‘I was left with little choice but for this to be extremely personal’ — Matthew Good bares all on Hospital Music
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Tuesday, September 25 - Tuesday, September 25
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“The last hotel we were at, they didn't allow smoking in any of the rooms, so he just decided to pay the fine,” the publicist says, smiling over her shoulder as she slides the electromagnetic key through the reader on the door. It opens a crack, and she raps the door frame quietly with two knuckles. Curls of smoke hang in the sitting room air. A gravelly response comes from inside, and she squeezes out one more PR-perfect smile.
“Well, here we are. I hope you did your research.”
The hotel room is hot and smells like coffee and tobacco. A flash of blue plaid from around a corner, and Matthew Good's muffled baritone grows clearer. He's talking about record sales, how Hospital Music went from 91 to 20 on iTunes on the day of its release. A cigarette burns in his mouth and his coffee cup jitters slightly in his hand as he sets it down. He greets us both with a smile and a handshake. “Hey, I'm Matt.”
The publicist's warning is immediately justified by the intensity with which Good discusses nearly everything. He talks incredibly fast and with an abundance of knowledge no matter the topic. My hand throbs as I try to shorthand it all. His pleasant demeanour, however, seems to contradict the commonly held perception that he is a “total dick.” Even his politics — though it takes little more than a casual mention of the subject to launch him into a 20-minute diatribe — seem well-reasoned.
“I'm often attacked for my position on Afghanistan, because people say I've never been there, what do I know?” he says. “But I get information from people who have been there, experts who really do realize the complexity of the situation. The problem is that so many people are still stuck in this post Second World War, good-versus-evil mentality, and they don't realize that it is a complex situation. It's not black and white.”
Of course, the opinions themselves are hardly the issue. If an artist becomes famous by being an artist, some might ask, what gives them the right to exploit an audience’s goodwill for a political agenda? Not that a political stance should be invalidated by a profession, but pulling out a soap-box once the spotlight is on smacks of an opportunistic bait-and-switch.
“We live in a society where there's this huge schism between art and entertainment — it's all just become about getting famous,” Good says. “We have reality television shows where that's the entire point. As citizens, everyone has a responsibility to be vigilant and objective. I've always been pretty upfront about my stance on most things, and artists have reflected the politics of their times in their art throughout history.”
Songs like “North American for Life” and “Blue Skies Over Badlands” are certainly representative of Good's political opinions, but it's his blog (www.matthewgood.org) that serves as his prime outlet for punditry. Though it features the usual recording artist trappings of an on-line store and tour updates, frequent readers of the blog are treated to Good's daily postings of his latest opinions on everything from Israel to the iPhone. Good's personal life does make an appearance, but if the deep, gut wrenching content of his latest LP is any indication, he's mostly been saving it up.
Hospital Music couldn't be further from the soapbox of The White Light Rock and Roll Review, most of it having been written about or during Good's struggle with bipolar disorder. In “99% of Us is Failure,” Good growls: “Styrofoam coffee cups/And bag drugs that never work enough/And I know it's real slow, honey/Painful and real slow.”
“It's blatantly personal,” says Good. “I was left with little choice but for this to be extremely personal. I wrote a record that I didn't think was all that accessible, and now I see that people are really enjoying it, really relating to it. It's always nice when you're able to do both.”
