Promptness has never been my strong point
Huh, so maybe I haven’t kept my promise on updates coming in October, but hopefully they’ll start becoming more regular now.
So what’s new with The Matirns?
Well we’re all back from school and writing again, and man it feels good. We’ve turned out 4 new songs, all of which are substantially better than anything we’ve written so far. We decided to take off school till the new year, so we’re going to hold off on recording until November-ish, when we have a good 20 songs written and can pare down to the top 5 for our EP that will be followed by a December tour (hopefully). It’s hard to book a tour for a band that has been dormant for 2 years, because we have to book the gigs now, rather than when we’ll have more buzz and fans, but I am confident we can do at least a short west coast run.
But yeah, anyway, the new songs. We title our songs last so they’ve all got uncreative names like “The Blues Song” and “Creepy Song”, but trust me, they are SO much better. We’ve all improved on our instruments, and our songwriting is much more mature and complex. We’ve sort of abandoned the need for a clear pop structure - one I had mostly stressed for, so it was more of me just shutting up about “where’s the chorus?” - and just tried to write the best song we could, rather than the most digestible. We’re still finding our sound, but it’s more in the vein of stuff like Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” than anything, but that’s not the best comparison. We still will write songs completely out of that style, but we’re trying to work on finding a cohesive sound, which I think is important both for our identity as a band and also will help us write better songs. If we keep writing in one certain style, those songs are gonna get better than if we keep writing one really poppy song followed by a country song followed by whatever.
As for shows, the first two have gone pretty well. It’s interesting, even though the second show had all our friends and a bigger crowd, we all felt better about our first show, which was in front of pretty much all strangers and a crowd of 15 or so. I dunno…you just can’t underestimate the importance of the audience to the quality of a good show. It was awesome that all our friends were there for the second show at Ground Zero, but at this tiny studio (Top O The Hill Studio in Oak Harbor, WA) we truly felt like rock stars. After every song, they went NUTS, and we really felt like we gave them their money’s worth. It probably helped that they had been warmed up by a couple of other acts and were probably a little drunk…but you get done with that kind of show with something that can only be described as a high. The second show, it just didn’t feel like we gave them something to remember, which is ultimately your goal as a performer. I guess we’ll just have to rehearse more and play better the next time around, so we don’t feel like we cheated our friends or something. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing the audience - I’m criticizing our inability that night to provoke a similar reaction.
Anyway, a big thanks to Josh Bruegger at Top O The Hill Studio for booking us, and likewise to Nick Merz at Ground Zero. Despite my nickpicking about our performance, we still loved played both shows and would love to come back to either venue.
We’re in the middle of writing some new stuff, so if we really get it together we might have 2 new songs in addition to the 4 new songs we’ve already performed. So stay tuned for that and catch us at our two July shows - the 26th at the Laughing Ladies cafe and the 30th at Golden Gardens park.
More updates to come, and more frequently I promise!
- Ryan
