A Conversation with Matt White – HuffPost 9.22.10

Mike Ragogna: Your new album calledIt’s The Good Crazy is your second album, your first one being Best Days?

Matt White: That’s exactly right. Yeah, the record just came out ago, and I just played a big show last night. I’m laying in bed, relaxing, and just waking up at twelve twenty-nine unfortunately.

MR: Now, you’re no stranger to Iowa, are you?

MW: No, Iowa happens to be one of my favorite places to come through. When you do these tours, there are certain things you get used to, like there being one thousand miles between Texas and Arizona. So, when you go through that area there are certain things and certain highlights. Whenever we’re in Memphis, we go to this certain barbecue place, and when we’re in Des Moines, there’s a place where this guy just kind of takes care of all musicians and cooks home cooked food for us.

MR: Well, when you come through Fairfield, I’ll cook for you.

MW: I’ll happily eat it, believe me. Denny’s, Cracker Barrel and trail mix from 7-11 gets boring after the forty-sixth day.

MR: You say that now, but when you taste my food, Denny’s will look like Tavern On The Green.

MW: Right, I’ll go back to Cheez-Its.

MR: Now, about this new record of yours. One of my favorite songs is “And The Beat Goes On,” which is the happiest song I think I’ve ever heard.

MW: Right.

MR: What’s cool is that the piano part almost sounds like a seventies sample. Actually, the whole album has this sort of retro vibe, and I don’t know if it’s intentional or not, but it works so well because you also have modern production techniques making a nice marriage of the two.

MW: Some of the stuff was just full-on analog tape. My first record was all Pro Tools and all digital, and I certainly think that that’s great. But a quote was said to me that said, “The record industry is over, so why not make a record that I actually like?” As much as I liked and enjoyed making my first record, everything I did was edited, and it sucked the soul and vibe out of the music. What’s cool about music is the imperfections, like not being perfectly in tune. When I go to a show, the things I like are when things are a mistake. You listen to Beatles records or to Dylan or even some of the Simon & Garfunkel records, the guitar is out of tune, and that’s what makes music. You just can’t be perfect. I compare it to digital photography because I can tell a digital photograph over a real photograph any day of the week. You can use any kind of filter or whatever, but I can always tell.

MR: There’s almost like a surrealism to it.

MW: Yeah, you listen to a song like my favorite song, “Taking On Water,” and the depth of the sound is a little bit darker than a modern pop album. If you put it up against a pop sounding record, it doesn’t have that depth of sound. But that was all done on tape, and done in the exact same way as the people that I admire did it. Then sometimes, we have songs that are a marriage of the two, like the single “Falling In Love (With My Best Friend)” The vocals, guitar and bass were all analog, then we had a kind of modern loop that we literally couldn’t figure out how to do on tape, even with five of the best engineers. So, we synced with the Pro Tools, but it still has a kind of warmth. When you mix a record, you never know how it’s going to come out. It’s like you throw up cards and let them come down, and you keep on doing it until you get it right.

MR: “Taking On Water” was one of those songs where it sounds like you took it analog as best you could, until the end.

MW: You can hear the producer say, “Take five,” because we were all playing facing each other and I couldn’t really move. The same thing happened with “Therapy” and “When I Fall,” which is one of my other favorites. I was playing, and you always want to play to a click, but the producer was like, “No clicks, no nothing. Go in there and play it and sing the song, and if the piano mic picks up your vocals, so what?” and that’s what we did. And we had this choir come in because I did it in a church, and it was just a really trippy process. There were no lights down in the control room, and it was very intense to be there.

MR: You also used a classic recording method and things were truly analog.

MW: One of the great, last records is Nevermind by Nirvana, for example. They did that all analog, and the editing must have been just the most intense process because no plug-in on Pro Tools was going to equal the real sound of something tangible–this is a frequency versus an actual piece of tape. The king of the universe can tell me that it sounds exactly the same, which is sort of what they did when I did Best Days saying, “It’s the same, and you can’t tell the difference.” So, I was like, “Okay, maybe you can’t tell the difference.” But I could.

MR: Yeah, you can tell the difference. I think the brain hears it and goes, “Wait a minute, you’re giving me numbers. You’re giving me zeros and ones.”

MW: Sonically and scientifically, the frequency is totally different; one is triangles, while one is squares.”

MR: Exactly. Who are your influences because I’m hearing all sorts of things?

