetypal horror, and life on the tour bus he’s seen plenty of. A terrible fear of flying keeps Matthew Sweet grounded and on the road in the States and Europe (to which he travels by boat), so it’s natural that fossils would be one side of his ‘Boys own’ adventure and space must be the final frontier. In the meantime the Blue Sky On Mars has a perfect hue and a welcoming glow, so step outside and meet the native Sweet.
Consumable Online
By Joe Silva
While the Marilyn Mansons of the moment have come to insure that the day of the winsome and generally melodic pop star never returns, there's enough resistance out there to keep the non-ghouls like Matthew Sweet from fading entirely. Album number six from the Nebraskan-born, Athens-reared (well, musically anyway) musician is more high-energy, guitar-etched pop. Blue Sky On Mars sees Matthew combine forces yet again with uber- producer Bendan O'Brien to come up with a hit-and-run style disc (it clocks in at just under 40 minutes) that's tuneful and fresh beyond what most regular record chart residents could ever hope to be. On the road for warm-up gigs with a slightly revamped lineup, Matthew took time for an extended chin wag.
Consumable Online: How are you doing?
Matthew Sweet: I'm crazed. Out of my mind. But I'm doing good. The tour's gone great and I was really nervous to go out because I hadn't played in like a year. It's been an amazing turn out every night. We've been so lucky.
CO: This seven week "warm up" tour - was that your idea?
MS: We did it last time where we toured for a few weeks. It was a little shorter, maybe like four or five weeks. It's definitely good to get the band out and get warmed up when you're not under full pressure yet. It's a little bit grueling, but mostly I was concerned that we wouldn't have a good turn out and that they wouldn't know the new songs and it would freak them out. But the crowds have been great and really accepting so far.
CO: Who's out with you this time?
MS: Tony (Marsico, bass), Ivan (Julian, guitar), Rick Menke is playing drums, and Paul Chastain is playing keyboards and doing vocals. So we actually have an extra member this time.
CO: So have you guys worked out any of the harmonies?
MS: Well there's me and Tony and Paul singing together, so there's more advanced harmonies than ever before in the live set.
CO: Someone had asked me why you haven't been over to Europe in a long time.
MS: And you said "Because he's stopped flying!!"
CO: Well I had read how you'd made some manic two-day cross-country drive.
MS: Yeah, I've done that a couple of times. I have a horrible fear of flying and I went through a period during Altered Beast where I really flew a lot and it just caused me to have mini-nervous breakdowns. And I went and got hypnotized and went to various different people about it and just never really had an easy time conquering it. It kinda got to the point where either I needed to say I wouldn't fly or I was still going to have to fly all the time to promo things, or flying every day to different cities, and doing a lot of international. So before the last record, my manager said "OK, we'll just not fly at all on this record and just concentrate on this country and Canada." and I got gold records in both places within the year, which is way faster than Girlfriend went gold. And since it worked so well, no one's really bothered me about it since. We spent a lot of money touring internationally and never really made money doing it. It's kinda like I feel I've gotten to go everywhere (already) and for the time being it's not like I won't fly, but it's just made it easier saying I won't.
CO: Have you thought about the "boat" option?
MS: Yeah, that really doesn't sound too great either. You need a lot of time for it and it's totally horrifying. I mean crossing the channel in England is scary. I spent a lot of time in England early on in my career before I had any success, like during my first record. Not so much touring, but recording.
CO: I've heard that you've brought a lot of guitars with you on tour. And considering what you guys have been doing, is there any reason why...
MS: Well I don't really have a ton of guitars with me, especially for me. I think most of that comes from the Altered Beast era when I was using a lot of different tunings. I was using an open G, open E, drop D, regular tuning, so I had to switch guitars a lot on that tour. I got so much flak that I really made an effort on the last album not to use open tunings so that I wouldn't have to explain all the time why I switch guitars. I also love guitars and I have millions of different guitars, but this tour I've been mostly playing Jazzmaster Telecasters. Mostly fender stuff which I haven't played in a long time. Also an Epiphone Casino I used a lot on the record, the one from the back of 100% Fun.
CO: What about that clear lucite looking thing?
MS: Oh, the Van Armstrong? I haven't used that a lot lately. I haven't been touring with it. I used usually on song with open E tuning. It's a cool looking guitar. It's really heavy, and not easy to play. I do have a double-necked Gibson SG out with me that I use in my new video.
CO: Is one coming out soon?
MS: Yeah, we already made a video for "Where You Get Love," which is the third song on the record. It's a space video where I'm like in a pod spinning through space and I go walking on the surface of the planet sort of in a space suit and all of the current band is in it. It really came out cool. It's directed by a guy named Andy Fleming, who directed The Craft which is a teen witch movie that I did a song for last year ("Dark Secret"). Lindsey Buckingham played lead guitar on it because he was working in Ocean Way (studios) when we recorded it. He's a huge idol of mine, so that was real exciting for me. It's also the first time I got to play theremin on a record. There's one credited on 100% Fun, but that's not a real theremin.
CO: I saw that the new record also has as theremin credit. Is that yours?
MS: Yeah, Brendan (O'Brien, producer) and I both bought theremins. Bob Moog has been making re-issue theremins the last couple of years out in North Carolina. They're a lot like an old one, but they're a lot more stable. I used that a lot on the new record, mostly "Missing Time" and there's a little bit on the very end of "Where You Get Love."
