By: Josh Kitchen / June 3, 2024
Photo on right by Henry Diltz
Matthew Sweet's commercial and critical breakthrough album, 1991's Girlfriend, put him on a path to success that few artists are lucky enough to experience. Led by the shimmering ear-worm power-pop title track, "Girlfriend" as its lead single, the album also features Richard Lloyd from Television on guitar, and Robert Quine. Girlfriend made Sweet an alt-rock legend, and would feature several great singles like "Divine Intervention," and "I've Been Waiting."
In July of 1993, Sweet released the follow-up to Girlfriend, the aptly named Altered Beast . Sweet's latest release is a live album recorded the same week that Altered Beast came out, WXRT Live in Grant Park, Chicago IL July 4, 1993. Listening to the record is a joyous experience, with Sweet sounding at the top of his game playing tracks off Altered Beast tracks, the Chicago audience giving it back 100%. It was around this time that Sweet began dealing with severe mental health struggles which culminated in a bipolar disorder diagnosis in 2002. Sweet tells me that Altered Beast Sweet was a record made "by a bipolar person," admitting he was a nightmare to work with during this time, and owes his happiness now to the treatment he received nearly twenty-five years ago.
Sweet released 100% Fun in 1995, and would go on to release over a dozen albums since, including three covers albums with The Bangles' Susanna Hoffs, (The superb Under the Covers series that features songs covers from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s over three discs) and his latest studio album, 2021's Catspaw recorded at home as the pandemic began.
To casual fans of Sweet's early 90's output, it might seem like Sweet disappeared, but that's far from the case. While he did move to Nebraska in over a decade ago, Sweet has been writing and recording great jangly power pop ever since, and is a self described homebody. In February, Sweet toured went on a short tour of the mid-west, his first outing since before the pandemic. I caught up with Sweet around then to talk about the new live album, the new tour, the success of Girlfriend, Brian Wilson, and the power to say you hate going to parties.
You just wrapped up your first leg of touring after a long break after the pandemic. How were the shows?
They were great. I had a lot of nervousness before the tour. I went down to Florida for this songwriters festival that my manager has had for a really long time. I played through a whole acoustic set there, and that took away some of my huge fears. I still didn’t know what it’d be like to be standing up there and singing so many songs at once which I haven’t done very much lately. It was just kind of amazing. We had almost all sold out shows, which is not that unusual in some of the places we play, but here in the Midwest that isn’t necessarily true.
It’s fun because the band is a little different. My longtime drummer Rick Menck couldn’t do the spring dates, and I ended up getting a friend of mine – Debbie Peterson from The Bangles to play drums on these dates. There’s another new band member – Adrian Carter. He’s playing acoustic guitar and singing. I wasn’t thinking about this when I asked her, but with Debbie we get a new voice that’s used to doing a million harmonies all the time. With Debbie and Adrian, they add voices that we usually don’t get live and that brings a kind of anything can happen factor, because even though I’ve done everything a thousand times, with Debbie and Adrian it feels fresh and that’s been a lot of fun.
Photo by Evan Carter
I looked up some videos of those February dates and your voice is sounding pristine.
Well, maybe it needed a breath. It made me delighted that my voice was working mostly. That made me feel great, knowing that I could still do it.
I wonder if there’s something to resting your voice for quite a while. I saw Yusuf (Cat Stevens) on his tour after he took about a thirty-year break, and he sounded like no time had passed.
There probably is something to that, who knows, but again, it helps having friends with you in a live situation like that.
You have a new live album out, Matthew Sweet – WXRT Live in Grant Part, Chicago IL, July 4 93. Something that strikes me about that live show is how appreciative you sound of the audience. You keep thanking them and are so present with them – going so far as to ready them for each new song by telling them the song titles. You sound like you’re having a lot of fun.
When Girlfriend took off, I was really grateful. I wanted to make records, but I was never really focused around having success with it. I started to realize that I wouldn’t be able to make more albums, if one of them doesn't eventually have some action. I felt like, I had lots of music I could do, so if I got an audience that was bigger, I could keep making more music. It was a crazy time in that it was very, very busy. The promo was just all the time. The talking, the meet and greets, the radio stations. You can’t imagine how much they’d booked in just every minute. That was pretty overwhelming for me. That show is right before Altered Beast came out, and the sheer amount of stuff I was required to do to promote it started getting overwhelming for me. It shows up in the sort of split personality stuff on the record, which I recognized and liked at the time. I wasn’t thinking about being palatable. I didn’t care if it could get on the radio or not, I just loved recording. I think in retrospect, I was lucky Altered Beast did as well as it did do, because it was regarded as a kind of difficult record.
As I started to promote Altered Beast, I started to have these mini nervous breakdowns around flying. It was so severe that my manager arranged it so that I didn’t have to fly for the rest of Altered Beast. I suffer from bipolar disorder, and back then, the signs were all around. Altered Beast to me is totally an album by a bipolar person, and the things I was going through were very common for a bipolar person. It just felt so precarious. You’re afraid of anything to change because you can only imagine things being worse. I didn’t understand what psych meds even were or that it wasn’t a drug you just take to numb your feelings. When I finally got treated in 2002, I learned that it doesn’t take away any feeling, it makes you able to feel everything and have well-being. Once I was treated, I thought, this is what it is, my god! If I’d known, I think I could have really benefited from it early on in my career. Instead, I was having incidents and was probably a nightmare to deal with for my management. The saving grace was more that at a basic level I’m not an angry or unhappy person. I probably was more so when I was younger because I wasn’t treated, and also, I was thinking about a lot of big issues. I was worried about dying more at 22 than I am at 59. There were fundamental things I had to get my head around. How do you have a relationship without being torpedoed by whatever issues each of you have.
