Foto-© Reed Schick

Die Suche nach dem Glück – ein schwieriges und stets fragiles Unterfangen, aber der Londoner Songwriter Matt Maltese kommt der Sache zumindest gefühlt ein Stückchen näher! Zuvor komplett in Richtung Zukunft getrieben, gestattet er sich auf seinem neuen, heute via Nettwerk erschienenem vierten Album Driving Just To Drive erstmals den Blick in den Rückspiegel. Dabei reflektiert Maltese über das Gefühl für einen Ort und dessen Bedeutung, an dem man aufgewachsen ist, sowie über das Geheimnis, einfach den Moment zu genießen. Dabei zeigt er sich so frei wie nie zuvor.

“Als ich jünger war, war ich übermäßig ernst – als ich 18 war und mir das Herz gebrochen wurde, verlor ich dieses Ego-Ding in mir, und das brachte in gewisser Weise die Ernsthaftigkeit zurück”, sagt Maltese über die herrschenden Emotionen, die ihn zu einer Ebene der reinen Nostalgie und Romantik führten, die dieses Album auf eine kraftvollere, aufrichtigere Ebene als je zuvor hebt. “Ich habe diese Ernsthaftigkeit verdrängt, weil ich mich selbstbewusst fühlte, aber mit der Zeit bleibt keine Zeit mehr für Selbstironie. Ich denke, die Art und Weise, wie ich mein Leben vor 2021 gelebt habe, bestand nur aus Grübeln. Jetzt versuche ich, weniger zu denken und mit dem, was ich schreibe, weniger preziös zu sein.” 

Der üppige, fast filmische Sound des Albums ist zum Teil darauf zurückzuführen, dass Maltese zum ersten Mal seit einer Weile mit einem Produzenten zusammengearbeitet hat – mit Josh Scarbrow sogar mit einem Erstlingsproduzenten. Erst nachdem er sich in der Welt des Songwritings zurechtgefunden und mit Joy Crookes, Celeste, Etta Marcus und anderen zusammengearbeitet hatte, erkannte Maltese besser, wie er für sich selbst schreiben wollte. “Ich bin schlecht darin, loszulassen, damit mir jemand anderes hilft, aber ich habe mich diesbezüglich gebessert”, sagt Maltese. “Diese Momente im echten Leben mit einer anderen Person zu teilen, ist einfach sehr schön. Josh hatte zuvor noch kein Album gemacht, was ich sehr mochte, und auch die Arbeit mit jemandem in meinem Alter war am Ende sehr wichtig.” Noch viel mehr Infos zu seinem neuen Album präsentiert uns Matt im Track by Track zu seinem neuen Album!

1. Mother

I had this sad, almost funny conversation with my mum a while back about breaking up with an ex-girlfriend. I’d known it had really affected her, and in her mind it was almost like a member of the family was just disappearing overnight. And I realised more than ever the similarity between my own experience of heartache and hers. Just like you, they lose someone without choosing to lose someone, and they have even less agency than you do in the process. I remember comforting her at the end of the conversation with a line I’d been told myself years before about the same relationship –  ‘you’ll learn to love again’, I said – and both of us kind’ve laughed. You always feel like you’re the main one hurting in a break-up, but relationships can form these webs that intertwine the people around you into them, and thats a lot of change and grief for everyone. And a lot of sad, almost funny conversations.

2. Irony Would Have It

I wrote this song about someone close to me who has been a mentor figure to me. As we get older, those relationships naturally can change as people fall on harder times at different times. Finding myself trying to comfort them kind’ve shifted our dynamic for a moment and this was really about that. I actually wrote it when I got bored out of my mind watching 20 minutes of the Beatles doc and wrote this in a restless ‘keep it simple’ mentality. I think keeping it simple is constantly the hardest challenge, and I realise more and more how much more meaningful a song ends up when it is. Especially something like this one, where I’m really not trying to make anyone laugh (hard for me) and it really needs to be left alone once it’s written.

3. Florence

This is a pretty old song that Josh (the producer) convinced me to dig up from the grave and put on the album. I quite liked the idea of putting a song on the record that wasn’t really written at the same time as everything else.. I’ve made a lot more peace with my greener, sincerer older songs that I wrote before I started making my first album, and songs like ‘Florence’ that have a multi-year gap between writing and recording often make for more interesting versions than the ones you write and record in the moment. I wrote it after seeing a show (not Florence and the machine) and it was right at the precipice of anger and acceptance with loss, and with life changing a lot. I wrote the ‘I’d have to be a man to know’ at 19, and though I still feel some kind of alliance to that, I also feel adult in a way I didn’t then, so I think the song takes on a slightly different energy. It kind of came at a moment in my life before I became a lot more set on bringing humour and self-deprecation into music.. and around my first album being put together, I had come to find it far too sincere and ‘sweet’. And now I often come back to these older teenage songs years later and think their earnestness was actually something to be proud of, rather than cringe or make fun of.. and I’m often trying to get closer to that, and still be funny sometimes (hopefully).