CO: Speaking of theremins, I read the interview you did with Brian Wilson. How was that?
MS: It's very exciting for me to meet Brian and for that matter Van Dyke Parks who I'm also a huge fan of. He was so great. You know, Brian's a little out there, but in certain ways he was more normal than I expected him to be. You know, he's not talking out of the side of his mouth or any of that stuff like you see footage of him doing in particular in the theremin movie. I saw that movie shortly after I interviewed him and it was night and day from the guy I just met. He's really way a lot more normal than he was at that point. He just seems healthier, but he's a little out there. I've gotten to know his manager pretty well and he says "Don't think Brian doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes. He uses it a little bit as a buffer between him and the world, that kind of wackiness thing.." It's kinda hard to tell. I've never really worked with him musically. I was supposed to perform some stuff from Pet Sounds with him for some radio shows in conjunction with the Pet Sounds box set which then was shelved indefinitely. But it got to the point where I was supposed to go to his house on a Monday and rehearse and then the plug got pulled. I hope to one day check him out musically a little bit, like get him to arrange some background vocals or playing Hammond (organ) on something. But I'm just a huge fan of his work.
CO: There's that little bit in the beginning of "Back To You" that's sort of Pet Sounds-ish.
MS: Yeah, that's got a little. The funny thing is that really comes from Brendan. It's Brendan that's playing that percussive Hammond sound that so's signature-Beach Boys.
CO: I heard your voice coming out of a Coke commercial. Why'd you do that?
MS: I used to collect a lot of tapes of people, and in fact Van Dyke Parks immediately pops to mind as someone who did a lot of cool commercials in the sixties. And the Yardbirds and the Stones did these Great Shakes commercials and I always had tapes of those. My viewpoint is kinda opposite of the hoighty-toighty artist that won't do anything commercial. I'm kinda like, if they pay me a lot, I think it's funny and cool to do it. And they did pay me a fortune to do that Coke commercial which is like a minute long. We did it the same afternoon that I did a song called "My Pet" for the Ace Ventura II soundtrack, so I made a lot of money that day. I'm not shy to say it, because believe it or not having sold a combined million and a half records, I've never made a penny from record sales. I mean, people might not understand that, but I need to do things to make money. I buy so many guitars, I have to offset it somehow (laughs). So it's partly for the money and partly because I thought it was fun to do. It was the same thing like Flipper. They asked me to do the theme for the kids Flipper movie last year. They just paid me a fortune to do it, so it was like how could I say no? Plus it was like Flipper, so I thought it was kind of funny. None of the so-called alternative people really knew about it too much. I just built up my eight year- old fan base with that. I mean, I just like doing music and if I could make an inordinate amount of money doing little one-off things like that as long as they're something that I think would be fun or I'm interested in, I do them. I've certainly turned down my fair share of things.
CO: You did a track for the Germs tribute record, didn't you?
MS: Yeah, that happened because believe it or not, I got invited to Drew Barrymore's birthday party. When I was there I met Pat Smear who's in the Foo Fighters now and was in the Germs and a guy named Bill Bartell who was kind of the coordinator of that record. They were just really nice to me and kind of begged me to do it. My friend Brian, who's friend with them kinda helped me get it together and came over and did some of the synthesizer noises. He's actually the guy who did the Moog cookbook with Roger Manning of Imperial Drag. So that was just a quicky thing we did. I was really into the Germs' stuff. I like Pat's guitar playing a lot.
CO: So you knew their stuff ahead of time?
MS: I knew it a little bit. I wasn't hugely into at the time. I kinda got the compilation, listened to a bunch of song, and found one that I liked a lot.
CO: I guess you toured a fair amount for 100% Fun.
MS: Yeah, we toured pretty much a year for that record. Probably from February through December.
CO: And did you take a fair amount of time off aside from the smaller projects?
MS: Yeah, really like the whole year. I made demos during the spring, kinda got my demo studio together. I bought a house during May and June, which was a monumental hassle and then moved all my junk over there in early July. So I accomplished a lot of major life things due to my publishing deal getting renegotiated.
CO: Zoo (Entertainment, Matthew's label) gotten shaken up a little bit.
MS: Zoo was purchased by a group of Wall Street investors and a guy who was one of the high-up money guys at BMG who defected whose named is Kevin Zinger. Now it's Volcano Entertainment. It's kind of exciting, because it gives a whole new atmosphere to the label. They're more New York-based. It's a lot of my old friends from BMG who are running it now and they're all excited because there's more money for things like packaging now.
CO: Yeah, the sleeve is really neat.
MS: The cover has real Martian surface photos as well as orbiter photos and then Roger Dean, the Yes album cover guy did my name and album title for it. So we've got these really groovy looking name and album title and then all these real lander photos in color.
CO: Now the new record sort of comes off like Matthew and Brendan's house of harmony and distortion again. Did you two work pretty much together on this?
MS: This was like really the culmination of our friendship. We really had a great time doing it with just no turbulence at all. We worked really quickly, pretty much doing a song a day. We did a bunch of drums at first and then we'd just would work on a song a day and try to mix it by that night. So we kept up the kind of energy level of it because I played so much of it myself this time. It's really just me and him and a drummer on any given track. I played mostly all the guitars and everything, and he played a lot of the keyboards. Last time when we finished we said "Yeah, I think we could make a much stronger record." I feel like it's a really consistent record, kind of upbeat for me. It's almost kind of like a New Wave record.
