Matthew Perryman Jones
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Matthew Perryman Jones

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"Matthew Perryman Jones embraces a genuinesadness on his latest album"

Matthew Perryman Jones admits there is a danger in being the artist frequently discovered through song placements in television shows and movies.
Over the course of his last two albums, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s introspective tunes have underscored key moments on shows such as “Private Practice,” “One Tree Hill,” “Bones” and “Pretty Little Liars.” Earlier this year, his song, “Waiting for the Light to Change,” was part of the soundtrack for the film “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”
But as he began to think about making a new album, Jones noted such exposure, while gratifying, had an unsettling effect.
“Whatever form of success you find or when you see something that works, there’s a subconscious thing where I think I should just keep doing that and how do I recreate that,” he says. “When you’re really self-conscious of your work — and that’s not to be confused with self-awareness and what’s going on with you — that’s a really bad thing. I think self-consciousness is the death of a good piece of art.”
And so for his new album, “Land of the Living,” Jones, a Levittown, Pa., native who left the area with his family for Atlanta at age 11, returned to pure instinct, and the honest, heartfelt songs he’d been drawn to since the start of his career.
He even left Nashville, where he’s lived for the last 13 years and is part of the Ten Out of Tenn singer-songwriter collective, to record the project in a studio in an old Amish barn on a 20-acre ranch in Round Top, Texas.
There, he spent eight days recording the album live with a band and his good friend and producer Cason Cooley — while they traded stories of their encounters with the female ghost who was said to haunt the property.
“I wanted to leave what was familiar and I also wanted to put myself in an environment that was creative and inspiring and also where we could be creative and inspired around the clock,” says Jones, who, as a married father of three, does not have that luxury when working in Nashville. “Our mantra was, ‘We’re not tracking songs. We’re making a record.’ I wanted to make an old-fashioned thing that was going to have an arc and you’d have to hear the whole piece to get it.’ ”
But by the time the album’s May 29 issue date was in sight, Jones had revealed so much of himself, and his struggles, in the pensive, lavishly rendered collection of songs that he almost dreaded its release.
“I felt very, very insecure releasing this record, almost sick to my stomach. It felt very intimate and vulnerable because I’d created these songs that are from a really personal spot,” says Jones, who performs Thursday at World Café Live in Philadelphia. “When it went out, I was almost living in a panic attack for the first couple of weeks.”
Ultimately, the risks he took to not only jettison any thoughts of a potential audience — “I had these critics and scenesters in my head telling me what was relevant that I’d literally have to fight, sometimes even yelling out against them,” he says — but to chronicle his journey through grief with both profound insight and raw emotion affirmed his return to his own artistic truth.
“Land of the Living,” the follow-up to Jones’ 2008 album “Swallow the Sea,” was written after the death of his father, who succumbed to a long battle with frontal lobe dementia, in 2009.
“I had a close personal relationship with my father, and after he died, I went through my own personal stuff with that,” he says. “I really wanted this record to be basically pulling out all of that and working through it. A lot of my writing, when I was really just wanting to write, that was what was coming out.”
From stumbling through the early chaos of grief and resisting its force to fighting the memories that both sear and speak of love, Jones writes with an elegiac poetry, and striking imagery, of emerging from a lonely and fearful darkness to shake off the illusion that he can control his suffering.
As the songs build toward catharsis, and he allows himself permission to grieve and say goodbye — closing tracks “The Angels Were Singing” and “Land of the Living” poignantly capture that sense of healing and renewal — Jones alternates between ballads of meditative plangency and driving, impassioned rock songs.
“I kind of surprised myself a little bit,” he says of the album’s sweeping textures. “I went into it wanting to do a really stripped-down acousticy kind of record. I wanted it to be this sort of intimate record, but as I wrote, I felt like the songs really were more grand and needed a landscape that was a bit bigger than a guitar and a couple of light arrangements. It became something more cinematic and grand.”
Fueling the melodies and lyrics was the concept of “Duende,” initially espoused by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca as an unvarnished authenticity in art and later the subject of a lecture by Australian rocker Nick Cave, who referred to the concept as a “restless and quivering” sadness of the soul that seeps - PhillyBurbs.com


