From his new bio:
“there has to be a thread left for you to pull,” he says. “then you’re included in the experience. plugging listeners into some social consciousness – that’s the trickiest damn thing. that’s bob dylan’s brilliance – he’ll tell a story, but it resonates with an extremely social conscience. if i have a basic ambition, it’s to impassion people – for my music to become the soundtrack track to other people’s lives. to their first kiss or the first time they picked up a cause.”
late into the night we talked – or let’s be honest, he talked while i sat stunned like a citizen arrested for not thinking enough – about third world debt relief, human and civil rights, religious intolerance, trudeau’s night of the long knives, cnn, afghanistan and iraq, moral vs. intellectual choice, the internet and how it gives people the right to make a great white noise of uninformed opinion and how he’s starting a bagheads social rebellion in which people will leave their homes wearing paper bags on their heads to assert their continuing god-given right to anonymity. what else? oh yes, north americanism, continentalism…
” i have a huge problem with canada becoming a little america,” he said. “we’re living next door to the world’s biggest media monster. i’m concerned about the impact the us has on how we see our own stuff. our sense of national unity is fragmented enough already.”
then the guys in the bar around us, your typical beer-swilling hockey enthusiasts, start yelping along to the tragically hip’s ‘nautical disaster,’ which is playing on the jukebox. “see?” he says. “now that is not exactly the most straightforward song as far as lyrical content is concerned. in fact, the majority of our mainstream music is more intelligent, more abstract, than american mainstream music. perhaps our inferiority complex is based on having to actually lower our standards to be able to compete and be accepted by them.”
” um hang on, let me try to understand. because we don’t do dumb as well as the americans do, therefore we feel dumber?”
” exactly”
> but i’m digressing. there are also… wait for it… love songs on avalanche. that may be, in my opinion, what makes this matt’s best, most mature work yet. these are songs of loss, regret and pain, with enough tenderness and vulnerability to give you goose bumps. just listen to the emotion, listen to the pain and the rage, the sheer caring. it’s elegiac but it’s proud too. though he says he mixed it with an “antique vibe to give it a sense of going back in time, of going home,” it’s also ferocious, defiant and forward-looking. one foot in front of the other, at any cost. i suppose i could tell you which songs are about iraq and which ones are about the girls he should never have slept with, but if you’re really going to own this cd you’ve got to let it take root in your heart. it doesn’t matter what he had for breakfast when he wrote ‘house of smoke and mirrors’ and it may not matter which town he’s really talking about in “a long way down.’ he heard these songs in a certain way at the time, and they were a catharsis for him then, but that process is likely on the wane now. don’t even think of e-mailing him to ask, don’t rummage through his garbage looking for clues. you’ll never know him, and knowing him is beside the point. this is not dictation. it is not pre-chewed, annotated or government approved. he probably doesn’t even like half of it anymore. he’s already off making new things. as you’re reading this he’s slapping down a painting, or scrawling a pissed-off harangue about our terminal apathy, or testing that new fevernova soccer ball on a pitch near the sea.
i bet you could clock that notion matt mentioned of the “soundtrack of your life” to the invention of the walkman. (he had one surgically attached to his head at the age of ten.) now you didn’t have to go to africa anymore. suddenly that aimless walk downtown, the stale air subway ride, that shit-kicking october afternoon when you should have been in class, it all became your own personal blockbuster – every scene a pivotal one, the money shot, a killer montage with a hit single score. that was the first download, years before the napster, but instead of robbing income from the musician you claimed to admire, you were stealing meaning. who cared anymore what the musician meant to say; now the songs were in the service of scoring that movie starring you, written and directed by you, distributed by you to an audience of one: you. music fans know this, of course, but life’s a struggle, what with the media and the industry perpetually fixated on the gossip, the celebrity, the clothes and the hair, herding us into vicarious lives. this has got to be matt’s biggest pet peeve. that’s why it’s up to you to piece it all together yourself. it’s yours now.