CO: You've worked with a lot of different people on your records, but now that you've done this more or less on your own with Brendan, did that affect the approach? I mean Richard (Lloyd, guitar) isn't on it.
MS: Well the original concept for this record was that I was going to do it at home and then I was going to mix. It was going to be my home demo kind of record and then I took so long getting it together that (Brendan) finally called me going "Where's the record?" And was like "Well I just finished the demo stage (laughs)". So I ended going down and recording it with him. There are a couple of songs that I did mostly at home. Both of the ballads, "Until You Break" and "Missing Time" were recorded mostly at home. It wasn't a planned thing not to have outside guitarists on this record, but once I got there we just got into this process that was so streamlined. I mean, it wasn't even easy for Brendan to say "Let's not get Richard, let's not get Ivan", it was just that we had to make the decision at some point that since it was going so well do we even want to mess with that. I knew eventually I'd do a record where I didn't use those guys. It happened so naturally, I thought "Well, this is the time." If I take some knocks for that, I guess I'm prepared for it. I mean I haven't noticed a lot of people picking up on that right away. It's not the first thing they say to me.
CO: Are you going to play any of the ballads like "Until You Break" on this tour?
MS: We're going to. We haven't really been playing it. We did rehearse it. Almost every song from this record we can play live, which is good in case it becomes successful because we can play a lot of the songs from it which is not always the case. A lot of the songs from 100% Fun were really hard to translate from the record. But since we have Paul Chastain out playing keyboards, that helps to get some of those textures in. It's just a simple record which gives me a chance to play some lead live which is fun. Ivan's been really cool about playing rhythm parts on those songs. A lot of people at the label went really crazy about that song, and I think they have high expectations of getting it on the radio someday. I'm sure you'll see us playing it live.
CO: I read somewhere that you thought Zoo went a bit crazy with how many singles they could get from Altered Beast.
MS: They were talking about that there would be five singles and it just never works out that way. Usually it takes several months to get through a single and once you do that a couple of times, your record is either still happening or you're getting to a point where you're going to stop spending all the big bucks to promote it. In my case, the second singles have never been successful. They've been mildly successful and gotten some airplay, some MTV, but they've never really taken off. So we can always hope, but this time won't be different than the last. It's not usually that they're not saying that there are singles, they just sometimes get a little beyond themselves. But that's not their fault, I'd love it if all five singles came out.
CO: There are things that have been out a long time and they finally get a single to take off like that Verve Pipe record, "The Freshman".
MS: That happens a lot. That's a hard thing to get a label to do, to promote something for so long. People felt like we didn't promote "Sick of Myself" enough on the last record, that if we would have stuck with it longer, it would have been a much bigger hit. But the Top 40 felt so strongly that they could take "We're The Same," they just moved along to that track. You can't really back track it once you move on. So if anything, you should stay with a single longer.
CO: Have you guys chosen a follow-up yet?
MS: I'm not sure what it's going to be. I've heard a lot of different arguments. Some people say "Back To You," or "Into Your Drug." I've heard people say "Until You Break" being some kind of a pop single, but I don't think you'll see that happening unless we have some huge hits with other songs. People like "Hollow" for rock radio.
CO: Has the Chamber of Commerce for California not insisted on "Come to California?"
MS: That was all I heard about during the making of the record, but now I don't hear so much of anymore. I think people are just afraid of it at the label, like it's dumb or something. Brendan just went crazy for that song. He was just like "Feelgood hit of the summer!!"
CO: Well you live out there now, and it's such an uptempo opener.
MS: It's really a sarcastic song, sort of saying that this nasty machine will chew you up. But it's so cheerfully presented, people don't really pick up on it. When we play that live, they think it's a cover.
CO: I see you have a sizeable and thorough Web site going.
MS: Yeah, there are a few of those. There are some that are just amazing to me. I look at them and I'm so flattered that someone would go to the trouble.
CO: I remember asking you one time after a concert what you thought about all the online hysteria that can go on for an artist and you seemed kind of shy about the whole thing.
MS: My biggest problem with the online thing is that it becomes an excuse for people to spout off endlessly in a consequence free environment. And I just find that just breeds a lot of egotistical bullshit and that's what I kinda don't like about the Internet. But it's been useful to me in a lot of other ways, so it's kind of softened my view. You know, when I was looking for Mars photos for my record or just trying to find Roger Dean.
CO: You find Roger Dean on the Internet?
MS: Yeah, well we got an initial contact that way. I found his publisher through that. So I've kinda softened, but it's kinda of another thing to deal with. I'm really bad about answering e-mail. I mean, I can't deal with the phone calls I have in real life much less the other me in Internet life. I can certainly see that it's going to be a big part of our future.
CO: What sort of focus do you have on the lyrics at this point in your writing?
MS: I think they really grow out of the music for me more at this point. I don't really conceptualize them a lot beforehand. I mean, there are songs where I have a certain idea about a lyrical slant where I might write it all at once like "Missing Time" which I wrote all in one day with the words. A lot of times they are very fill-in-the- blanks and I don't know what they mean. A lot of the analysis of them is hindsight when people start asking me about them. I try not to overthink lyrics. I try to have them be natural and somewhat conversational. It's kind of a mysterious thing for me, the lyrics. I don't know where they come from.
