Matthew Sweet

Wigs Are Us
By Mike Cimicata

Master pop craftsman Matthew Sweet released his seventh album, In Reverse (Volcano/Jive), this past fall. A charming, challenging 14-song collection that ambitiously blends blistering rock songs with majestic pop creations, the album oozes with Sweet’s indelible optimism in the face of uncertainties of time, love, and occasionally the weather. Y3 caught up with Matthew on the phone from Atlanta during the mini-tour that accompanied the release of In Reverse in October.

Yeah Yeah Yeah: You’ve consistently released a full-length album every two years for 10 years running now. Is that a pace that just works for you, or is that just the pace that labels want you to work at?
Matthew Sweet: I think it’s more the industry pace. Frankly, I could probably make records twice as often. I don’t know what it would do to their quality, but I write a lot, so I’d love to be able to do it more often. But it’s the reality of promoting a record, and the time and the money involved, and the people involved. It just conspires to make it hard to do much more often than that.

Y3: But if the industry worked the way it did in the ‘60s, you feel like you could put out an album or two every year?
MS: Yeah, I feel like I would be up to that challenge, if that was the way things were. But it just isn’t the way things are now because of the big business involved. Or maybe just in terms of demand, maybe the audience isn’t there for people to put things out that often. It would just water down the impact for everybody.

Y3: The Beatles pulled off two albums a year at that time, and not just The Beatles, all those groups…
MS: They were great albums. But they burned out pretty quickly, too. There was a lot of demand on those guys. I can only imagine what it was like then. We have so much more advantage now, knowing how to go about things. They must have been just in a whirlwind.

Y3: Do you have much say in the way your tours, promo appearances, and interviews get booked? Do you have a lot of say in the way that you’re marketed, or do you just turn yourself over to the mercy of the label and management?
MS: To some extent, you have to. I mean, the amount of time and energy I would have to spend to really, really be on top of everything—I just don’t think I could do it all. Once I get out on road, especially, there’s just so much I have to do everyday, and then to be able to manage to sing every night as well. I have to kind of kick back and let other people sort of guide me through to some extent.

But I have something to say about it. I know about how we booked this tour. It makes total sense. What’s happening to a lot of bands right now, and bands that sell a lot, lot more records than me, is they’ve gone out and done tours at the very onset of their records, where they’ve gotten the biggest places they could get for the most money, right off the bat, and they’re all not doing that well, because there’s a ton of people out touring. And then you have promoters who are unhappy because they paid you so much and didn’t make that much money. We wanted to do a tour that got the word around that my record was out and allowed me to do promo from city to city, because I don’t fly. This is my way to get around. And it makes more sense to do it when we’re actually playing. To me, it makes great sense to make sure that we can come back later on by making the initial tour small and sort of exclusive.

Y3: Some people are talking about the fact that you worked again with Fred Maher, who produced Girlfriend, that they see similarities between In Reverse and Girlfriend. Do you think of your work like that at all? Do you compare it to your previous records?
MS: I don’t really do that. I’m always just living in the present, and thinking of now, and not really dwelling on the older stuff. But I did have a little bit of a sense that it was my wrapping up the decade. And it wasn’t lost on me that the girl on the cover is vaguely reminiscent of the Girlfriend girl. But I don’t think it’s very much like Girlfriend.

Sonically, it’s a modern sounding record. It isn’t nearly as stylized, to be kind of retro, as Girlfriend was, as an album. I think it’s much more psychedelic, and elaborate, and ornate than Girlfriend was. Although I think it has touches that are like it. I still think it’s a new record for me. And probably a more ambitious record than Girlfriend was, in a way. Girlfriend was a little more simple in its concepts, I think.

Y3: The retro thing that does crop up is the ‘60s kind of production which you hadn’t really done before.
MS: I was making demos during the time I had off, and I made one batch of about 10 or 11 songs that were specifically Spector-esque. I used a lot of reverb and multi-tracked all the instruments myself at home on the demos. I’d been listening to a Spector box set and was struck by how radical this stuff sounded. And I got it into my head that if I recorded some of my more melodic, ballady songs using that method that maybe it would make them kind of be dramatic and otherworldly in a way I’d never done before. All the songs we did that way came from that same batch of demos.

So it wasn’t that I wanted to make my whole album like that, but things about it sort of spilled out into the rest of the record. When we did the double drums, we really loved that, so we did it on some rock stuff as well. And when Carol [Kaye, legendary L.A. session bassist] played on the big group, then I hired her for one of the smaller things. On those large groups it’s two drummers, Ric Menck and Fred Maher. Two bass players, Tony Marsico played upright bass and Carol Kaye played electric bass. And then three keyboard players, a live theremin player, three acoustic guitars, and usually two electrics. So a lot of things doubling each other.

It’s sort of what the Spector thing is, where everybody’s banging away. Not so much like Pet Sounds, which is more orchestrated, but a little more just rock and roll. We were all playing live together. The most I think we had at once was 15 or 16 people, which is a lot of fun, and it’s very gratifying because it’s done right when you do it. So it’s pretty amazing, the impact of going back and hearing it right after you do it.

