My friend Matthew Connor released his new single last week and it’s so good I’m upset. I described it on IG as:
and idk if that quite does it the justice it deserves but I stand by it.
I was humming it last night brushing my teeth, and again in the shower this morning, and thinking about how good and interesting and different his music and lyrics are – he has a really singular, strong POV as an artist; he comes at moods and emotions and scenes from odd and compelling angles, which makes his music unlike almost everything else out there. Which is a difficult thing to do.
I’m not a writer who has, like, amazing sentences. (SEE?) I think I’m pretty good (or at least improving) at stringing a story together. I’m good at capturing voice. I write pretty good dialogue (never in my life as good as Josh Allen but whatever), and I think I’m pretty decent at pulling different threads from pop & tech culture and weaving them into a map for where things are headed and what they might mean.
But I’m aware that I lack a layer of artistry when it comes to sentence-building. My process is pretty work-person-like (I’m very unromantic when it comes to the job of writing), and part of it is the very public first draft-y nature of what I do, where the point is to keep moving forward and get to the end. So maybe it’s a thing that comes with successive edits as you rethink scenes from different angles, but the ability to create lines that make you sit up in bed, that you you want to quote and share with people, that become these sort of bookmarks in your life for moments when you suddenly felt things differently, is not super accessible to me. I want it to be and maybe it will be at some point, who knows. Not saying this to have people reassure me, I wouldn’t do what I do if I wasn’t stubbornly optimistic about my ability to do to it. Just thinking about where I’ve come from, where I’m going.
My main point was just that Matthew’s abilities & vision are really inspiring to me and his new song is fucking killer and I hope people listen to it.