CO: So something like "Behind The Smile" is not particularly directed at someone.
MS: No, not really. It's a song about somebody who knows they've let somebody down most of the time because of their own problems with themselves. It's a pretty universal concept I think. It has that funny thing "I haven't been a good friend" in it, which is obviously a little joke on Girlfriend. My manager really worked me hard to put that song first on the record and I was like "I don't need to be referencing my record two records ago just yet." But I thought it was funny opening Blue Sky On Mars with "Come To California" which is a very martian place in a way. More pressure than I've ever felt from people to move a song on a record.
CO: This record is pretty straight forward in terms of presentation. Do you ever think you're going to put together a more complex record using less traditional rock structures?
MS: I think maybe, but this was such a natural record for me to make. I didn't plan for it to be really short songs and really concise and all that. It's just sort of the way it came together. I would really love to make a record like, but I just never seem to do it. I'm sure I'm going to make some records where I really stretch out and do some different things eventually. I'm still kind of struggling to make my living you know, and I live in fear of not have anything to show for my success. And that's not to say that I gear my records so that they are easier to sell or anything but I think I'm really trying to do clear, communicative, strong, "me" kind of records at this point. It's not by any sort of design. I mean, you can talk and talk about what kind of record you want to make, but for me it's just whatever songs I happen to write then. I got a few things that are kind of weird and different for the demos that I made for this record for whatever reason. But I don't know if that would mean making kind of an orchestral sort of record by branching out to different sort of instruments. I'm sure it's going to happen eventually. I don't know what it would take for me to be in the right kind of mood.
CO: Do you think that if this record went through the ceiling and a year from now you were still even promoting, you'd feel comfortable enough to stretch out?
MS: I think so, but I think it would take more than that. After 100% Fun, I certainly felt comfortable to do a record like that, it just wasn't the time that I was interested in that. I was more interested in making a sort of New Wave record, like ultra-simple versus something complex and floral. But I would love to make something if I didn't feel I had a time crunch. That's the thing most likely to come out of my home studio when I get to a point where I have soundproof rooms and really pro-level equipment. It wouldn't want to do something that emulated too much of say, a Pet Sounds style. It would have to be something that would come out of my own space. I fantasize a lot about making an instrumental record that I may do sooner than later as a side thing.
Rolling Stone, March 12, 1997
Matthew Sweet sees nothing but blue skies
Blue Sky on Mars might seem like an odd title for Matthew Sweet's new album, but it's an apt one. Sounding, as it does, like the name of one of the vintage science fiction movies Sweet loves, the title evokes the visual equivalent of the Technicolor sound Sweet has crafted on his last three albums. It's also a telling metaphor for his best work, which mixes the otherworldly with the familiar.
To prepare for the March 25 release of Blue Sky, which was recorded in Atlanta with producer Brendan O'Brien, Sweet played a 20-date mini-tour to test his new songs and re-acquaint himself with his older material. After a recent show at the Elbow Room, a 400-capacity rock club in Columbia, South Carolina, Sweet took time out from the tour to talk about the album; how divorce led to his 1991 breakthrough album, Girlfriend; and the curative powers of cortisone shots.
RS.com: How does it feel to be out on the road again? It seemed like you were really enjoying yourself up there tonight.
Matthew Sweet: It's actually been feeling really good, but last night I was very sick. I didn't want to cancel any dates on this tour, so I finally had to get a cortisone shot just to play. Before, it was hard to cover up for the bad voice, and I just kept getting sicker and sicker. So they finally gave me a cortisone shot, right in the ass (laughs).
RS.com: You've been previewing some of your new songs. What's your assessment of how they sound live?
Sweet: It's kind of hard to say. But I think this new record translates really well live, actually. The last record [100% Fun] was more complex, and there was all sorts of stuff going on in the songs that was a little harder to capture onstage. This new CD is simpler, I think. Maybe more straightforward.
RS.com: On Blue Sky on Mars, you play most of the instruments yourself. Did that require a significant departure in terms of how you wrote the songs?
Sweet: On my records I usually play a lot of the stuff. But, yeah, on this record I play all the guitars. I just hope that people like the songs and don't miss the lead guitar too much (laughs sheepishly).
RS.com: How do you think Blue Sky fits in with your other albums?
Sweet: I think this one's more fun than "100% Fun." It's funny, because people saw that album cover and thought it was going to be a lot lighter than Altered Beast. But then --
RS.com: They heard songs like "Sick of Myself."
Sweet: Yeah, right (laughs).
RS.com: Do you, at this point, consciously approach making an album in a certain way, so that it has a particular feel to it?
Sweet: It's funny, because even with my last four records, I don't think they were that huge a departure from my first one. But, regarding your second question, I think it's really a good thing when you don't think too much when you're recording, because you want the songs to come naturally. And so far, I think it's worked pretty well.
RS.com: Let's backtrack and talk about Girlfriend, because I'm always struck by how radically different that album sounds from your previous work. It seems like such a sharp shift in direction, from the '60s-era stereo separation to the songwriting, which is so much more focused.
Sweet: There were a few factors. I was sort of giving up on the idea of ever finding an audience and I just decided to start writing songs I wanted to hear because I really had no audience. And I became kind of self-centered about it. But you know, we had a lot of the same players we had on Earth.
