KANSAS CITY, MO | Kansas City is a weird place to be the weekend of the SuperBowl Whatever matchup between the internet and Taylor Swift. It’s the same weekend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs has taken over the Convention Center and much of downtown. A suppressed but manic energy vibrates under everything like a passing subway train. Five days from now two teenagers will, in what is fast becoming an American tradition as deeply ingrained as the SuperBowl itself, shoot up a parade. But on this breezy, freezy Friday night, Matthew Sweet is playing the Madrid Theatre and it promises to be a pretty good time.
Sweet’s Midwest tour is the first after a long hiatus, but when I spoke to him in January he already had a live gig with Tommy Stinson under his belt and was looking forward to an outing with his new lineup, which includes Debbi Peterson of The Bangles on drums (Susanna Hoffs is also a frequent collaborator of Sweet’s) and John Moreland on lead guitar. Releasing alongside the tour is Sweet’s first live album, WXRT Live in Grant Park, Chicago IL July 4 1993, which draws material mostly from the same year’s Altered Beast and Sweet’s 1991 breakout Girlfriend.
Kansas City’s Madrid Theatre is already crowded when I and a few other rogue writer friends arrive fresh from ten or twelve hours of publishing shop talk. There don’t seem to be many other AWP attendees, but there’s certainly some demographic overlap, with a particularly strong showing of well-behaved middle-aged eccentrics cutting loose for the weekend and a healthy minority of precocious hipster twenty-somethings. A kid to my left who can’t be more than eighteen is wearing a Paul Westerberg 1993 tour tee.
Sweet looks and acts his age and it feels oddly punk rock to do so while Aerosmith and Madonna are still touring like nothing’s changed since 1987. He’s seated for the entire show, sporting a tweedy driving cap over shoulder-length hair, a graying beard, and an impish, dimpling smile. His voice, however, hasn’t aged at all.
When the band starts up, so does the whole room. It’s the best kind of crowd: warm, effusive, generous with their applause and largely unselfconscious. They strike up conversations with strangers, sing like they can’t hear themselves, dance like nobody’s watching, drink like tomorrow is ten years away. The mood is buoyant. Upbeat. Everybody’s happy to be there and nobody’s causing trouble. It’s an instant, easy camaraderie.
Sometimes the good feeling just can’t be contained. “The tone is fantastic!” somebody yells at the stage. “Oh, thank you,” Sweet says, and you can’t for the life of you tell if he’s joking, “I was worried about it the entire time.” He needn’t have, in any case—the band is radio-ready. Sweet’s calling cards are instantly recognizable, the fresh lineup moving right in step. There are no real standouts here, by accident or design: it consistently gives the impression of a rock-solid collaborative effort. While that does occasionally leave me feeling nostalgic for Robert Quine’s rampages across the fretboard, it’s just that—nostalgia. That was then, and this is now.
In any case, Sweet doesn’t mind mixing now and then. He jokes about his eyesight as he squints at the setlist, but sings with the gusto of his younger self. He asks Kansas City how they feel about Taylor Swift upstaging her boyfriend at the SuperBowl—he likes her and respects her, but “Who makes that many videos?” There’s a hubbub of opinions in reply, everybody piping up like it’s a tailgate party and we’re all just friends here, drinking beer and shooting the shit and listening to some tunes before the game gets going.
But once the chatter dies down the tunes take over the theatre. “It’s all hits from now on, pretty much,” Sweet says, and gets no objections. When the show is over—at, I might add, a civilized hour (looking at you, Madonna)—the crowd reforms immediately around the merch table or bubbles out onto the sidewalk. It’s jarringly fucking friendly in a way I’ve seen rarely since before the pandemic and politics and (may as well say it) unrelenting mass shootings made us all so justifiably skittish and suspicious of each other. It feels for a few hours like we have somehow gotten a glimpse back in time.
I and the rest of the writers straggle along to one bar, then another, and when the party finally breaks up it’s late enough to feel alive and we’re just drunk enough that the cold doesn’t matter and we all get oddly weepy when we say goodbye. Then it’s back to networking and the NFL and the terrible news that never relents, but with a little something sweet to keep us going for a while.