4. Mortician

I really wanted some faster songs on this record, and over Christmas 2021, I asked josh to send me some instrumentals that I chopped up, and mortician came out of that. I had the lyrics for a while, and putting them into a kind of cowboy anthem environment felt right. It’s the kind of bittersweet territory I think aim for a lot. It’s pointing the finger back at myself and being like ‘yeah it’s sad but you don’t have to do that thing everytime’. It’s easy to wallow and be sad.. but the hardest thing and the best feeling is when I somehow celebrate the joy in those sadder things. Not judging a relationship by its length or dwelling on what went wrong, but just being like ‘that was a lot of bad, and some good, and now we move on’. Those moments don’t always last forever, but they’re great when they come.

5. Musuem

This song, along with ‘Mother’, was really a building block for the album. It came from really reflecting on my relationship to my hometown – which in my case is Reading. You change a lot but these places hold those different versions of yourself that you were and that you can’t change. I always couldn’t wait to leave Reading.. it had that kind of middle-ground feeling between city and countryside, and I craved city throughout my childhood. It’s funny cause I have often felt like my life didn’t really begin til I moved to London at 18. And of course in some ways that’s true, but also there’s a whole life lived in this other place that ive frankly never really wanted to think about or write about. I like my current-self more than my teenage self, but I also realised it’s a shame to not see how the present is so intertwined and indebted to the past. Every day you’ve lived shapes who you’ve become, and Reading has been home for a lot of those days, even if it isn’t now. Even by reacting against it as I got older, it shaped me. And I think I finally feel a lot more like I wanna embrace it, even if I can’t relate to those years as much anymore. Museum is an ode to Reading.

6. Widows

This is the last song I wrote for the album. I’d written all these couplets about inflation, sex, global warming and corruption, and I kept thinking to myself ‘you cant sing this’, which in-turn made me start to feel ‘you have to sing this’. It’s a little hopeless at times, and though I do really like to pivot away from those feelings, it is just good to put it how it is sometimes. As I think I’ve said too many times already, I think the better and harder way to feel is the other way where your positive about misery, but that doesn’t mean it’s not ok to sometimes cave to the feelings.

7. Coward

This was probably one of the simplest songs to make on the record. I’d had a half-demo of it for a while, and it kept knocking on my proverbial door and asking to be on this album. Jess (Biig Piig) has always been someone I’ve really admired and I thought she’d bring the perfect amount of intimacy to the song – it was so good to finally work together. Put simply, it’s a love song about that moment when you’re both clearly trying to hide feelings from eachother, but failing miserably.

8. Driving Just to Drive

I think getting older and busier, you can sometimes create a rewards-system in your brain, where every action needs to have a reason for doing that action. But there’s also a whole new fresh load of doom out there that sometimes can put our obsession with personal ‘growth’ into perspective. I often live in a building-block mindset where I need to do this thing so I can do that thing and that means I’ll have a chance at that other thing.. and in the meantime, there are all these uncontrollable (and maybe even unchangeable) realities like a wealth-bias financial system and an exponentially heating world that could render all the productivity pointless. I thought a lot back to being younger and how much more I used to do things just to do them. Playing on a playground as a kid or just going for a drive and listening to music in the car. I don’t have a car anymore but I used to love that.. stuff with no sense of an outcome, with no sense of self-imposed necessity. I think it’s important to have some of that in our lives.

9. Hello Black Dog

This one’s a very melodramatic song. I liked the idea of personifying your sadness and and serenading it – greeting it unwillingly but also like a friend, and letting it in, rather than trying to run away from it. Letting yourself just feel the feeling is always better for me than getting angry with myself for feeling the feeling. This song is reflecting that notion.

10. Suspend your Disbelief

This songs pure escapism really. I wrote it when I visited LA last winter before tour (the most escapist thing you can do), and hung out with Jonathan Rado who made my first record. I again had these couplets that I never really thought I’d sing, but then I did and it’s all here. It’s a sort of happier sounding cousin of ‘widows’ – it’s not got any answers to the problems we face, but it’s hopefully a few minutes of escape. Life is better when you forget all the bad stuff for a moment, but of course the point is to forget for a while so that you can actually address things with enough mental strength to do so. The art of switching off. Which I suck at.

11. But leaving is

This was a song that came out of the lowest part of the end of a relationship. It’s complicated when the end of a relationship isn’t just falling out of love and walking away.. those two things didn’t really align and that was shit. No matter how much I build my world and learn about myself, i really still can be shaken by love in a way i have no idea how to control. No amount of intelligence or growth of experience or cynicism can change that. It’s still the most powerful force in life and pretending it’s not is silly.