I get a call from Omaha on a frigid Wednesday afternoon. For the last week or so, I’ve been revisiting Matthew Sweet’s discography. A cluster of Midwest tour dates are bringing the power pop legend back onstage mid-February. I tell him I’m looking forward to opening night in Kansas City and, happily, so is he. “First time I’ve gone out and done real dates since before COVID, and it’s kind of a big deal for me,” he says, but after a recent gig with Tommy Stinson of Replacements fame, “I know I can do it, so I’m vastly less horrified to have to go out and play shows.”
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Sweet has always surrounded himself with adept and eclectic collaborators, including Susanna Hoffs, both Stipe siblings, and veteran punk rockers Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd, to name just a few. The upcoming tour is no exception. “I think it’ll be fun because it’s a little different band,” Sweet tells me, citing Debbi Peterson of the Bangles on drums and pal John Mormon on lead guitar. “We’ve never played live together, [and] if nothing else it’ll be fresh for all of us.”
It’s great to hear Sweet so fired up about performing live. Touring hasn’t always been easy for him. Intense aerophobia kept him grounded for eight years at the peak of his career, but it was only one part of the problem. “I suffer from bipolar disorder and I didn’t get treated until the early 2000s,” he explains. “That made life really hard for me. You’re so barely holding together your world.”
His candor is refreshing, and it’s something he appreciates about the present moment. “One of the great things of our era is that it’s not taboo to talk about your mental health. I’ve always been pretty open about stuff, probably more open than I should be,” he says. “I never felt like I could make a fake version that’s the one that’s famous and the one that presents some other personality.” Fame never suited him well. “I didn’t want people looking at me or talking about me. I was so ill-fitted for the rock star part of it.”
Since the heyday of the ’90s, he’s found a better way of doing things: “They put me on an SSRI or something and it was life-changing. It made me able to go out in the world and walk into a store and whatever and not feel all freaked out about it.” Prioritizing his mental health has also changed the way he thinks about music. Fame was never the goal, and now Sweet is focused on his true fans. “When there are fans now, they’re really fans,” he says. “Back in the day when I was having my biggest years in terms of record sales and shows, when you’re on the radio and you have songs that are on the charts and things, you have people don’t really know you coming to shows. That doesn’t really happen now because it’s so specialized.”
It’s a change for the better, for him at least. “I understand it’s small, [but] it’s wonderful to be an artist and have even some people care about what you’re doing.” This creative shift has changed the way he makes music, too; his 2017 record Tomorrow Forever was funded entirely by true fans on Kickstarter. “The DIY thing, it’s kind of more fun, because you can focus on a small amount of people and they’re more concentrated in their enthusiasm,” he explains. “That means a ton to me. I don’t really feel like I need more than that.”
The same “true fan” philosophy also underpins the vinyl boom, he says. “There are all these young people listening to vinyl now. That’s kinda delightful because they’re making it still, y’know?” It’s no surprise it’s true fans of the format who have kept it alive all this time. “When I started making records, it was like around the mid-’80s, you only got a CD if you were having big success. Otherwise you still got vinyl. And then within a year or two it sorta flipflopped, and by the time I made Girlfriend, you only got vinyl if you had a hugely successful CD.”
He was approached by a vinyl company in the ’90s who wanted to put his first three albums out on wax. “That was like a big deal. It wasn’t my label making it, it was this vinyl company.” He’s thrilled that acetate is here to stay. “I love that we always make vinyl now, because the artwork is so much cooler when it’s big. Stacks of CDs just weren’t something you look through the same way.”
Despite the resurgence of the LP, times have undoubtedly changed. Sweet jokes that in the internet age, “Forty years ago was like ancient history.” The way we make, and consume, music will never be quite the same. “Vinyl was so, so important,” he says. “It’s hard to emphasize enough how important it was, and how few ways we had to kind of get away on our own… we went in our rooms and closed the doors and played all the records our parents wouldn’t like. You were in your own little world.” Not only that, but records were Sweet’s first music teachers. “I largely learned to play bass from Yes records. I learned to play funky bass off, like, Stanley Clark records that my brother had.” It’s an adolescent rite of passage “that doesn’t exist for people now in quite the same way.”
Some of this has to do with the internet. “I might have gotten into biology or physics or other things I was interested in as an eight-year-old, as I got older, had I had the internet,” Sweet speculates. “If there’s a problem for music business now, it’s that people have everything.” As music struggles to keep listeners listening in an increasingly crowded entertainment marketplace, “It’s just kind of diluted in a way. It just doesn’t have that cultural importance in terms of like, rebellion, that it did at the time.”
But Sweet is no Luddite, quick to acknowledge how the internet has improved his quality of life. “[It] allowed my wife and I to move out of LA and live back in the Midwest and get to know our parents better before they passed,” he says. “The internet age made it so it didn’t matter so much, as an artist, where I was.”
He’s rearranged his touring life to better suit his true fans, his mental health, and his music. “My later life is easier in terms of the shows, in terms of interacting with fans. I’m able to really enjoy how much they’re enjoying it,” he says. “The small, do-it-yourself kind of life, just in terms of my basic happiness, is better for me.” There are downsides, of course—it’s harder to make money, but Sweet’s in the sweet spot so long as he can keep making records. “That’s the thing I love to do.”
Sweet has two records in the pipeline, including a new album of original songs and a live album from the 1993 Taste of Chicago festival. “There was a lot of stuff kind of going on there at the time!” he exclaims. “It’s particularly memorable because my mother grew up in one of these big Irish families, they were very strictly Catholic,” and the headline in the Chicago Tribune the following day gave him top billing with the supreme pontiff himself. “‘The Pope, the Bulls, and Matthew Sweet!’ I remember how big a deal that was to my mom, that my name was put with the pope.” But there’s still plenty here for those who, like Sweet—a self-described atheist who “[does]n’t know how to find comfort, exactly”—don’t have much of a relationship with the Big Man Upstairs. “I’ve never put out an album of a live show, so it’s at least a unique thing and I hope people like it.”
There’s a lot to like in Sweet’s back catalog, and a lot to like in his approach to life. The upcoming tour promises to be a good time for true fans and new ones, too.
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PHOTOS: EVAN CARTER
