Adam Matlock, a.k.a. An Historic, starts off “Nicer In This World” with a flourish from an electric piano before settling into a mellow groove like stripped-down Afropop. Then comes his voice, unfurling a set of lyrics shot through humor, sarcasm, and sincerity, all at once: “You’re starting to like all the time you spend out there in nature / digging a crater for all your friends and their intentions / Oh, did I mention? I’m starting to see you for what you are / I admire your clarity of vision / I get too distracted by something that isn’t a reasonable action / Pulled off the course but I made my way home by the light of your star.”
The New Haven-based Matlock has just released Thawing, an album years in the making that has nothing to do with the Covid-19 pandemic and at the same time is already looking a little beyond it.
“I’ve always had pretty lofty plans on paper and they don’t always come to fruition the way I expect them to,” Matlock said. “There’s a whole other set of songs that I intend to record with a band.” But “it just fell into place that I’d been wanting to do a separate record that was overdubbed, a studio experience, and this seemed like the best way to do that without a lot of time pressure.” By “the best way,” he meant “all by himself”; from the writing to the performing, recording, and mixing. It took eight years.
That might suggest that Matlock is a perfectionist, or that he may have suffered writer’s block, but the reality is that he’s a prolific writer and performer. As Matlock said, “another distraction comes up, or another project comes up.” Since his last full-length recording as An Historic — 2013’s Small Mercies — Matlock has produced 15 recordings under his own name and several others under a couple aliases. He has performed countless times, solo or with ensembles, in New Haven and elsewhere, most notably with experimental titan Anthony Braxton and jazz heavyweight Mario Pavone. He’s also a music teacher, at Hamden Hall, Foote School, and Neighborhood Music School. Part of the reason eight years went by was simply because he had other things to do.
The oldest song on the album is from 2012. Many of the others were written starting in 2015. “I have pages of journals with up to three different track lists,” Matlock said. “There have been lots of times when it just didn’t come together.” A handful of songs, however, were written in November and December of 2019, while he was recording the older material. Part of the long gestation had to do with Matlock “learning the tools a little better and learning myself as an arranger a little better too,” he said. “A huge part of getting the sound I wanted was about overdubbing a bass line that was actually funky.” How did he get those bass parts the way he wanted them? In part, by “listening to an absurd amount of Stevie Wonder, being the only person in the car,” he said. “Stevie Wonder did all that stuff with overdubs, but it still had that feel … the vibe is 100 percent there.”
Another part of it was about his desire to expand his abilities as a solo musician. “I had been more forgiving of mistakes in my solo records in the past that I should have been,” he said, with a sardonic, self-deprecating tone in his voice. He revisited his previous and the work of other solo artists, taking notes on some specific musical choices they made; sometimes it sounded to him as though “they made that choice because it was the only choice available to them. There’s still some of that” on Thawing, he said, “but not as much as there used to be, and I wanted to show that off a little bit.” Again, the same self-deprecating tone. “Honestly, the choices were made by what was nearest when inspiration struck” — whether a keyboard, or an accordion, or his own voice.
“With an album like this, the longer I work on it, the more temptation there is to ruin it with too much stuff,” he said. He seems to have resisted that temptation. The album’s opener, “Summing It All Up,” is a slinky jam powered by a simple drumbeat and pulsing bass, some spacious chords, and a cracking solo keyboard part.
“Counter-Clock,” meanwhile, eschews drums entirely and floats on pads of chords and a couple countering lines.
“The Woodcut,” one of Matlock’s poppiest songs, alternates between a sunny hook and Matlock’s singing, all powered, again, by a simple drumbeat and bass. Textures shift and change from song to song, yet feel of a piece; what pulls it all together is Matlock’s voice, confident yet exposed, and the lyrics, always full of knotty phrases and linguistic surprises that catch the ear and reward close listening. Matlock has the ability to write small personal stories against epic backdrops, observant, funny, and emotional. “Land we’re told had stopped existing, gaping holes on every map,” Matlock sings on “Last Contact.” “You drag him by the wrist before he falls to the attack.” Elliptically, it conjures a sweeping story of adventure and loss. Then, “it would help if someday you were wrong,” he says over and over at the end of “Makes Me Right,” the repetition building a sense of self-righteous hurt, until he delivers a self-deflating stinger — “but would that make me right?”
In a way, the album came together the way it should. Some songs, Matlock has been performing for years. But “there were new songs written specifically for this album that I’d never played live before,” he said. Some songs were built on musical hooks, in “that ‘80s way,” Matlock said. “The type of songwriting dictated the arrangement.” But even more generally, Matlock over the years settled on a sound that felt unified yet flexible. “There was a nine-song draft of an album that I recorded on four-track in 2015, and that was many of the same songs that are included here, but the limitations of a four-track meant they had the same sound to them.”
He wanted a broader musical palette, but one that still felt cohesive. “When I’m thinking of electronic projects, I like certain types of sounds,” he said. “Plucked sounds, or soft attack sounds.” But he also liked “the feeling of too much happening in one place and the auditory illusions that come with that,” he said. “What matches not just in terms in EQ, but how the sounds work with one another.”
And for all the gestation, it did come together in a final flurry of activity. “I can’t stress enough that some songs were written in the studio,” Matlock said. “I wrote five songs for this record that were written at the point when I started recording” in November. “There was a good two weeks or so where I carried a lyric notebook with me everywhere and tried to get stuff down that would match the existing songs.” That meant, in time, finding a narrative thread that ran through them all — as Matlock wrote in an accompanying note to the album, “about feeling crushes and digging your hands in the dirt and strange beauty everywhere.”
Slow Down
“It doesn’t have anything to do with Covid-19,” Matlock said of Thawing. “I haven’t processed it for myself.”
But in a broader sense, the same mentality of patiently taking years to find the bigger picture to finish Thawing lets Matlock look past the frightening headlines. Matlock still has work at all three schools he works at — Hamden Hall, Foote, and NMS. He lost some students along the way, seeing that the “bandwidth” of families for regular music lessons wasn’t there “even when the intention has been good.” The shutdown was implemented as Hamden Hall was on its spring break, and what could have been a vacation was instead a scramble to switch to distance learning for the rest of the year.
“What this has put into stark relief is the existing inequalities,” Matlock said. Even those not directly affected by sickness have seen their fortunes change — though some have not. And for some, their lives were so precarious to begin with that “to some degree, it’s not all that different.”
“It’s been hard to think about how we can try to be hopeful in rebuilding from a situation like this,” he said, because of the immediate threat, and the fact that the pandemic is far from over. “Every time you have to look at things systemically, you can sound passive or cold about it,” he said. “It’s really easy to sound like a complete jerk.”
But he does find himself thinking more broadly all the same. He thinks about how the difficulties of making money from creative work during the pandemic are only marginally different than they were before the pandemic began. He thinks about the restaurants that he wants to see survive, and the stress they are under — even as he knows the restaurant industry before the pandemic was “grueling.”
He thinks more generally about the way, for many people, the stress of life before the pandemic and the stress of life during it has kept them on high alert — before, people had to run ragged and now they have to stay put, but in both cases it was a matter of survival. “One of the things that hopefully will come out of this is the realization that a certain level of stress is not really good for the human condition,” he said.
“It’s not necessary for us to be stressed for the sake of productivity,” he said. “I don’t think people always make their best work in high-stress situations and don’t always make the best decisions.”
And then, just like his songs swiftly switch focus from the global perspective to the personal, just like they mix humor and emotion, he said: “I miss donuts. I miss not having to think about whether it’s a good idea to get them.”