Y3: Talk about how "Thunderstorm" fell into place as a rain-drenched nine-minute suite.
MS: There were four different demos of songs that that was made out of. When we were in pre-production I realized they were all in the same key and had sort of relating themes. We saw the connections and put it together, and I made an acoustic demo the next morning of it. It just seemed to work. I was kind of embarassed about it, the idea of a mini-opera sort of thing, but everybody just got so into it. It was a source of happiness all through the sessions. As we worked on it, we would play it for people as they came in, and it was just fun. It’s amazing to me how much people get into that kind of thing. I thought people would be more like, "What’s he doing, this crazy monstrosity?"

Y3: The other side of the coin is a song like "Faith In You"—short, guitar-driven, not as wet production-wise, and kind of a cousin in a way to "Sick Of Myself," with the lyric inverted—it’s about doubt in another person instead of doubt in oneself. Is that a fair characterization?
MS: I think it is, and that’s an interesting thing. For some reason I think of "Divine Intervention" with "Faith In You" because they’re both about, "Do I really believe in…whatever?" But you’re right, because it’s like "Sick Of Myself" in the way it riffs, and it is kind of the flipside of that song. I wanted to do some basic rock songs that were really raw and edgy. I wanted the extremes to be either way—the melodic stuff to be really lush and ornate, and the things that were rock to be kind of spare and raw.

Y3: Contasts are a great part of what a lot of your albums are about.
MS: I’ve always tried to vary the landscape in a record as much as I could.

Y3: Most untitled songs are songs about which the artist says, "Oh, this song has no title." But yours seems consciously titled "Untitled," as opposed to not having a title.
MS: People that get into the record and really listen it get really into that song. It is deceptive because you can just think, oh yeah, "Untitled," but what it really is about is a person who wants to be recognized. That’s what it means, more than just not having a title. I really like that one.

Y3: So, "Millennium Blues…"
MS: I know, it’s embarrassing to have a millennium song. [Laughs] And by the time my record was done, I wished it wasn’t even called that. At least I feel my song is a weird song about anxiety, how time’s going to pass you by no matter what. I always knew when I was a kid that I’d be in the middle of my life at the millennium. I turned 35 a few weeks ago, and the song is sort of about that anxiety of time flying past.

Y3: The song is followed on the record by "If Time Permits," so there’s a whole time-space continuum here.
MS: There’s a lot of time going on on the record. [Laughs]

Y3: Do you think about time a lot?
MS: I think that I was during this record. It was kind of a time of reflection for me, because I had more time off and was home longer than I’d been since the early ‘90s. It just allowed me time to look back at things a little bit and think about them some. And I guess those anxieties rose up a little bit in my writing.

Y3: With a line in "Millennium Blues" like "It’s not about you anymore," it must be asked: are you feeling humbled by it all?
MS: Well, you know, I think so. And anyone who’s self-aware, that’ll happen to you. You have realizations like, wow, I’m getting older too. And I have as much anxiety as anybody. It’s a hard world, and it’s hard for someone doing music like I do to make their way in it. And I felt really lucky to be making a record when I made this record. I think that partially informed me to want to go the extra mile as far as packing in a lot of emotion and things into the record.

Y3: Now with the ‘90s drawing to a close, all these lists are coming out. How do you feel when people call Girlfriend a definitive ‘90s pop album, and Rolling Stone includes it on its best of the decade list?
MS: I’m totally flattered when people say that kind of thing. I never dreamed I’d ever have a record where people thought that about it, or in the beginning, even to be me and be a solo artist. That sort of thing is great. And it gives me a sense that at least I have something established. It gives me a little bit of a will to go on, knowing that somebody cared about records of mine at all.

On this tour I’ve been meeting a lot of people who are like, "I was 14 when I first got whatever, and I saw you here, and you signed my thing." [Laughs good-naturedly] It’s hard for me not to feel the passage of time, because I just see it, in terms of my career. In a way it’s a good feeling, that I have something under my belt that I can hang onto, that I’ve been around for a while.

Y3: One interesting thing that happened in your career over the last few years was your involvement in the music for Mike Myers’ Austin Powers movies. There’s the "BBC" song—with you, Myers, Susanna Hoffs, and others as the band Ming Tea—over the end credits of the first movie, and the psychedelic scene breaks in the first movie too.
MS: They used the same ones again in the second movie, actually. I did some music for the trailer of the new movie, but I didn’t actually work on the movie. I know Mike really well. It’s so amazing how well known Austin Powers is. To have been around when he was developing that character, it was really fun seeing him working on it. We did some groundlings things with him where he would perform the character and some other characters.

It was really fun doing the Ming Tea thing. Our involvement on it mainly was before the first Austin Powers movie came out. We even did a show at the Viper Room in L.A. where we played 12 Ming Tea songs. And at that time he really wanted there to be an album. But I think that there just wasn’t that much interest in it. I think there might have been conflicts with the movie company as well, that they didn’t want Ming Tea to become a big deal at that time. It was a really fun thing. We had a whole batch of songs, and we still talk about sometimes playing or doing something, but Mike’s really busy, and it’s really his baby. But when he says, "We’re doing it," we’ll be doing it. The show we played was really fun. But the wigs are kind of hot.

YEAH YEAH YEAH, 1999