Photo by Evan Carter
Another great thing about being treated is that it made me feel a lot less self-conscious on stage, and that made it able to open up more to the audience, to look at them, see them, and take in what they get from the music. That was amazing, to be able to see how much it meant to them. Having my life not be like it was in the very beginning with Girlfriend and Altered Beast, was a huge load off for me. It made my life more enjoyable. I always felt lucky do get to do what I do. I really felt thankful.
It’s so relatable to hear you talk so openly about your history of mental health, and how you’ve been lucky enough to be treated and take the steps to get better.
It's made me able to be a happy person in a way that I just never was. In the 90s there was so much taboo around, and there was a fear of the unknown around psych meds. If I had known that all they would do is make me feel like I had a chance, then I’d have started taking them right away, and I probably would have had more success just being able to do some superhuman promo. I look back, and I feel like I did pretty good. Two gold records in that time, and when I look back now, that’s a lot of people’s best moments in their careers, But it’s hard to realize at the time when its happening, like now the “in” thing is Limp Bizkit, and you’re not in the club anymore.
After I got treated, I started flying again, and they got me on a plane with Brian Wilson to do a tribute show for him at Radio City Music Hall.
You did “Sail on Sailor” with Darius Rucker.
That was great, I met Jeffrey Foskett at that time, and he was so influential in my life. He introduced me to Brian’s solo career along with David Leaf who was such a big fan of Girlfriend. Those people were so incredible and nice to me. When I was flying to the show, Brian’s daughters Carnie and Wendy [of Wilson-Phillips] came to check on me. When we were making Girlfriend, Wilson-Phillips was doing a signing at Tower Records and I stood in line to check it out. Little did I know that I’d be doing in-stores too.
Hearing you talk about your mental health and how you were able to see the other side of it, and then hearing you talk about Brian Wilson, I can’t help but think about the comparisons. You look at Brian’s fear of touring in the 1960’s and how his schizophrenia and mental health issues changed his entire life and trajectory. With Brian you had the mental and medical abuse from Eugene Landy, culminating with his late wife Melinda Ledbetter getting him the real treatment he needed. He went on to finish Smile and tour for over twenty-five years before his retirement. As a Brian Wilson obsessive, it’s easy to say he put out some of the best work of his career after he was treated.
I never felt a kinship that I had been through mental troubles like Brian’s, but I felt a kinship to his music. Once I had Pet Sounds, and I listened to that music, to me it was like nobody could ever be better than Brian. I went through what everybody does with Brian and had all the Pet Sounds and Smile recordings before that came out. It also reminds me a lot of Alex Chilton and Big Star. Once I heard those records, I loved them . Alex to me was a great example of a guy who was almost like the John Lennon of America. He could be sarcastic, weird, he could be loving, and he could be really melancholy. Those were all the things I wish could be in my music. Girlfriend was more well-rounded partly because of that. And with John Lennon, he could do “Julia” and he could do, “Christ you know it ain’t easy” [“The Ballad of John and Yoko."] There’s the breadth of viewpoints and they were very human. Even John’s weird stuff was about humanity. So, those were the people I idolized. Those guys were the guiding lights and the most you could hope for as a songwriter. But I’d never put myself in the same category with them as an artist.
Photo by Evan Carter
To me, and a lot of people, your music is in that category. It’s so great to have you back out there.
I really appreciate that, and I am grateful. And I do know how great it is to that fans that care about me are there. It allowed me to keep doing what I love to do, and actually go out and play it and see people who love it. Honestly, I’d be recording, even if those people weren't there, but it sure is nice to kind of have that. Affirmation from people you don't even know, right? And it helps me to understand kind of what happened, because that time in my life was a whirlwind. And I realized then that everything in rock music had been so recent, even though it felt like a million years since The Beatles or Brian Wilson. So, when I look back, I’m just amazed that I found any way in. That goes back to again, just feeling grateful. That’s all you can feel. You’re a singer who writes songs, and people like it enough you can tell they liked it. That’s the most you can dream because you very well might not have had it.
I was blasting “Evangeline” with the windows down driving down Ventura Blvd the other day, and it felt so good. It felt like this is the way this music should be heard.
I remember one time after Altered Beast came out, I was at a gas station in New Jersey and New Jersey was the only state that you still had to have an attendant pump your gas. I was getting my car filled and walked away from the pumps, and somebody drove in in a pickup truck and they had Altered Beast on so loud, like fuckin’ insane. They were playing “Knowing People” which is about that bipolar swing of hating everyone. I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I was hearing that; I couldn’t believe it was that loud, I couldn’t believe it was that song, and it was some person I dint even know. And that’s what it all felt like, it’s what Girlfriend felt like, like kind of a dream.
Will your current tour be extended? Los Angeles needs some Matthew Sweet shows.
I'm sure I will come out there and tour again, and I love California. In a perfect world where I had a billion dollars I would live there. We moved back to Nebraska because my wife and I both had lots of family here, and both our parents were still alive. It turned out to be a great decision because I got to know my parents better and spend a lot more time with them and be there for them when they were on the decline, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that in LA. I love anywhere I live because I’m a homebody, and I’m still a little bit of a recluse. I’m happy being home and on my own with things I like to do. That’s one of the things I thought maybe would go away when I got treated, but all that happened after I got treated was, I had the same things I liked or didn’t like, it was just that I didn’t feel bad about not doing something. So instead of feeling weird and terrible about myself for two days after I got to some party and didn’t go in, instead I was like, I just don’t want to go to a party.
There’s a lot of power in saying I’m not going to a party.
Now I just tell people I hate going out.
This interview had been edited from a longer discussion.
WXRT Live in Grant Park, Chicago IL July 4, 1993 is out now.
Follow Matthew Sweet here: https://www.matthewsweet.com/