What you need to know:
Saturday 27 April 2013
Matt Jones and the Reconstruction,
Graham Parsons & the Go-rounds, and The Hounds Below

-Poster art by Jenny Harley

What you need to read:
“Dark is exactly what I’m supposed to be…” An Interview with Matt Jones

Matt Jones has a Neil Young quality to him. Not that he’s rocking in the free world or searching for a heart of gold, or anything. It’s that he’s going to disarm you in a certain way.

Just like Young’s offsets his leathery features, his shabby worn gruffness with that angelic voice of his, Ypsi’s singer/songwriter curtails his lurching tree-like height and broad grizzly bear shouldered stance with those squinted smiling eyes of a boyish tike, the dirty-blonde shaggy locks of a neighborhood scamp who still probably gets good grades, and, yes, that cherubic voice crinkled like lilac pedals that’d wither off their bloom if the lingering winter breeze blew too hard.

He’s definitely not been searching for a heart of gold, so we can drop the Young stuff; Jones sounds more as though he’s been searching for a heart of darkness. Or at least trying to transplant it…

Jones has dealt with personal demons, self-destructive addiction, he’s disappointed others and disappointed himself only to re-rise back up to sobriety, a groove through which to till onward (thanks in large part to his musical kindred spirit Misty Lyn Bergeron). “Having gone through a period when I didn’t give a fuck about anything else around me, I can now appreciate when something lifts me or breaks my heart. Misty’s music does that; when she sings, I believe it.” Her music, and musical-friendships overall, are that one thing he wants to hang on to and to have hang-on to him. As he tills onward, dark or light…

Heavy, right? Jones makes some pretty heavy music for what would sound otherwise like a warm-n-fuzzy folk warble.

Darkest Angels remind me that I am destined for the darkest things… Jones sang in his most recent song. “I realized that even though everything is dark in my lyrics, that dark is exactly what I am supposed to be.”

More thorn than rose, I’m afraid… And what’s Jones afraid of?

It was early winter and Jones had been out of work for six months and whenever that happens he starts feeling worthless. Worse, he hadn’t been playing many live shows at that point and he was in the “draw down” from his latest release, (Half Poison/Half Pure), which had come out about seven months earlier.

It feels similar to coming off the road, coming home, the dizzy whirlpool descent back down to the worn nest.

“(Chris) Bathgate put it well the other day when I was bitching to him about the pointlessness of playing so many local shows,” Jones said, recalling conferencing with fellow acoustic-guitar strapped day-job slogging singer/songwriter. “ ‘Yeah,’” Bathgate said, “ ‘You feel like god for a week after selling out the Pig,’ and after that, the teeth-grinding obscurity returns and you are doubting every reason you ever picked up a guitar in the first place.”

Stream Darkest Things:

Releasing new works usually brings rejuvenation, as it did with this latest single. Or, at least, rather, it can ameliorate the artist’s ego back to a point where one can actually “erase all thoughts of reality for a second, or for a few months.” Because the record or the song or the show gets a nice response and serotonin levels rise and it’s all good for a minute. But downloads drizzle off and you start feeling flat again and you never really learn your lesson.

That’s not Jones’ story so much as its almost ay workaday musician’s story.

“You realize, then, that it’s not the listen-counts or the ‘likes’ – it’s that people move on and they listen and ‘like’ other things. So, yeah, I was dealing with all that narcissistic shit and not writing much and bitching to Misty Lyn (Bergeron, of The Big Beautiful) and she says: ‘Why don’t you try writing something simple? Just an easy chord progression, simple melody, no finger picking…’ (that last one being one of his characteristic specialties).

Bergeron told him to ‘just sing a fucking song.’ But it didn’t sink in until he listened to “Run From Me” by Richard Hawley (of Pulp). “It was so fucking simple and his tone of voice was so genuine and really, really tired sounding and his lyrics sounded tired and it stuck.

The next time he sat down with his guitar it was simple. He felt like he had something to say (and a way to sing it) that other people might be able to understand. “And then I threw the finger-picking in, because…I couldn’t just let everything go.”

By the end of the song, as the music fades and the lyrics cease, Jones realizes he’d been a wuss and that he “couldn’t quit” and that he “didn’t want to be forgotten, no matter how much I, myself, forget what that specialness is about me.”

And he could not be luckier to have had the talented musicians who contributed to Half Poison’s recording sessions steadily come back down to his basement to back him up as a full band. This, even after he dickishly dropped the ball with his vacillation over how to release it, when to release it, how to present it live…hem, haw…hey, what happened?

Now he’s got his shit together. And he’s got his band together, (Chad Pratt, Serge Van der Voo, Greg McIntosh and Misty). He knows they all didn’t have to come back but they did and…

And… “They’re such fantastically versatile and willing players and the songs we’ve been constructing are so good. I could not be luckier.”

Misty, Bathgate, his band, even cellist Colette Alexander, he exudes his appreciation for these “musical friendships.”

He doesn’t mince words when he says he’d be dead without them.

And that’s not so much Jones’ story as it is the writer of the next song I hear.

Or that you hear.

Hold on…

INFO:
Blindpigmusic.com

http://www.songkick.com/artists/2954366-matt-jones-and-the-reconstruction

http://mattjones.bandcamp.com/