RS.com: That's what I think is so interesting, because the sound on Girlfriend is a lot fiercer.
Sweet: Well, also at that time, I had just split up with my first wife, so that meant I could move a drum set into the living room, and it didn't matter if I had microphone stands and amps everywhere cluttering up the room. And I recorded the demos for Girlfriend that way -- really loud and noisy. And the record was an outcome of those demos.
RS.com: So basically, you lost a wife and gained a record contract. One more question: You still got that Dodge Challenger [pictured on 1993's Altered Beast]?
Sweet: (Smiles) Still got the Challenger. But you know, it's hard because I moved to Los Angeles and there's not really many places to open it up on the road, because you've gotta blow out the carbon. But yeah, the Challenger's great.
Rhythm and News Magazine, June 1997
By George A. Fletcher
With a career both extraordinary and mundane, people either "get" the music of Matthew Sweet - or they don't. For those who do get it, and there are plenty of 'em, Sweet has created, through trial and error, a genre practically all his own.
A solo artist for well over a decade, this Nebraska native's recorded output has been marred from time to time by overproduction and forgettable tunes on such releases as his 1986 solo debut Inside and its only slightly better follow up Earth. However, with do-overs like 1991's Girlfriend and the marginally less accessible but more daring 1993 follow up Altered Beast, Sweet has managed to hang in the game long enough for alternative radio to pick up on his latest, Blue Sky On Mars, and perhaps give him a hit record for his years of service to the company
"I write a lot about relationships," he recently said, "and sometimes the songs are about my real life, sometimes about an alter ego, some are about joy, some are about feeling hopeless. They're all about living life -- how to understand it, tolerate it, change it." Sweet says the songs on Blue Sky On Mars have resolution. "Here," he continues, "whether a song is about risking being an idiot or about trying to find an answer -- there's more of a resolve. And, with the title and the mood of the record, the space thing becomes a metaphor for the journey you're on, where you have to come to terms with what your life is and how to get the best out of it."
About as down to earth as any artist who tinkers with the planets could be, Matthew Sweet has unfairly been labeled the-sugar-coated-wanna-be-rock-star for years. To see him live in concert is another story, however. Sweet wows the crowd with full-throttle rock and roll that one reviewer, taking into consideration Sweet's "candy-coated, very loud pop songs," admitted that even he couldn't help but "really, really like him."
And it isn't hard to like Sweet. He's totally open and seemingly unaffected by his near-brushes with fame. Conversing with him is akin to talking to some guy on the bus. The relaxed quality of his speaking voice is remarkably younger than his singing voice.
Sweet returns the admiration he receives from die-hard fans and groupies, lovingly dubbed "Sweeties". "After all these years," he explains, "it's still cool when people sing along with my songs -- even in the absence of a chart hit. It's encouraging and it keeps me going."
And Sweet does continue on, touring for most of the year and spending little time at his Los Angeles home. When he does go home, its because California is "the home of so much of the pop culture I love -- old movies, sci-fi, horror, and, of course, Brian Wilson and Lindsay Buckingham-era Fleetwood Mac."
While on tour, Sweet enjoys meeting with his fans. "I try to be real with people I meet on tour, but that can get a little draining. I get a little sick of the 'me'-ness of it, all the attention that's focused on me. But it's still amazing, and a huge compliment, when I meet people who say a song of mine has made them cry, or that another song has just made them feel better about their day. It reminds me that music can really mean something."
Sweet's latest alt-rock radio mainstay "Come To California", is your basic 1-4-5 progression, but chunky and raw with distorted bass and a catchy chorus, a pseudo Beach Boys meets Clash-era-punk number. Modern rock made the bouncy, Cheap Trick-esque "Where You Get Love," a playlist staple, but still, Sweet wears his influences on his sleeve. He digs the Beatles and punk, which is evident in his choice of sidemen: Richard Lloyd (Television) and Robert Quine (Lou Reed, Richard Hell). "I really love what their playing does to the music," he gushes.
As for his latest effort, the popster says "I've always wanted to make an album that really stood up for the pop ideal, something with both melody and strength. There's less lead guitar abandon on this record -- it may be my simplest one yet. I tried to go for something a bit different from my last records, something with a hint of space kind of vibe. And while there are melancholy parts, and dealing-with-heartache kinds of songs, I wanted the end result to be somewhat more upbeat, more light-hearted."
Sweet has, in fact, achieved just that. Clearly his most focused effort since 1991's Girlfriend, Blue Sky On Mars successfully combines the better portions of his earlier work with the concise song craft of '60s-'70s style pop with some grungy whomp thrown in for good measure. Blue Sky On Mars is the work of a true pop craftsman, and one whose world is currently-and deservedly-enveloped in a blue sky all its own.
SonicNet, September 6, 1997
Skies there may not be blue, but pop rocker says he feels vindicated by NASA mission
By Chris Nelson, Addicted To Noise Staff Writer
For pop songwriter Matthew Sweet, the recent public focus on the Mars Pathfinder mission couldn't have come at a better time, as he finishes his European tour in support of his latest album.
Sweet's most recent effort, Blue Sky on Mars, which received some harsh criticism since it came out last spring, features a shot of NASA's original Mars lander, complete with prog-rockish lettering for his name and the title. So, Sweet was only too happy to see the attention given to the Mars Pathfinder as it made its way around the red planet this summer.
It was kind of a vindication.
"I think the most compelling thing in our future is finding life elsewhere," Sweet said from London after wrapping up his recent European tour. He added, laughing, "Maybe a hundred years from now, the fact that I was interested in Mars might seem kind of enlightened, instead of embarrassing and geekish."
The 32-year-old singer, most famous for the modern pop classics Girlfriend and 100% Fun, said he followed the news on Pathfinder closely, but not only because of the historical nature of the mission. "That was especially exciting," Sweet said, "because everybody hated the Mars artwork (on the album). It was sort of a pat on my back as well. I still couldn't get the label to really capitalize on that, because they talked so much about how they hated it." Pathfinder's findings that the skies on Mars are actually red, not blue, mattered little to Sweet, who said his album's title comes from the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie Total Recall, not actual science. More important to the bittersweet singer are the metaphorical implications of the title. "The idea that being out of place on Mars is what was interesting about the title to me. The unreality of it, the implication that you wouldn't find happiness anywhere on this planet."
Sweet said while he holds out hope for future manned space missions, he doesn't foresee any interstellar travel in his own future. In fact, the singer won't even step on a plane. After his swing through Europe, he began the five-day boat trip back to the States aboard the QE2.
As for his next move on American shores, Sweet said he's undecided. "I'm either gonna tour more, or start working on demos for a next record. There's some talk of a greatest hits record with a couple of new tracks, but I'm not really sure what's going on yet. I'd be more interested in making a weird box set of demos from over the years. That would be cool, because I'd just have so many things to choose from."
Either collection may receive a warmer American welcome than Blue Sky on Mars. Although the album was by no means panned, it did not receive the high marks of either Girlfriend or 100% Fun. Sweet compared Blue Sky on Mars' reception to that of his fourth record Altered Beast.
"I feel like I'm fighting for the record," he said. "During Altered Beast I heard more from people saying 'I don't like it as much as Girlfriend,' or 'It's weird.' But this is so much more of a positive, concise sort of record that it doesn't really seem like the record is real uncommercial."
Still, the man with his eyes on the skies said he believes that one day Blue Sky on Mars will get its proper acclaim. "I thought a lot of people were unduly hard on it," he said. "But I think it'll be good over time."
Music Monitor
Matthew Sweet talks about his latest album, Blue Sky On Mars
By Andy Herod
Since the early '80s when he was playing guitar with bands like Oh-Ok and Buzz of Delight, Matthew Sweet dreamed of having the illustrious career that he has had so far. It started with his first album Inside, where he was joined by members of The Bangles, The Heartbreakers and the dBs. Then, on Earth, he began his musical relationship with Richard Lloyd of Television and sailed to the next level of success. With Girlfriend, his 1991 release, Matthew Sweet finally achieved some well deserved radio success. Since then he has managed (with the help of some of the most talented musicians and producers in the world) to prove twice more his ability to put together fun, hook-laden pop albums. And he's doing it again with his 1997 release Blue Sky On Mars.
Recently I had an opportunity to talk to Matthew before a show in Newark. I was apparently the last of several interviews that day and I could hear the lack of enthusiasm in his voice when we started. But as he talked about his life and music it all came back.
"This record has a really positive feeling to it," he starts.
"The whole thing is really short. It's only 37 minutes long, which is short for 12 songs. I just did an interview today with a guy who told me how much he loved the length of the record. He said it makes him just want to keep playing it. And I think this is really true. It's a good length."
I had only heard the record once before we talked, but I did notice that the use of keyboards was a lot more apparent than on the last few albums.
"Yeah, we sort of made a New Wave record this time around, it's a little simpler and there are a lot of piano and organs. Although, I always want to clarify when I say that that it's not a keyboard record. It's still very guitar oriented, it's just not as heavy on the lead guitar stuff. I laid all the guitars on the tracks, which was a little different from how we've done things in the past. And as for the keyboards, they were played mostly by Brendan, my producer, and I actually played some of those too."
When we start talking about the single, Matthew remembers part of his agenda. "Tomorrow I'm going to check out the first cut of the video we did for the first single on Blue Sky On Mars, which is called "Where Do You Get Love?" It was directed by a friend of mine named Andy Fleming who also wrote and directed that movie The Craft. It's really cool, kind of a space video where I'm kind of walking around on the moon wearing a space suit. The whole time I'm receiving transmissions from people on Earth. Another kind of cool thing is that we got to use this camera mount that has never been used in a music video in North America. It has this feature where it can rotate continuously in any direction. So apparently there are some cool shots where the camera just rotates slowly around the changing scenes. I had to kind of put my ass on the line because it's been, by far, the most expensive video I've ever done, which is still actually not that expensive. People spend half a million dollars to make a video all the time, which is something I've never come close to doing."
This brought to mind a favorite Matthew Sweet video of mine, for the song "Time Capsule," from Altered Beast, in which Matthew is shown covered in insects. "Oh yeah, did you ever see the black and white version of that? That was always one of my favorites, but we did this other version that was in black and white and had subtitles in this sort of Czech font, because the video is based around an old Czech film from the '50s called Time Capsule, and we spelled the words to the song phonetically so you can't really make it out at first, but throughout the song you start to realize what you're seeing. It's really weird, actually. MTV never played that version. I don't even know if they had that version. It was a #1 in Canada. We actually had a couple of them over there last year. Yeah, that video turned out really cool, I thought, but it didn't get very much support because the song wasn't doing that much on the radio. On this tour, though, people have really been responding well to that song. I'm not really sure why."
If you were lucky enough to catch Matthew Sweet at the Cat's Cradle in February, you may have noticed the sold out crowd. Two months before the album was released, that was already becoming a familiar sight to the band. "It's been a total shock to see so many full shows on this tour. I mean, when we started out we thought, this will be pretty good, and now it's been nothing but packed shows for two weeks straight. It's really encouraging to see this type of response before the record comes out. I'm really looking forward to touring when the album is actually released."
"Bringing the keyboards on the road is something I've never done before. Paul, who has been playing keyboards on the road with me, has this cool little acoustic piano, which is actually mine. We didn't want any sampled piano sounds. We also have been using this thing called the Nordley that produces a bunch of cool fake analogue noises. We've actually got a pretty simple set-up, though, so not really that much has changed."
When asked about touring outside the country, Matthew recounts his unpleasant history with flying. "Well, I stopped flying about three years ago, so I don't really have any immediate plans to go anywhere. I'll probably go to Japan. But what happens is, if I fly, they start flying me everywhere, every day, doing these promotional things and I just get sick. There was no way to tell them that I wouldn't do certain things, so I just stopped altogether and it pretty much solved my problem. Like with this last record, I just toured here in the U.S. and Canada and it was a lot more successful than any other tour because I think I was just more focused and I was more healthy because I wasn't flying everywhere going out of my mind."
You Could Do Worse
By Rob Galgano
Now here's someone I've wanted to meet for a long time. I've enjoyed Matthew's
work going back to his appearance on a Golden Palominos album back in the
mid-'80s (I think it was Blast Of Silence). Not long after that,
his debut album (Inside) was released on Columbia, followed by
some label-hopping and lots of obscurity (you should get his 2nd LP, Earth,
if you can find it!). You all know about the career-saving Girlfriend
CD and things have been looking up from there. His latest album, Blue
Sky On Mars, wasn't a big hit, but it turned out to be a pretty strong
album. This interview happened in the back of the Matthew Sweet tour bus
(impressed?) back in the summer of 1997. Thanks to Karl Munzel for making
it happen. (Note: In case you didn't know, Matthew's also a veteran of the
mid-'80s Athens scene as a member of the bands Oh-OK and The Buzz Of Delight.
I used to listen to those bands in my college radio days without having
a damn idea who Matthew Sweet was! If I knew then what I know now...)
Smartass: You've got a Mars theme on the cover of the album.
Are you a big sci-fi fan?
Matthew: I am, kind of. I'm into natural sciences as well.
I was into astronomy when I was a kid. I called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
the first time we had landers on Mars in 1976, when I was 11, because I
wanted a photo of the surface of Mars. So I've had this big panoramic photo
of Mars over my desk since I was a kid. I got it in my head last year when
the possible life in the Martian meteroite thing happened. I started thinking
about those photos again. I thought maybe I'd put them on my album cover
as a tribute. I went over to JPL-I thought it was cool they were sending
another lander-although they've lost a lot of missions to Mars. There are
a bunch of Russian landers that never made it. There was a billion dollar
one called Mars Observer that went a couple of years ago that never made
it. I wasn't banking on it getting there on the Fourth of July, but it was
exciting when it did. I felt that it somehow validated my album cover. People
think it's weird and confusing. I'd like to think that maybe now, some people
know it's the surface of Mars. People look at the whole thing and they don't
realize that's what it is.
SA: You got Roger Dean [he did album covers for Yes] to
do the lettering. How did you get him?
Matthew: Well, think how much people would have been bugged
if I'd gotten him to do the whole album cover! I was a big Yes fan when
I was in sixth and seventh grade. I learned to play bass from Chris Squire
bass lines. The Yes thing gets reinforced by Brendan and Nick, my co-producer
and engineer. Nick is a giant Yes/prog-rock fan. He's exactly from that
era, maybe a couple of years older than me. Nick brought in some of their
albums to the studio and we were talking about how great Roger Dean was.
I thought maybe I could get him to do logos for me 'cause I really wanted
to get an organic, trippy sort of writing to go with the stark sceince photos.
I thought a lot of people won't really know too much about Roger Dean The
people who do will go "oh, Roger Dean!" I think he was sort of
bugged that he didn't do the whole album cover. I was interested in him
doing the whole thing, but as it turned out we were in such a time crunch
by the time he got working on it, he wouldn't have had time to do a painting,
anyway. By that time I was really into the Mars photos-I had it all in my
head.
SA: Did you have space as a theme? For example, "Missing Time"
which is something that UFO abductees experience.
Matthew: It's definitely a play on that whole thing. In
fact, it was writing the song "Missing Time" that made me think
"maybe I could make a whole space vibe for my record." I don't
think it's really a space record. I've always put things I'm into in the
artwork and all that. I felt that it worked anyway with some of the little
synthesizer sounds and things.
SA: Talking about synthesizers [pulls out a copy of Inside],
there are a lot of them all over this record.
Matthew: But not cheesy, goofy synthesizers-more like those
modern mid-'80s synths. But I haven't listened to that record in a long
time, so maybe it's closer to the '70s than I think.