"Matthew Perryman Jones embraces a genuinesadness on his latest album"

Matthew Perryman Jones admits there is a danger in being the artist frequently discovered through song placements in television shows and movies.
Over the course of his last two albums, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s introspective tunes have underscored key moments on shows such as “Private Practice,” “One Tree Hill,” “Bones” and “Pretty Little Liars.” Earlier this year, his song, “Waiting for the Light to Change,” was part of the soundtrack for the film “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”
But as he began to think about making a new album, Jones noted such exposure, while gratifying, had an unsettling effect.
“Whatever form of success you find or when you see something that works, there’s a subconscious thing where I think I should just keep doing that and how do I recreate that,” he says. “When you’re really self-conscious of your work — and that’s not to be confused with self-awareness and what’s going on with you — that’s a really bad thing. I think self-consciousness is the death of a good piece of art.”
And so for his new album, “Land of the Living,” Jones, a Levittown, Pa., native who left the area with his family for Atlanta at age 11, returned to pure instinct, and the honest, heartfelt songs he’d been drawn to since the start of his career.
He even left Nashville, where he’s lived for the last 13 years and is part of the Ten Out of Tenn singer-songwriter collective, to record the project in a studio in an old Amish barn on a 20-acre ranch in Round Top, Texas.
There, he spent eight days recording the album live with a band and his good friend and producer Cason Cooley — while they traded stories of their encounters with the female ghost who was said to haunt the property.
“I wanted to leave what was familiar and I also wanted to put myself in an environment that was creative and inspiring and also where we could be creative and inspired around the clock,” says Jones, who, as a married father of three, does not have that luxury when working in Nashville. “Our mantra was, ‘We’re not tracking songs. We’re making a record.’ I wanted to make an old-fashioned thing that was going to have an arc and you’d have to hear the whole piece to get it.’ ”
But by the time the album’s May 29 issue date was in sight, Jones had revealed so much of himself, and his struggles, in the pensive, lavishly rendered collection of songs that he almost dreaded its release.
“I felt very, very insecure releasing this record, almost sick to my stomach. It felt very intimate and vulnerable because I’d created these songs that are from a really personal spot,” says Jones, who performs Thursday at World Café Live in Philadelphia. “When it went out, I was almost living in a panic attack for the first couple of weeks.”
Ultimately, the risks he took to not only jettison any thoughts of a potential audience — “I had these critics and scenesters in my head telling me what was relevant that I’d literally have to fight, sometimes even yelling out against them,” he says — but to chronicle his journey through grief with both profound insight and raw emotion affirmed his return to his own artistic truth.
“Land of the Living,” the follow-up to Jones’ 2008 album “Swallow the Sea,” was written after the death of his father, who succumbed to a long battle with frontal lobe dementia, in 2009.
“I had a close personal relationship with my father, and after he died, I went through my own personal stuff with that,” he says. “I really wanted this record to be basically pulling out all of that and working through it. A lot of my writing, when I was really just wanting to write, that was what was coming out.”
From stumbling through the early chaos of grief and resisting its force to fighting the memories that both sear and speak of love, Jones writes with an elegiac poetry, and striking imagery, of emerging from a lonely and fearful darkness to shake off the illusion that he can control his suffering.
As the songs build toward catharsis, and he allows himself permission to grieve and say goodbye — closing tracks “The Angels Were Singing” and “Land of the Living” poignantly capture that sense of healing and renewal — Jones alternates between ballads of meditative plangency and driving, impassioned rock songs.
“I kind of surprised myself a little bit,” he says of the album’s sweeping textures. “I went into it wanting to do a really stripped-down acousticy kind of record. I wanted it to be this sort of intimate record, but as I wrote, I felt like the songs really were more grand and needed a landscape that was a bit bigger than a guitar and a couple of light arrangements. It became something more cinematic and grand.”
Fueling the melodies and lyrics was the concept of “Duende,” initially espoused by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca as an unvarnished authenticity in art and later the subject of a lecture by Australian rocker Nick Cave, who referred to the concept as a “restless and quivering” sadness of the soul that seeps - PhillyBurbs.com


