Matthew E White: ‘My only goal was not to write bad songs’

Matthew E White can clearly remember the moment when he took stock of what had just happened to him. It was Christmas 2013 and he'd spent the previous year or so on the road touring with and talking up his debut album, Big Inner. The album had taken him from Richmond, Virginia, all around the world and back again.

Hanging out by himself in his parents’ house, with no shows on the horizon and recovering from a dose of shingles, he finally had time to think. “I just realised I hadn’t thought about what had happened in the previous 18 months. I went through each step and just couldn’t believe everything that had happened.

“I remember giving the album to Shawn Brackbill and he gave it to his wife Ashley, who works at Domino and that started all this. Having all these things occur because of the music you’ve made is so amazing. It was great to dwell on that for a while and be thankful for all that happened because you don’t usually get the time. It can be so hard to grasp the holistic part of that experience.”

As records go, Big Inner was quite the beast. A swaggering and swinging collection of rock, country and soul nuggets with a vintage buzz throughout, it was the first record to come out of the Spacebomb studio and label set-up that White and his friends had established in Richmond. It also became the record that put all involved in Spacebomb to the pin of their collar trying to keep up with the momentum it created.

"It was just growing and growing while I was on tour and we were trying to figure out how to stay on our feet," recalls White about that year. "I was incredibly hands-on with the process and that was the hardest part of touring. I didn't want to leave a group of friends back at home and a new business behind. Big Inner was made to facilitate a lot of people's success and give a lot of opportunities. I came out with a great record and everything started happening for me, but I didn't want to be the only one.

A bigger bomb

“Spacebomb was a huge responsibility and really, really stressful. It took a long time to get everything in place but we’ve finally grown into ourselves. When I think about going out on the road with the new record, the most exciting thing for me is that I won’t have to be constantly on email trying to figure out the administration side of running a record label. That was double-duty and it wasn’t easy.”

That new record is Fresh Blood, a step up and move on from his debut. The writing is sharper, the sounds are more nuanced and White sings with a new vigour in his timbre.

“I felt a lot more confident about writing and wanted to be a lot more aggressive and challenging with the songwriting, the lyrics, the forms and the melodies. I wanted it to be a bit more weighty, not necessarily the subject matter, although that was part of it. I wanted the songs to stand up by themselves.

"If I was to play several songs from Big Inner on the piano, they are very average and the production makes them something special. But all the songs on Fresh Blood, I could play them on the piano and they're definitely better."

Praise of songs

The art of making great records is something White can riff on for ages. He'll talk studios and microphones, players and vibes until the cows come home. He'll rave about how Marvin Gaye's What's Going On has "incredible production", but he'll also note that it had "incredible songs first and foremost".

"I like production, I like arrangements, I like studio stuff. But that stuff is there to support the song. Records are about songs and there's never been a bad record which had 10 good songs on it. That was something on my mind when I went into this one. The first seven songs I ever wrote are the seven songs on Big Inner. My only goal was not to write bad songs. I wanted them to not be aesthetically offensive and my production ideas and the process would make something special out of them. There's a lot of classic forms on it because if it's not broke, why fix it? Just use the classic forms and make sure the vocabulary and lyrics are strong.

"Big Inner isn't the best thing that's ever been made. There's vast amounts of improvement that could be done to that record and that's where we started off this time. We were trying to be honest about where we could get better and how we could tackle that."

One of the constants in White’s mind when he was making the record and working out the forms was Bob Dylan. “He might not be the first person who comes to mind when you hear the record, but I thought about him a lot. When he came out in the 1960s, he was a complete revivalist. There’s no other word for it. He was a throwback folk revivalist.

“But he made that vocabulary into something which was aggressively modern. No one would look at any of those Bob Dylan records and think they were anything but modern. Nothing says the mid-1960s like Dylan does. We don’t look back at him now as a revivalist, but as a forward-thinking songwriter. He took the truth out of those songs and forms and squeezed a language out of them that was completely his own.”

He may not be comparing himself to Dylan, but he sees the similarities in approach and execution. “I relate to that tremendously. I am a 32-year-old in 2015 and I don’t want to be anything else. I don’t want to be a throwback or a revivalist, but there is a vocabulary there which I love and which has room for development. I don’t think that branch is dead on the tree yet. You take those things that you love and you try to make something new, something better, out of them.”

Fresh Blood is out now on Domino