SA: It really does have that late '80s sound. Compared to what you
do today, it's very much of that time.
Matthew: When I first got into getting record deals, I
was programming all the drums on the computer. I wanted to live in my time
and be futuristic. I was really into Scritti Politti when they did their
ultra-high-tech records. I wanted to be new and fresh, so I was interested
in technology. Over time, I grew bored with it. When I started doing stuff
that was really raw and direct-guitar, bass and drums-it just felt really
great to me, novel at the time. That's where Girlfriend came out
of, me just getting into being totally organic. Then there was a "no
keyboard" rule, it could only be acoustic piano for a few records.
I started to get intersted in really old synthesizers, and started to think
they sounded cool. I figured I could play them by hand and it would still
be organic.
SA: They fit in pretty well with the new album. "Where You Get
Love" and "Come To California" for example. You write a lot
of songs with nice, poppy melodies but the lyrics: "Someone To Pull
The Trigger" or "Sick Of Myself." Matthew, what's wrong?
Matthew: I don't know, I write a lot of songs about feelings
about life and different ways of looking at it. I get melancholy now and
then. I suppose most people do. If you have much awareness about your life
and what's going on as you get older, you're filled with horror and depression
and everything. I've always expressed those things when I'm feeling them.
That's just what feels real to me. I think that my new record is more positive.
Since Altered Beast, they've gotten a little more positive. Maybe
as I've gotten older, I've really tried to enjoy my life. I don't want to
be miserable all the time! Having said that, whenever I get in one of those
modes when I'm all happy and positive about things, I'm always set up for
the giant crash. Like when I made this record I really thought "it's
a fun record, it's cool." And then the first thing I read, it's completely
trashed in Rolling Stone, who have always been pretty nice about
records of mine. That was a big bringdown. In a way, this whole years has
been weird. I've really swung back to complete melancholy, more so than
I think I expected to. It's more like "God, what was I thinking that
I could really be positive?" But on the other hand what can you do?
I think I'm writing more melancholy songs now than in the last couple of
years.
SA: One review of Blue Sky On Mars mentioned disappointment
about how short it was.
Matthew: It's one of the things I loved about it! It's
a lot longer than Sgt. Pepper; it's like 10 minutes longer! [laughs]
Not to compare it to Sgt. Pepper. Someone else pointed it out to
me: "Don't feel bad, all records used to be short, back when they were
good!" This is one that came together pretty short. I was glad. I was
like "wow, all right, I made a concise record!"
SA: Who do you have playing on this record?
Matthew: It's all people I've played with before. There's
Ric Menck and Stewart Johnson, who play all the drums on the record. They
were both on 100% Fun and Ric's been on all my records. Other than
that, it's me and Brendan [O'Brien] and Tony [?] plays bass on a song. It's
my least-other-people record. I got attacked a lot for Richard [Lloyd] and
Robert [Quine] not being on it. Robert was so jealous of how much Richard
was on 100% Fun that he hasn't talked to me since then. In Richard's
case, I love him and we're still friends, but it was time to do something
different.
SA: I wanted to ask you about the Best Buy single that was released.
How does something like this happen?
Matthew: There was another one for Circuit City that had
some different songs on it. This one is funny because they gave Ric writng
credit on "If It's Happening You'll Know It." I didn't have a
lot to do with the CD. I probably said "what do we have?" Out
of all the stuff on there, "If It's Happening," I just wanted
that song to see the light of day. "Vicious Circle" is a demo
from this album, but we never recorded it in the studio. I have 50 demos
of songs that I didn't use on this album.
SA: You've been on Zoo/Volcano for a few years, and they seem to
be treating you pretty well. Before that, you were jumping around a lot
(Columbia, A&M). Was that out of frustration with the whole process?
Matthew: It was more like not keeping deals because I wasn't
selling any records! Volcano is really only for this record, it's basically
a whole different label [from Zoo]. I think that it's likely before too
long that I'll be going to another label. I'm near the end of my deal. I
get the feeling that it's time for a clean slate, try something different.
I'm not convinced that a bigger label will necessarily be good for me, but
I feel like we gotta try it sometime. I dream of being on the tiniest indie
label where they don't make me do anything and I don't have to be in the
rat race so much. But then, how would I make my living and pay my mortgage?
I guess I have to just keep trying.
SA: I wanted to ask you about Buzz Of Delight. Any plans to rerelease
the Soundcastles EP?
Matthew: I don't know. I'm not so sure it's not still available
from DB Records. Over the years, they would make more and put them out.
It's a thing I really don't know too much about. We talk a lot with Danny
Beard, who started DB Records, about putting out a Buzz Of Delight album.
There's two versions of an album that came after this. We talk about making
a big CD with all that stuff on it, but we've just never gotten to that
point. It's one of things that we'll do someday, and it'll really be ancient
history then. There are two versions of the album that aren't all the same
songs. It never came out. The second version was what I got my deal with
Columbia from.
SA: So it was squashed by the label?
Matthew: Well, they said "we think you should be a
singer-songwriter and use your real name and we'll give you money to move
to New York for a year to write songs." So my whole thing changed then.
I was just saying to Bob the Volcano rep the other day "what if I could
just stop being me and just have a title?" Get away from the meanness
of it. It might be too late to do that.
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