![]() ![]() How did that kind of manifest itself on this project? Confronting aging sort of seems to emerge as a theme on Catspaw. You started to hit on something there that caught me as I listened to the record again earlier and that’s the idea of aging. I would just take a deep breath and go for it. It was a little bit like scat singing over a song I wrote or something where I could just go all over the place and see what happens. Don’t try to get them to do something that’s my idea - let them run free and pull from their freedom what you’re going to use on the record. I tried to do it like I had learned to do with other musicians, where I learned pretty quickly, don’t tell them what to do. I feel like it has the right kind of grasping going on in it - where it helps the album and it also helps kind of define what the vibe of it is. It was a first for me to stick my neck out and just go for it - and improvise playing lead. I was very sensitive in that way.īut I had this little kind of vision and, low and behold, I made an album and I played lead guitar on it. I was already obsessed with, and worrying about, death and what life meant. “I’m not that old, hey!” I was saying that to myself when I was young. I’m 56, which, at that time, seemed impossibly old to me, you know? I remembered having that kind of weird premonition when I was probably like 13. I never really thought about it again until I had decided that I was going to play lead on this record. Just because I’ve been around music so long, and I have had music in my head, I wonder if I’ll get good at playing lots of things?” And I had this idea that, even if I didn’t play bass for a while, that somehow, in my subconsciousness, I would get better at playing bass even though I was never playing it.Īnd I remember thinking one time, along that line of thought, “I wonder if when I’m old, I’ll just be able to play lead guitar - even though I’ve never really learned to do it. When I was a teenager, I was a bass player first - and played bass actually for many years before I started playing guitar or trying to write songs. I thought, “I want to make a record where I play the lead guitar.” I didn’t know what that meant. Was the idea heading into this that you’d handle all of the guitar or did it kind of just gradually become that? digitally, and on CD or vinyl, via Omnivore Recordings Album cover art courtesy of Omnivore Recordings 'Catspaw,' the 15th studio album from Nebraska power pop artist Matthew Sweet, is now available. So it’s been a really happy occurrence to have it be coming out and be doing interviews for it. Then, knowing that the album was actually going to come out and see the light of day this month just kept me going kind of hopewise a little bit, since my actual way I normally make a living, which is through live shows, was entirely ground to a halt. The bright spots for me were hooking up with Omnivore Recordings, who I’d always wanted to do something with, and working on the artwork with them - which is always one of the most fun parts of the process for me. And I really spent most of my year consuming tons of media - lots of movies and shows and streaming all kinds of things. So many people got creative during the pandemic - whereas I was coming off that creative spree. For me, that felt like it was kind of eerie how well it fit with what we’ve all gone through. So, in a way, it’s my nature to be a little more of a homebody.īut it is almost like Catspaw sort of weirdly predicted or fit with the time of the pandemic. MATTHEW SWEET: I think it’s partly that I’m a kind of isolated person. What impact did that sort of isolation have on this project as you started guiding it forward? ![]() But you very literally handled nearly every element of it in your home studio, from recording to instrumentation - everything but drums. I’ve read that Catspaw was finished just prior to the pandemic. ![]()
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