"Songwriter Of The Week"

Matthew Perryman Jones gets metaphysical in our latest Writer Of The Week interview, in which the Nashville-based singer-songwriter discusses his new album, Land Of The Living, which was funded by fans, his approach to songwriting and more. “I wanted this record to be unabashedly human,” says Jones. Mission accomplished.

How did Land of the Living come together?

I worked on this record with my good friend Cason Cooley (producer). We had talked about making a record together for years. It was good to finally work together. We pulled together a few other friends to play on the record and went out to Round Top, Texas to record it. There’s a studio a friend of ours works at on a 20 acre ranch. It’s in the middle of nowhere. The studio is an old Amish barn that was built in the 1700's. The environment is incredibly inspiring, and haunted. At least 4 of us had ghost encounters while we were there. We spent 8 days there tracking the record live with the band. There was no time to over-think anything. We basically had to trust our instincts and go with it. I think we captured something really special.

How would you describe the album?

This record deals a lot with grief. I lost my father three years ago and so that couldn’t help but find it’s way into this record. I wanted this record to be unabashedly human. I found myself constantly fighting off the internal critics and hipsters who would try to instruct me on what was cool and relevant. At times during the writing process I would audibly yell at these imaginary people. While writing for this record I discovered the writings of Federico Garcia Lorca and the idea of “duende.” I stumbled upon this excerpt from a lecture Nick Cave gave on “Duende” [Vienna, 1999]. It really affirmed how I was approaching this record and gave me confidence to stay the course. I think it sums up what I would hope to say about this record:

“In his brilliant lecture entitled “The Theory and Function of Duende” Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. “All that has dark sound has duende”, he says, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.” In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friends the Dirty Three have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.” All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil – the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here – so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.”

Who are your songwriting heroes?

Peter Gabriel, Leonard Cohen, Emmylou Harris (Red Dirt Girl is a goldmine), Rufus Wainwright and Patty Griffin are all top tier for me.

When did you start writing songs? Were they good right away, or did that come later?

I started writing in high school. I played guitar in a band called This Island Earth and ended up being the lead singer. At that point I started writing for the band. Honestly, it wasn’t terrible, nor was it particularly good, but it seemed like there was something there to work with. in my early 20's I got more into folk music and started focusing a lot on the lyric. However, looking back, those songs were too much. I was trying to write novels into songs. Around 2000 I was listening to bands like Travis who really inspired me with melody. At that point I really started focusing on writing a good mel - American Songwriter


"Songwriter Of The Week"

Matthew Perryman Jones gets metaphysical in our latest Writer Of The Week interview, in which the Nashville-based singer-songwriter discusses his new album, Land Of The Living, which was funded by fans, his approach to songwriting and more. “I wanted this record to be unabashedly human,” says Jones. Mission accomplished.

How did Land of the Living come together?

I worked on this record with my good friend Cason Cooley (producer). We had talked about making a record together for years. It was good to finally work together. We pulled together a few other friends to play on the record and went out to Round Top, Texas to record it. There’s a studio a friend of ours works at on a 20 acre ranch. It’s in the middle of nowhere. The studio is an old Amish barn that was built in the 1700's. The environment is incredibly inspiring, and haunted. At least 4 of us had ghost encounters while we were there. We spent 8 days there tracking the record live with the band. There was no time to over-think anything. We basically had to trust our instincts and go with it. I think we captured something really special.

How would you describe the album?

