My cover band The Viper Brothers covered Elvis’ “Santa Claus is Back in Town.”
Check out my Christmas video playlist!
New video
Nirvana’s Lost Christmas song?
Merry Christmas to you, and a Happy New Year! Here is a new Christmas song and video I did: – “O Come, O Come As You Are”. It’s the classic Christmas carol “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” done in the style of Nirvana. Enjoy!
And please check out my other Christmas offerings!
New Video: song explanation of In December
I recently had the privilege of being on Spider-Man’s program, Hanging Out in the Batcave. His program is sort of an acquired taste, but I think it went pretty well. We talked about my latest song, In December. Please check it out above!
Jimmy Page Cameo in Frozen 2
Have you seen Frozen 2? Are you a Led Zeppelin fan? My new video makes an important connection between the two.
Sons With Guns
My acoustic demo of “I Don’t Care” is now on YouTube:
I’d love to hear what you think!
In the Earbuds: “The Similitude of a Dream” by Neal Morse Band
As I listened to the first album I’ve heard with Neal Morse (formerly of prog rock band Spock’s Beard) on it, I thought, What makes a good rock opera?
- Gratuitous background vocals
- Multiple lead vocalists
- Borderless songs
- An overture
- Dream Theater cofounder Mike Portnoy on drums
- Volcanic guitar solos
- Two discs
- Repeated musical themes and melodies
- A concept from a centuries-old Christian novel
The Similitude of a Dream delivers all of those things and much more. Based on the story from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, it follows the protagonist Christian in his journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Along the way he meets several characters that encourage, mock, confront, betray, or battle him (a dragon!).
The lyrics are fine in most places, and weak in a few others (“Satan’s talking such smack”). The musical quality is off the charts. Organ-heavy prog rock with a lot of 70’s influence, which occasional chunky metal diversions. Each band member is a virtuoso in his own right, and often on more than one instrument. Highlights include “City of Destruction” (a killer Black Sabbath riff and soaring melody), “The Man in the Iron Cage” (sort of a Black Dog Jr. with a great hook), and “Draw the Line” (a smashing hard rock progression). The effort, imagination, and skill that went into this album bazookas your face. And it looks like more is around the corner in 2019 with their next double album, “The Great Adventure.”
I was going to add a few more things, but I just went on and on about Neal Morse. Next time!
Matt’s Museletter: I Don’t Care If Your Skin Is Fair
Feast your ears on this baby – not literally a baby – its a new acoustic demo for my song, I Don’t Care:
I’d love to hear what you think!
Great Minds Think Alike
You might have noticed that my video is on a website called Minds. Minds is a social media platform Im toying with because I am intrigued by the fact that it is:
- Running on Ethereum, a decentralized blockchain platform
- Totally open source ie, the software is totally out in the open for anyone to see and copy for their own
- And not prone to censorship as some of the other platforms may be
I havent made up my mind about it yet, but it seems cool so far! And you can apparently make money on it for posting things!
Electronically social on:
===Follow Matts Spotify playlist, Libertarian Rock, updated regularly!===
$5 for 5 Thousand Seconds of Rock – Russian Hacking Thwarted
For a limited time only (technically, all time is limited if you read Stephen Hawking – or the Bible), you can get all of my music for only $5!!
And full disclosure, the total runtime of the music is less than 5,000 seconds, but I needed that continuity for the subject line.
Facebook Live Concert – No Longer Live
If you for some reason missed my Facebook concert the other day, you’ll be pleased to know that you ca
n still watch the video right here:
For those of you that watched, I really apologize for the technically difficulties! The video stream froze up at various points and the video cut off when I was just beginning “Fight Your Programming.” The Russian hackers might have thought they won, but little did they know I already recorded “Fight Your Programming” as a sound check earlier on! You can watch that by clicking here! USA!!
And I still had more to do! The last song, a No Picnic cover called “Last Year’s Girlfriend” can be seen here.
Much thanks to all who tuned in and to all who might take a gander at the above videos!
In the Eardrums and Eyeballs: U2 Experience + Innocence Tour
I had the pleasure of seeing U2 for the first time back on June 18 in Washington DC at the Capital One Arena. I thought I would wait until the band members were almost 60 and had been making music for nearly 40 years. But man, it was worth the wait. Touring off their latest album, a strong one, it was everything a concert goer might have hoped for and more: stunning special effects, fantastic performances, and a great setlist.
The concert rig included a standard looking stage connected to a smaller “B” stage by a long “catwalk.” Suspended above and perpendicular to the catwalk was a double-pane projection screen, showing images to the audience on either side of the walk. A few of the songs were performed by the band on the B stage in a closer-knit fashion than the main stage. Then the concertgoers could realize the B stage itself lit to life as “screen,” displaying images and patterns underneath the band.