MW: It’s weird, I go through periods. With this record, I was listening to a lot of Paul Simon and a lot of Dylan, but my influences are people like Elton John. Some of those records I’ve been listening to since I was three years old. Zeppelin, to me, is just the greatest band of all time. Springsteen because I’m originally from Jersey. Billy Joel I love because when I was playing piano and having to go to music school, I was studying classical, and studying classical music has this connotation of being not so cool or whatever. So, I walked by one of the rooms in the school of music and I saw these cool people playing jazz. I was like, “What’s this jazz? You don’t have to follow an exact formula for playing?” So, I started playing more jazz piano kind of stuff, and improvisational music. That’s sort of how that happened, if that makes sense.

MR: Absolutely. Paul Simon I definitely hear in your lyrics.

MW: He’s the best. He’s just so unbelievable and massively talented, I don’t even know how he can walk among people. Lyrically and the way those records were made? With the approach to the rhythm section, using African influences? The song that really came to me was “Therapy” because when you’re in New York in your late twenties, everybody is trying to get married or set you with people, and everyone in New York seems to go to therapy. So, maybe there’s a way to put those two themes together, and then all of the sudden this waltz (hums) groove came to me. That’s another song that was all tape. Then, there’s a song like “Honeymoon Phase.” Everyone always talks about the first six months of a relationship being the most exciting, and it’s like, “Yeah, that’s the honeymoon phase.” It’s weird because I don’t remember how I write the songs or how they come up. I don’t remember the process because I’m so in it, I guess, but I remember thinking of that theme.

MR: Your producers were David Baron and Henry Hirsch?

MW: Yes, David Baron and Henry Hirsch. They did all the Lenny Kravitz stuff, and Henry Hirsch did some Madonna, a bunch of Mick Jagger and Stones stuff, and he’s just a really old school record maker from the ’70s. He got the last board that Zeppelin recorded Zeppelin II on from Olympic studios, and shipped that board to New York from Germany. I don’t know how they did it, I guess by a boat. But he brought that in, and David Baron and Henry Hirsch ran a place called Edison studios with Lenny Kravitz. Then, Henry bought this church up in Woodstock and brought all his gear and all these special, crazy mics that I’m not sure what they do, and just the best recording equipment because sound is so important. If I went up and played acoustic guitar and sang, that would sound better than an entire production at another studio.

MR: Let’s talk about your single “Falling In Love (With My Best Friend).”

MW: It’s actually a very true story about one of my good friends growing up, this guy Rob, who I probably shouldn’t say his last name, and this girl who he was best friends with growing up. There was always an undercurrent of sexual tension through middle school and high school, then they went to separate colleges, but remained best friends, and there was always difficulty with each other’s boyfriends and girlfriends. The entire twelve years before they finally realized that they were meant to be together, everyone would always say, “Oh, you guys should really be together.” So, that’s sort of where the theme of the song came from. A lot of relationships start off that way, but for me, personally, it was difficult to get from having a very close girlfriend to being a lover, but I hear stories, and it happens more and more every day. I think it’s just a very common theme that happens a lot. So, that’s where that theme came from, and we put really weird guitars on it, and there’s a Bernard Purdie kind of drum groove. So, that’s how that song came.

MR: Now, I have to ask you about the song “Sunshine,” where you say, “…I need a relief from the same old groove. I hate the 405, the job, and the solution is sunshine.” But you live in California, right?

MW: I’m back and forth, but that song really came from a momentous kind of thing. I was dropped from Geffen in Canada, and it was the worst because I was in Calgary at a highway Holiday Inn, so that’s how that song came about. I was in a country that wasn’t familiar to me, very North in the country, and that’s how that song came.

MR: Hey Matt, who do you like as far as new artists?

MW: New artists? Brendan James is another singer-songwriter, piano man. I love Mumford And Sons, which is this band from the U.K. and Australia, and they’re now just exploding. I love Bon Iver, who I guess is not new, Lykke Li, and Temper Trap. Personally, I love the more simple, darker kind of music.

MR: Is there any advice that you’d like to give to up-and-coming artists?

MW: The only advice is to just keep on writing songs. It’s so true that you’re one song away from breaking. You just have to keep on writing, and play with every kind of musician you can possibly play with. I’ve been in the most bizarre situations playing music, and it’s taught me so much, even in my guitar playing. I don’t really play guitar and I have no theory on guitar, but I was taught by street musicians in Washington Square park, who just would sit out there and jam, and who knows what their stories were? Some were seventy-year-old hippies, who had just been there forever, and some were music students from NYU. Just play with anyone and everyone you can play with.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney