Matt Ellin
NAME: Matt Ellin
GENRE: Lo-Fi / Indie folk
SOUNDS LIKE: Magnetic Fields / Nana Grizol
LINKS: Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify, Facebook
Though Matt Ellin could be considered a relative newcomer to the music scene, he has been making music since he was 12 years old. He only seriously started creating music four years ago, yet already has two EPs out: “hey nice” released in 2015 and “Black Flag EP” released in February last year, as well as his first full length album, All is Not Lost (2017). Since high school, Ellin has been producing indie rock on his own terms, disregarding the rules of genres and creating music unique to himself. In All is Not Lost, Ellin's lyrics are especially gratifying as they strike a chord with the shifting dynamics in life that come with the end of adolescence and the beginning of college -- something particularly notable to this Tune-Jam writer and recent college student. Although it’s an interesting and exciting time, it can also be weird and lonely. In this album, Ellin accurately pinpoints the disorientation of going to a strange new place and leaving a part of yourself behind.
Even though Ellin’s tunes are notably relatable for the transition from youth to adulthood, the overall message and feelings he creates are universal. His sound definitely has elements characteristic of indie folk -- the background snare, the bells, the ethereal voices and floaty electric guitar slides. Ellin’s voice itself is low, casual and almost even croaky, in a good way. The songs he has constructed are musically refined, but he finds true success in the connection he makes with the listener. His words are full of little intimacies, youthful nostalgia, and inherent curiosity. Most of all, they resonate with people, especially with those who appreciate authenticity over everything else.
One of the first things that comes to mind when listening to his most recently released album All Is Not Lost is the uplifting tone, despite the overall wistfulness of the work. Perhaps reflective of the album title itself, it serves as a reminder that no matter how bad it gets there will always be things to hope for and reach towards.
In one of my favorite songs, “Even the Idiot”, he tenderly ends with, “And the touch of another human being, I don’t know what they mean. I don’t understand much but still, even the idiot dreams.” The lyric is both cynical yet gentle, representative of Ellin’s trend of hesitant optimism.
In his song “Friends” he sings, “I try to be friends with myself since it's good for my health. I try not to get stuck in my head,” illustrating a feeling deeply recognizable to anyone with anxieties. “It’s tough I suppose. I get caught in my clothes. I feel trapped in my body instead.”
Ellin creates these long-winding narratives that both subtly incorporate his own experiences, but also feel like they could be about anyone. The wordiness of his songs are characteristic of the genre, but their conversational quality is unique. His voice carries through each track while remaining soft, earnest, and hopeful.
In the interview below, I talked to Matt Ellin a bit about his musical origins, touring with Nana Grizol, and the inspiration for All is Not Lost.
LAUREN: First off, can I say that I absolutely just fell in love with your recent album! What was your mindset when you were going into and creating it?
ELLIN: I’ve been trying to record a full-length album pretty much since I started seriously writing songs about four years ago. I’ve always been kind of an album person in the sense that a really solid, cohesive collection of songs always appeals to me. That ultimately ended up stifling me a lot because every time I would set out to make a debut LP, I would get hung up on really minute things. I was always trying to make something that was sprawling and ambitious and perfect, like Pet Sounds (1966) or something, which was just not going to be a reality, so it was essentially just failure after failure for a while. Towards the end of last spring, I started getting into bands from the Drag City roster in the 90s, like Will Oldham and Bill Callahan and Silver Jews, and I liked the way that those people just sort of wrote good songs and recorded them and then called it a day. There didn’t seem to be an overwhelming amount of theatrics or studio perfectionism in the way they did it, and it still turned out great, so I decided that was the way I wanted to do my album, and also probably the only way I was going to be able to do it.
One of the things I’ve noticed about your songs is that the lyrics are so intimate and specific. What influences you the most when you’re writing music?
A lot of my lyrics come from pretty standard things that I hear people say, like figures of speech. I try to capture the way people actually talk in my lyrics, so as to make them believable. I think a lot about things that interest me, like music and movies and food and try to incorporate them somehow. One of my general rules with writing is that the more specific I am about kind of mundane things, the better. It’s about lending a conversational quality to the songs.
Nana Grizol is actually one of my favorite bands, what was it like playing with interesting people and other bands like them?
Nana Grizol are really, really nice people and also an incredible live band. It was a little strange meeting them and playing on a bill with them because to me, they’re like an old fabled legendary band. When I was like 12, my older sister came home from sleepaway camp and showed me them, Neutral Milk Hotel and a bunch of folk punk bands, and at the time I was probably pretty dismissive of it all because I was strictly into 80s Southern California punk, but even then Nana Grizol felt like this weird ghost band that could have easily been from an alternate dimension. When I listened to them, I sort of felt like I had just found their record covered in cobwebs underneath an old victorian bed. They don’t even really sound like that, but that’s how it felt at the time. I’ve been fortunate enough to play with a lot of other great bands that are also comprised of incredibly nice people, and here are just six of my favorites:
Listen to their music and book them!
What other bands do you draw inspiration from, sound-wise? Also, are there any poets, books, or writers that have impacted you?
Drag City like I said was pretty integral to this record, though my love affair with the tradition of the dry monotonous male lead vocal goes back to when I was maybe six, when my dad used to play mix CDs of what I’ll call “irony rock" in the car; Beck, Cake, Weezer, They Might Be Giants, etc. I think that stuff stuck with me for a good while, and then it kind of came full circle when I got older and started liking stuff like The Velvet Underground, The Magnetic Fields, The Modern Lovers and Pavement. Also, the more country moments on the record are especially influenced by Jason Molina. I was listening to a lot of Neil Young around the time of recording but I’m not sure if that shows much. I like poetry, and I write it, but my academic knowledge of famous poets starts and ends with the Beat Generation, which to me feels like a joke, though they’re big influences nonetheless. I used to be kind of interested in the internet alt-lit movement but the people involved with that are too cool and I can’t connect with what they write in any genuine way for that reason.
How did you start out making music, at what point in your life did you decide to seriously pursue it, and how do you balance it with the other aspects of your life?
I started teaching myself bass when I was 12 and then slowly began to learn guitar chords a year later. I was pretty dead-set on playing bass and singing in a band that sounded like Black Flag or Minor Threat, but I eventually realized that bands like that don’t exist anymore and also that I was a dork, so I got into indie rock and folk. From there I started to take writing lyrics really seriously, and I feel like that is kind of my main thing now. If I do balance music with other aspects of my life, I don’t think I do it all that well. It is under almost all circumstances the most important thing to me and if I’m unable to do it professionally (which is quite likely), I think I’ll be sad. I’m sure people who are close to me get irritated about how I have such a one-track mind concerning the possibility of a career in music, but I also think they’ve come to understand that it’s the way I am and that I’m probably not going to change in that respect.
What kind of gear do you use when you record?
My friend Daniel Neiman, who I co-produced and recorded the album with, used a variety of different mics. I remember a few Sennheisers and most notably a pair of AKG C1000’s, which we found could make pretty much any instrument sound good. We used a Korg Minilogue synth as well as a Microkorg, the latter of which was primarily used for organ sounds. We recorded and mixed in Ableton Live.
In this album, you talk about a myriad of topics like depression and loneliness and isolation. So why did you name this album “All Is Not Lost”?
The album itself, and maybe also music in general, represents kind of a glimmer of hope for me. In truth, it’s derived from a silly inside joke between Daniel and I that occurred during recording, but I decided I wanted to use it because it almost felt like a literal reminder to me that at least I had this. I like to think of it as sort of a triumphant declaration of victory from me to myself.
Do you have a favorite song or lyric you’ve written for this album, and what’s the background behind it?
I’m very happy with “While You’re Away”, the last song on the album and I believe the last one I wrote. It resonates with me I think because of all of the songs on the album, it is the most specific to the moment I wrote it. I was starting college in a matter of weeks and I knew that there were a lot of people I wouldn’t see for a while and certain aspects of myself that I would have to leave behind and I was bummed about it. Now I’m sort of settled in at school and I’m still bummed about it, albeit with a little more perspective, but I’m glad that song exists to sort of chronicle how I was feeling at the time.
Most interesting anecdote from the behind-the-scenes of the album?
Daniel and I are real goofsmiths, so naturally, we do spoofs and gags to keep ourselves from wanting to kill each other when we work together. During the making of the album, we arrived at the conclusion that intricate, quick-witted and elaborate spoofs are a thing of the past; now, it’s all about saying “poopy” and “poopy penis” and “poopy cum pagina” as gratuitously as possible. We are babies, and we live in a world of big people who hate us.
Finally, what is some general life advice you would tell anyone -- your motto, if you will?
Listen to my new album All Is Not Lost and pay me lots of money for it.
Listen to the All is Not Lost below.