Results tagged “matttheelectrician”

For maybe four years running—until I got overwhelmed with being so popular and having too much work— I think I could count on my nipples the number of times I missed the regular Wednesday night gig Matt the Electrician plays with Southpaw Jones, a running residency going on something like seven years now (and currently held at Flipnotics on Barton Springs Rd). I never, ever, ever get tired of hearing either M or SP play. And I’m so happy to tell you that this week Matt’s sending a new record out into the world, Animal Boy, with an official CD release party Friday, October 9th, at the Cactus Café. The disc is pure brilliance from the rich horns that open the first song— and you have to have cojones muy grande to open with a cover of Journey’s Faithfully and pull it off the way Matt does—right on through to the end. Matt somehow manages to consistently spin the equivalent of a multi-plot novel in four minutes or less, and he can rhyme and sing while he’s doing it. The imagery in his songwriting is nothing short of cinematic so that you find yourself in each song, interacting with the cast of characters that inhabit his tales: a naked valedictorian at graduation, an arrogant leash-loathing dog owner, giddy girls on bicycles in Osaka in the rain, an underpaid yet terribly kind Walmart employee saving the day, a truck driver peeing into a Gatorade bottle. In Animal Boy (the song) we get a spectacular view of a child looking back at some of the curious rules and choices offered by the grownups at dinnertime.

I first saw Southpaw Jones back in ’04 when he was playing in the tin roofed barn behind the original Moxie and the Compound. The very first song I ever heard him sing was The Cruelty of Teenage Girls, and in that moment my life radically and permanently changed for the much, much better. And I’m not even saying that because I read a recent article in Wired telling me that hyperbole is the path to more page views. I’m saying it because, thanks to Southpaw Jones, I got my picture in the New York Times, I was afforded the privilege of home ownership, I collect royalty checks for decent sums of money, and—I am not shitting you—I regained the ability to walk again.