He’s an example of the many artists across the fields — poetry, the short story, jazz, etc — doing strong\u00a0work without nearly enough attention.<\/p>\n
By an odd coincidence, Keating<\/a> Tell us a little about your songwriting. How do you approach it, who are some of your model\/inspirations, and how do you know when you are done?<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n I try to follow the old Picasso quote, \u201cInspiration exists, but it has to find you working\u201d and so I really devote some part of every day to \u201cwriting\u201d just to keep me in the game. With that said, my best songs come when I\u2019m not working and usually when I should be somewhere else. The good ones come when I\u2019m late for some very \u201cimportant\u201d meeting or something and should have been out the door 10 minutes before and have to leave \u201cright now\u201d\u2026it just keeps inching out and making me later. My muse is high maintenance that way. When I write a song from that space it\u2019s clear when the song is done because it\u2019s writing itself. The other ones can take years. I read somewhere that Dylan said he writes a song a day because that improves his odds of writing good ones. There was a time I did that but since becoming a father it\u2019s more like 1 a week.<\/p>\n Most of your music sounds to me like \u201cclassical\u201d songcraft, not because it resembles Brahms but because you\u2019re very grounded in pop history \u2013 Beatles, Byrds, Big Star and so on. What are some songs by others that you consider perfect or close to it \u2013 tunes you wish you\u2019d written?<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n There are so many perfect songs out there I wouldn\u2019t even know where to begin. A really good \u201cstory\u201d song like Pancho and Lefty by Townes Van Zandt usually is enough to humble me real good. It\u2019s usually a lyric like that or a classic tune like \u201cKing of the Road\u201d by Roger Miller that shows me what a real standard is. I don\u2019t thing songwriting can be judged like sports\u2014that there\u2019s some \u201cperfect score\u201d you can get on an objective range. There\u2019s an effortlessness to perfect songs that can\u2019t be achieved usually through traditional \u201chard work\u201d. I think it\u2019s more like there\u2019s a \u201czone\u201d certain songwriters get in where they can access all the songs that have already been written in some Platonic song world. I love the story of how Lennon\/McCartney initially didn\u2019t believe you could buy or sell the rights to a song. They felt that songs came from the air and that you couldn\u2019t really own them in the way the Native Americans who sold Manhattan for $26 thought the idea of land ownership was ridiculous. They all found out the hard way how na\u00efve they were, though I do believe that naivete is somehow connected to the ability to access the song. I really don\u2019t wish I\u2019d written songs by other people\u2026I\u2019m satisfied with the ones I\u2019ve been blessed to access. Your new album, The Perfect Crime, came out in February. (iTunes has it listed as \u201cAmericana.\u201d) What were you aiming for with this one, and did you think of it as a change of course at all?<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n Ha. That\u2019s funny because the Orchard who are distributing it first told me I could have two genres but then told me it was only one. I initially put singer\/songwriter I think because I don\u2019t really think of that as a \u201cgenre\u201d per se\u2026I mean, even Ozzy Osborne is a singer\/songwriter by strict definition. But then I realized that things are so divided by genre now that though I don\u2019t necessarily think of myself as Americana, that\u2019s probably what it sounds like to most uninformed music listeners. I have to admit I come at \u201cAmerican music\u201d by way of English bands like the Beatles and so it\u2019s not really just American. Though I am American and when I\u2019m touring in Europe I can feel a twang in what I do that\u2019s not present over there.<\/p>\n I also have to admit that my only goal in making a record is to include only recordings of songs that have at one point made me feel happy and proud to have made them. I can even change my mind and hate a song eventually, but if there was once a strong feeling that I \u201cgot it\u201d then I stick with it. Then I weed it down to the ones of those that other people tend to like. Then I try to put them in some kind of order that tells some kind of musical or lyrical story and feels like some kind of journey. This one took a long time, mostly of just leaving it alone, and letting the cream rise to the top.<\/p>\n The indie-rock and record-industry worlds have changed enormously since you started recording in the early \u201890s. Is there a clear and succinct way to make sense of what\u2019s happened to people like you in the ensuing years?<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n I think most of the people who try to cash in on a trend drop away when it becomes clear there\u2019s gonna be no real payday. Then there are those of us who feel a life mission to find these songs in the ether and share them with the world, even if that world is only a few hundred or thousand hard core fans and listeners. I mean, in the words of Dr. Seuss in Horton Hears A Who<\/em>: \u201dA person\u2019s a person, no matter how small.\u201d I think that extends to fan bases too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [contextly_auto_sidebar id=”EdVjbY1oGn33X3u5XD2sNfMAvy9nGcGd”] HERE at CultureCrash, we’ve been admirers of Matt Keating’s music since we saw him play at a barbecue at South by Southwest in the ’90s. I’m especially fond of his music from that period — the Candy Valentine EP is an essential document that I don’t think could be improved — but he’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[66,174,40,58],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-alt-country","8":"category-desert","9":"category-indie","10":"category-music","11":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3183"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3188,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions\/3188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"summer-tonight-cd-cover-200-150x150\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/summer-tonight-cd-cover-200-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a> and I were in California’s high desert — Gram Parsons country — at the same time about a week ago and met at Pappy and Harriet’s for a few beers and bottles of sarsaparilla.\u00a0I tossed the New York-based Keating some questions about his work — I urge fans of indie rock, alt-country and the post-Dylan singer-songwriter tradition\u00a0to check out his work.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n