'I don't like fame': Matthew Good is making music for himself, not to become a celebrity
CBC Music | Posted: February 26, 2020 8:57 PM | Last Updated: February 26, 2020
The Canadian musician, who found success in the ‘90s, grapples with making music in today’s landscape
Matthew Good's latest album is called Moving Walls, a title that is supposed to be a metaphor for "emotional displacement," as the Vancouver-based musician explained to CBC Music. But, it can easily reflect lots of shifts in the musician's life and in the industry he occupies.
Right before he started writing this album, Good moved home to live with his parents in the aftermath of his divorce. In addition to that, Good's been lending a helping hand to his mother because his father suffers from dementia and has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But moving around is also a foundational part of his life as a touring musician as he notes: "You get used to being able to get out of town pretty quick."
Stability comes with "great difficulty," Good admits, but it was at his parents' home that he began shaping his ninth solo album. Moving Walls attempts to find the "beauty in the struggle," as he sings on the ballad, "Beauty." A largely acoustic album, filled out and brightened with orchestral and horn flourishes, Good sounds simultaneously weary and hopeful. On that same track, though, he reminds himself that nothing — good or bad — is permanent, and that we just have to "keep on moving."
As an artist who found success in Canada's '90s rock boom, Good is now grappling with a seismic change in the music industry as well. Streaming, virality and open discussions surrounding artists' mental health (Good was diagnosed as bipolar in 2007) has created a very different playing field for the singer-songwriter who admittedly finds parts of it frustrating to navigate. Whether he's calling out the emptiness of gestures from big corporations pledging to remove the stigma around mental health or fighting through a saturated market of "watered-down new music," Good is not sure how to release music in this new landscape — or if he wants to at all.
"I make art all the time, it's something I'd do even if I didn't do it professionally," he says. "That's something I've thought of doing, just quitting and doing it for myself."
Good goes on to compare the unfairness of the new streaming model to being a contractor: "Imagine a contractor gives you $150,000 to build a house, but now someone pays you $7.99 a month to build it. That's ridiculous, but for some reason in my profession that's completely warranted. I don't get it. At some point you're just like, why does this have to be a consumer product? I'll just do it by myself and a lot of my friends will listen to it, and I'll be a greeter at Walmart."
Virality, which has launched stars overnight, is another thing that Good wants nothing to do with. Tangentially, this kind of stardom also comes with immediate fame, and Good's past experiences with rising celebrity status led to him "sabotaging" his success in the U.S.
"Why the hell would I want to be famous in another country when I'm at home and I leave my apartment just to find some girl is stalking me or I walk down the street and a guy runs across the street to get an autograph," he remembers. "I don't like fame, I despise it. The entire American game… I wasn't willing to play that game."
Ultimately, Good's goals have remained the same for the past three decades, and wading through "a lot of crap in the way" is an occupational hazard he continues to clash up against. What matters most is a phrase he repeated a lot throughout the interview and something he intends on doing whether he's a full-time musician or not: "All I do is make art."