Sweet’s past shines light on ‘Tomorrow’
There’s one old girlfriend that Matthew Sweet can never break up with. No matter how good his new albums are — and the latest, “Tomorrow Forever,” is good indeed — they all tend to get overshadowed in his catalog by “Girlfriend,” his 1991 breakthrough, a watershed album for power pop.
“I totally understand that,” he said by phone this week. “I’ve never been the kind of artist who says, ‘I’m so sick of that song’ or ‘I wish people would stop talking about “Girlfriend.”’ I understand how it struck a chord with people emotionally at the time. Young people were just getting into serious relationships at that point in their lives, just as I was in mine. So it was flattering to know how much it meant to people.”
There will indeed be some “Girlfriend” songs in the set when Sweet hits the Brighton Music Hall tomorrow, though he’s not reviving the whole album as he did in 2013. (He says its follow-up, “Altered Beast,” is getting more play this time around.) For pop aficionados, the stage will be full of familiar faces: Sweet’s new guitarist is Jason Victor from the recently reunited Dream Syndicate; bassist Paul Chastain and drummer Ric Menck both hail from the beloved Providence band Velvet Crush. Tommy Keene, no slouch of a cult hero himself, opens the show.
The new album is Sweet’s first original album in six years, his longest one ever and his first to be fanfunded via Kickstarter. Instead of writing for deadline, he stockpiled songs over time, came up with more than three dozen and picked the best 17 for the album. (Fans who supported him on Kickstarter received a bonus disc with the overflow.)
“I was concerned because there was so much material, so I recruited some friends to listen to all 38 songs and make me a list of their favorites. It turned out that everybody agreed on the top 10. My mother passed away right after the Kickstarter campaign, so that slowed me down for awhile. And once I got back to work, I decided not to work on the moodier songs right away. It got more upbeat because I had moved back to Nebraska, where I grew up. That started me to channel the feelings I had back as a teenager, when I first started playing electric guitar.”
With its mix of snarling rockers, soaring ballads and ’60s roots, “Tomorrow Forever” is easily pegged as a Matthew Sweet album.
“I’m always going to sound like me,” he said. “I don’t jump on styles or try to re-create what kind of artist I am. I never feel that I have much control over what an album turns out to be; the whole process for me is a mysterious one. I feel that the music comes from a spot in the universe that I just try to channel.”
Matthew Sweet, with Tommy Keene, at Brighton Music Hall, tomorrow. Tickets: $20; ticketmaster.com.