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Matthew Good's Blank Slate

The singer-songwriter dropped a lot of baggage to make new album.

Alex Hudson 2 Jun 2011TheTyee.ca

Alex Hudson writes for various music publications and runs a blog called Chipped Hip.

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Matthew Good -- finally off the endangered species list.

He's one of the most successful Canadian rockers of the last 15 years, but popularity has not been easy for Matthew Good. He's warred with the press, battled anxiety and bipolar disorder, and spent time in a psychiatric ward following an overdose of pills in 2006. This has made him a notoriously prickly public figure -- a Google search of the words "Matthew Good" and "asshole" returns 69,700 hits (as of press time). Going into the recording of his fifth solo album, however, the veteran songwriter found himself suddenly unencumbered by personal baggage.

"It doesn't have the tension in it that a lot of my other work does," the singer says of Lights of Endangered Species, which came out on Tuesday, May 31 through Universal. "I was able to sit back and really focus."

Speaking with The Tyee on the phone from his Maple Ridge home, Good sounds relaxed and friendly. He's talkative and opinionated, but by no means an asshole. He traces the new album's genesis back 14 years, to a conversation he had with long-time producer Warne Livesey.

"We were walking from his home -- he lived right on the Thames, and we were walking to Kingston, in England -- and we started talking about making a record that let us do whatever the hell we wanted to," he recalls. "We never got the chance to do it. Always something came up. I was always personally affected by situations that were going on."

In finally fulfilling their vision, Good and his producer created an album that's expansive and diverse, bearing few traces of the fiery alt-rock sound that won over so many fans back in the '90s. "There's horns all over the bloody place," the songwriter says with a laugh. "And woodwinds. It's nowhere near as sonically dense as anything I've done in the past."

Listeners can hear evidence of this new approach on the stand-out "How It Goes," a sombre ballad swathed in a fluttering blanket of flutes. Even more striking is "Zero Orchestra," which is carried by its blaring big band horns and Good's sinister promise that, "In hell we will all burn brightly."

Of his spacious new sound, the songwriter observes, "This record's not a very commercially viable album, that's for sure. I told that to Universal when I gave it to them. I basically said you guys are going to be fucked, hard-pressed to sell this."

Sure enough, there's a notable lack of singalong choruses and MuchMusic-ready hooks on Lights of Endangered Species. Casual listeners aren't likely to latch onto a track like "Non Populus," a sprawling piano dirge that clocks in at more than eight minutes. It's a bold move for a musician signed to a major label to shun mainstream accessibility, but Good isn't afraid to venture into unfamiliar stylistic territory.

"You learn, and you grow, and you refine," he says. "That's an intrinsic part of being an artist. If you stand still, anything you do creatively becomes irrelevant."

Certainly, it doesn't look like Good will be stagnating anytime soon. When queried about his future plans, he enthusiastically describes his plan to cut a new album while traveling across Canada. "I'm going to throw my band and Warne and a bunch of recording gear on a bus, and start on the east coast and spend two days in Halifax and record one song there," he says. "And then drive somewhere else, like Quebec City, and spend two days in a studio and record one song there. And go all the way across the country."

The album will be called Transnational. And as he muses about which cities he should use as recording destinations, Good is characteristically eager to defy expectations. "Not Toronto, because it's a little too obvious," he scoffs, "but maybe Peterborough or something."  [Tyee]

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