Origins of Girlfriend
Drums changed Matthew Sweet. In 1989, he came off the road after his first tour as a frontman and purchased a drum kit. It became the catalyst for his new musical direction. He played the drum parts on his new demos - those who heard them thought he had finally found his niche. Where once his songs were regulated by the rigidity of programmed rhythms, the real drums gave the new material a loose, unbridled feel Sweet had never experienced before. They got him thinking about what made his favorite records so great: spontaneous, bare-bones recording with the uncertainty of the humam touch behind every note and beat. Girlfriend, Sweet's third LP and first for Zoo Entertainment, is the climax of this new outlook.
Working in a small studio in New York City, Sweet gathered together drummer/co-producer Fred Maher, guitar crunchers Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd, drummer Ric Menck of Velvet Crush (for which Matthew has done some recent producing), Lloyd Cole on acoustic guitar (Sweet plays on his two solo LPs), and pedal steeler Greg Leisz from k.d. lang's Reclines. Unlike his first two albums, Girlfriend was recorded and mixed quickly, without computers and with as few overdubs as possible. Its rock moments are blistering, as the pure melodies skid recklessly alongside the music's serrated edge. The acoustic songs hit down deep with their lyrical poignancy and lush strumming. The harmonies are no less than exquisite.
The Courtship
Sweet was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska. During high school, he worked in a local music store and played in various new-wave cover bands. Afer graduating in 1983, he departed for Athens, Georgia, for summer school. Before long, he joined local band Oh-OK and formed his own group, Buzz of Delight: both released EPs on Atlanta's DB Records. It was during this period that things started happening for Sweet.
He sent the Buzz EP and some new songs to various record companies. Buzz then recorded a full-length LP on their own, and later rerecorded it in North Carolina, with Don Dixon producing. Sweet sent a tape to Columbia Record's Steve Ralbovsky, already a fan of the EP. He invited Sweet north, cut a deal, and gave the fledgling artist money to buy some home recording equipment. Sweet, then 20 years old, and his wife of less than a year, packed their things and headed for New York City.
In the Fall of 1986, Columbia released Sweet's debut, Inside. Sweet's immaculate voice and chiming pop melodies moved Anthony Curtis of Rolling Stone to give Inside three-and-a-half stars and declare: "This...debut rewards repeated listenings. Sweet's a pop addict and his melodies are so effortlessly catchy that it's easy to dismiss his songs as slight...a big mistake."
After the release of Inside, Sweet went into the studio with the Golden Palominos to help record their 1987 album, Blast of Silence, for which he co-wrote and sang one track, "Something Becomes Nothing." A tour followed, with Matthew on bass.
In 1989, Sweet recorded Earth (A&M), another stunning album that received accolades from the press but went unnoticed by most of the populace. The album, co-produced by Maher and Sweet, included such guests as Lloyd, Quine and B-52's diva Kate Pierson. Reviewer Ken Tucker called the LP "the first perfect pop album of 1989," and said "the music's pleasures deepen with each succeeding spin." Rolling Stone gave the album three-and-a-half stars, and Spin awarded it Platter Du Jour.
The Engagement
Girlfriend, originally titled Nothing Lasts, features a cover photo of actress Tuesday Weld taken in 1957 when she was a teenager. (Matthew is an avid collector of movie memorabilia, especially concerning actresses from the '50s and '60s.)
The new album is much harder-edged than Sweet's first two efforts without obscurring the artist's uncanny sense of classic pop. Thematically, the new album delves far deeper into the human psyche than its two predecessors, and with good reason: Sweet wrote these songs while frantically trying to keep a firm grip as his personal life took a ride on the tilt-a-whirl. While touring Europe as the guitar player in Lloyd Cole's first post-Commotions road band, Matthew was smack in the middle of divorce proceedings with his wife, and money was close to nonexistent. Add to the mix the fact that he was meeting his first girlfriend since the breakup, and the image of an emotional tornado comes into sharp focus.
"The album reflects the actual overlapping of the end of one relationship and the beginning of another," Sweet recalls. "The songs are semi-autobiographical in this sense only."
Of "Looking at the Sun," for example, he comments: "I was saying a couple of things - one being that people often get stuck in destructive relationships, the other that the naked truth can sometimes be a destructive force." Those universal themes run throughout the record, evidenced by such titles as "Thought I Knew You" ("This one is about feeling betrayed, bitter") and the self-expanatory "You Don't Love Me."
Sweet's songs appeal to both the hopelessly romantic and the hopelessly cynical sides in all of us. They reveal the torture of heartbreak, but always return to the heart for safety. They question the objectives of our faith, but find hope in the human spirit.
"Divine Intervention" explores the difficulty of belief in God in today's secular world: "I just wonder if there really is a God of the kind that's always been described to us." And "Day For Night" preaches self-determination: "It's a liberation song. It's about giving up one life for another." There are no clear-cut answers to be found here, just difficult questions that mirror real life.
And death. "Don't Go" addresses that one finality, from the viewpoint of a person who's grieving over a death they can't accept. "Your Sweet Voice," which Sweet calls "a song about intimacy," resonates even more deeply. "During recording, I send this song to the mother of a close friend who was dying in the hospital. After she died, I found out that she had requested it to be played at her funeral. Since then, it's taken on a new importance to me."
"Nothing Lasts" brings the album to a close on a somber note: "I wrote this in my hotel room and brought it in to the last day of recording. I'd been through a lot of changes in my life around that time. It's about the impermanence of things."
Make no mistake, Girlfriend is a pop record. But it's also an emotive, personal album that is deeply affecting. And at a time when the superficial and the formulaic rule, that is no small achievement.