This is getting weird. This is the second time I've had to write a story about Matthew Good with an interview gone seriously wrong.
The first time, he hung up on me after the first question: "Any bands you wanna slam?" I never tire of sharing that incident.
This time - pumping his show at Klondike Days tonight - we had a perfectly pleasant chat that mysteriously disappeared when I played the tape back. Coincidence, you say?
But it's not hard to write a story about Matthew Good even without actual quotes. He's a sharp guy and always has a lot to say about music, literature, philosophy, religion, politics and current events. It's a nice contrast to most rock-star interviews - who cares about your boring new album when there's a war on, eh?
Good has become a respected blogger - the Internet diaries that are so popular that even CNN does segments on them - and an Internet news commentator of Drudge-ian potential. He even published a book in 2001 called At Last, There is Nothing Left to Say. He puts in several hours of research and blogging per day and in fact might be perusing this very silly article you're reading right now. Hi, Matt!
Read his posts at www.matthewgood.org. One could fill space with excerpts, but that's hardly necessary. Plus his site seems to be having problems, which is also weird. I sense a conspiracy.
Anyway, I remember a good deal of what Good said, or at least the gist, which is really something since I can't even remember to plug in the damned tape recorder.
Since we saw him last, Good has a new song. He laughs at the notion it's a "Christmas song," but really, it's as close as it comes from Matt Good. Three reasons: There are only 150 shopping days till Christmas, the song is called Oh Be Joyful and its video is nothing but three minutes of burning logs in a fireplace.
"It's become really hard to one-up myself with every video," he says, "especially in Canada when you've got a $30,000 budget competing with American acts with budgets of half a million. So we said, why even try?"
You won't see the video on MuchMusic (the topic of a long rant). It's strictly an Internet thing (another rant). He says there's a copyright on Shaw Cable's burning Christmas log, so an original fire had to be filmed. You can even see a hand putting newspaper in at one point.
The lyrics are not all that cheery: "Here we go, pop your skull, off the air, lose control, get up and go, five fingers, one of them lets you know. Oh be joyful!"
While the title is taken from a term for bootleg liquor during the Civil War - like we didn't know that - the song is a slap at the increasingly slanted view of the world we all get from the mainstream media.
Good says he's particularly worried about the number of people who get their information from Fox News, and appalled at how quickly we forget the woes of the world, how TV news flits from one catastrophe to the next with little regard for what it all might mean or what can be done. Something like that. Live-8? Old news. Didn't do a thing. War in Iraq? Hardly rates a front page anymore.
He goes on for quite some time on this topic. I wish I could relate some choice quotes for you because they really were something. Next time.
Anyway, Oh Be Joyful will appear on Good's upcoming record, In a Coma: Matthew Good 1995-2005. It will contain greatest hits, both with band and solo, along with music videos and - here's something you don't see every day - nine new acoustic versions of his old songs in one continuous track. Download that, it seems to say.
As for his next solo album, I remember exactly what Good says, "I think it will be less accessible than anything I've done - way less accessible. I figure after all these years of doing it the record company way, it's time."
Admission to see Matthew Good is free with your gate admission to Klondike Days.