The performances were spot on: Bono’s voice was as strong as ever, the Edge ruled on his collection of axes, Adam Clayton coolly meandered through his bass lines, and Larry pounded his drum set mercilessly. The sound mix was great and included some studio overdubs to fill out the sound, but not in a contrived way. The band still rocked on the stripped-down songs sans overdubs.
They played with some of the arrangements of their songs, like a more skeletal version of Sunday, Bloody Sunday, where Larry Mullins played only a snare drum, walking around the catwalk in a sort of ominous marching fashion. The performance of their new song, “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” was acoustic, and quite nice, along with “Staring at the Sun.” Having just toured on a celebration of “The Joshua Tree,” where they played the album beginning to end, they played no songs from it. That made me sad, but that only meant there was more room for other great songs, like “City of Blinding Lights” and “Until the End of The World”.
The rumors I’ve heard about U2 concerts are true. Go see them if you get the chance.
What’s With These Homies Dissin’ My Girl?
In the Earbuds: the Blue Album by Weezer
A quintessential album from the 90s. No discussion of 90’s alternative music could be complete if it doesn’t include Weezer’s self-titled mono-colored debut album from 1994. Front man and lead songwriter Rivers Cuomo swirled together his loves for Kiss, Slayer, Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991), and apparently the Cars (producer Ric Ocasek’s band) to write these hard rocking gems with great pop hooks.
The single “Buddy Holly” sounds like a poseur using hip hop lingo with a 50’s bebop feel to tell the tale of a young man bemoaning how his girl is getting “dissed.” Here is my humble tribute:
The debut single “Undone (The Sweater Song)” uses grunge to chronicle a relationship unravelling – and Cuomo later admitted that he accidentally ripped off Metallica’s “Sanitarium”. The heavy-chorused “Say It Ain’t So” gets real, talking about the destruction of alcoholism in the family. One of my favorites, “Holiday,” has that classic 3/4 time doo-wop beat underneath an anthemic chorus and sings about getting away from it all, complete with a Jack Kerouac reference. “In the Garage” describes a late-adolescent inner sanctum where he can find refuge from teenage ills.
The influence this album had on a generation of shoe-gazing awkward teenagers (including those that would go on to form emo bands) is inestimable. Please do yourself a favor and get a copy of the Blue album. From there you can move on to the other colors of the Weezer rainbow: Green, Red, and White.
Matt’s Museletter: Now With 100% More FUN!
In the Earbuds: 100% Fun by Matthew Sweet
Rarely has there been an album title that better describes the contents. Matthew Sweet’s 100% Fun is a classic 90s guitar pop album, brimming over with head-bobbing catchiness.
There is something sublime to me about the lead track and radio hit, “Sick of Myself” – something about the catchy melody, bare-bones garage rock, and the grungy power chords perfectly aligns to make it one of my favorite songs ever. I can’t really explain it. The manic, zany guitar soloing causes facial ignition. The ending is really a pseudo-ending – just when you think it’s over (and maybe the band in the studio really thought it was over), Sweet starts it back up again. And again.
Here is my tribute to Sick of Myself:
Producer Brendan O’Brien brought some alternative rock heaviness to the album, especially on songs like Super Baby, Giving It Back, and Lost My Mind. While Sweet loves to rock, he primarily wants to craft personal, emotive songs, and this is apparent on the calmer ballads I Almost Forgot and Fog Moon. Sure, there’s a time to vent our angst and frustration with life as on O’Brien’s other producing work from that era: Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, etc. Thanks, though, to Matthew Sweet for having some fun. In the middle of the alternative/grunge age of despair, he found a moment of brightness.
The World Is a Vampire
In the Earbuds: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by Smashing Pumpkins
I just posted a soft acoustic cover version of the classic Pumpkins tune “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”:
When I first heard that song and then the ambitious double-album in which it dwelt, I formed a special connection right away with the fantastical, aggressive-at-times, tender-at-times, vintage-esque, and cathartic music of Smashing Pumpkins. “Bullet” fulfilled the loud, pounding guitars, drums, and yelling I craved from the deep depths of my grunge years. But then songs like “Tonight, Tonight”, “1979”, “Thirty-Three”, “We Only Come Out at Night”, and the title instrumental brought me back from the edge of the “it has to be loud or it’s boring” stage I was in. It was okay to have the distortion pedal switched off sometimes. It wasn’t just quiet vs. loud, either – the Pumpkins experimented with all sorts of different genres, instruments, and textures. One of the best rock albums of the 90s in my opinion.
This is why I was pretty happy to find out there is a Smashing Pumpkins reunion tour this year paying special attention to their older material. It’s the closest thing to a time machine I suppose.