This record deals a lot with grief. I lost my father three years ago and so that couldn’t help but find it’s way into this record. I wanted this record to be unabashedly human. I found myself constantly fighting off the internal critics and hipsters who would try to instruct me on what was cool and relevant. At times during the writing process I would audibly yell at these imaginary people. While writing for this record I discovered the writings of Federico Garcia Lorca and the idea of “duende.” I stumbled upon this excerpt from a lecture Nick Cave gave on “Duende” [Vienna, 1999]. It really affirmed how I was approaching this record and gave me confidence to stay the course. I think it sums up what I would hope to say about this record:

“In his brilliant lecture entitled “The Theory and Function of Duende” Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. “All that has dark sound has duende”, he says, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.” In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friends the Dirty Three have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.” All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil – the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here – so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.”

Who are your songwriting heroes?

Peter Gabriel, Leonard Cohen, Emmylou Harris (Red Dirt Girl is a goldmine), Rufus Wainwright and Patty Griffin are all top tier for me.

When did you start writing songs? Were they good right away, or did that come later?

I started writing in high school. I played guitar in a band called This Island Earth and ended up being the lead singer. At that point I started writing for the band. Honestly, it wasn’t terrible, nor was it particularly good, but it seemed like there was something there to work with. in my early 20's I got more into folk music and started focusing a lot on the lyric. However, looking back, those songs were too much. I was trying to write novels into songs. Around 2000 I was listening to bands like Travis who really inspired me with melody. At that point I really started focusing on writing a good mel - American Songwriter


Discography

ALBUMS
Land Of The Living (2012)
Until The Dawn Appears (2011)
Swallow The Sea (2008)
Throwing Punches in the Dark (2006)

EP
The Distance in Between (2008)

SINGLES
Save You
Keep It On The Inside
Waking Up The Dead
Anymore Of This (w/Mindy Smith)

TV
Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, One Tree Hill, Eli Stone, Royal Pains, Bones, Trauma, Army Wives, Pretty Little Liars, Make It or Break It, Brothers & Sisters, Switched At Birth, The Vampire Diaries, The Lying Game, Flashpoint, NY Med, The Hills, and Raising The Bar

FILM
To Save A Life (2009)
Something Borrowed (2011)
What To Expect When You’re Expecting (2012)

Photos

Bio

Matthew Perryman Jones has a voice that calls out with intensity, truth and emotion. Jones began his career in 1997 in Decatur, GA, and then, after moving to Nashville to pursue music full-time, he issued his first solo release, Nowhere Else But Here, in 2000. As American Songwriter describes, “Matthew’s voice ensnares listeners with a rare authenticity and gritty strength.”
In 2006, Jones released Throwing Punches in the
Dark, a departure from his previous Folk/Americana sound toward Pop Rock. In 2008, Swallow the Sea with break-out hit “Save You,” solidified Jones as an artist worth watching. Performing Songwriter Magazine noted Jones as a talent that follows “in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen and John Lennon."
In 2011, Jones released Until The Dawn Appears which contains retellings of his most popular songs including "Save You," whose video features Jamie Alexander (Kyle
XY, Thor). Written shortly after his father’s death, Jones’ latest CD, Land Of The Living, is a courageous personal Odyssey through life’s most troubled waters of love and loss.
One of the most sought-after songwriters in Nashville, Jones builds on his accomplishments with his 2013 single, “Anymore of This.” The duet, written and recorded with Mindy Smith, was featured on ABC Family’s “Switched at Birth” in January and “The Lying Game” in February. In March, the track was selected for the ultra- popular series “The Vampire Diaries.” CMT Edge followed up by launching its own exclusive live performance video of the new single in the same month.
Jones’ songs have also been featured in television shows including Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, Bones, Pretty Little Liars, NY Med, Flashpoint, One Tree Hill, The Hills, and Eli Stone as well as in the 2012 movie release What To Expect When You Are Expecting.
In addition to co-headlining tours with Joshua James, Jay Nash and Katie Herzig, Jones toured with Ingrid Michaelson and shared the stage with Holly Williams, Shawn Colvin, Paula Cole, and Patty Griffin. Jones is also an original member of the nationally acclaimed collaborative artist group "Ten Out of Tenn.”