Greatest Chicago Hits out now!

Greatest Chicago Hits is a pandemic album through and through, but more than that, it’s an ode to the city I called home for 16 years. I started writing its 10 songs in 2019 while I was still an official Chicago resident, and I carried those ideas with me as my wife and I decided to move to a quiet little town we had never heard of: Warrenville, IL. Covid had wrecked my mental health, and I was desperate for the tried-and-true healing energy of nature. We found a rental property nestled between five forest preserves about 45 minutes outside of the city. We fell in love with the little bungalow and signed the lease, scared shitless that we were making a grave mistake by becoming suburbanites.

I set up an ad hoc music studio in a spare bedroom of the house and began working more on the songs I had dragged along with me. I also started hiking and riding my bike in the woods almost every day. I used a lot of this time to meditate on the relativity of pain and suffering. I would carve out time to define the present moment only using my five senses: what do you see in front of you, what do you smell, what does your skin feel, what taste is in your mouth, what sounds are pouring into your ears? During those exercises, the abstract problems I constantly encountered on my mobile device were almost always irrelevant to my ability to take my next breath. I began to realize what a mystery it was to even be alive at all, able-bodied and able-minded, inhaling oxygen and possessing self-awareness.

Obviously, this newfound outlook didn’t make the world’s problems go away, and those suffering the most felt no direct benefit from my new perspective. Many times I struggled with a feeling of self-loathing and pessimism, especially as I chewed on the hard fact that I had the privilege to maintain employment during the pandemic and work from home, physically relocate from a community of individuals in dire need of socioeconomic help, and afford myself the time to think deeper on such an existential level, all while still having a shitty attitude about minor inconveniences in my life. I was also depressed by my advocation for massive social change while hiding the fact that I was scared to change myself. As I tried to come to terms with it all, I would go in my studio to make sounds that were bigger than me—looping huge ambient washes of electronic noises that would develop a mind of their own. I’d just sit back and be a listener, relinquishing control and surrendering to the moving air.

These experiences helped me process the vastness of reality that is out of my everyday control. They also allowed me to give myself permission to feel how I truly feel without such critical judgement. They inspired me to write music that made me feel good versus making music that I felt like I was “supposed” to be making. I recalled some words of wisdom imparted on me a few years ago by one of my closest music confidants. It was along the lines of, “Don’t worry about repeating yourself. Your music sounds like ‘you.’ Don’t stop doing what you’re doing. We like it.” I was finally able to trust these words, feeling liberated in a way that made me feel like I didn’t have anything to lose or regret while working on this record. I wanted to feel happy. I wanted to get over all this shit that had bogged me down for so many years. I wanted to find pleasure in simple things like listening to the radio while driving my car. I wanted to be more open for others and to help them in the ways that they wanted help.

I started thinking about music making more from the perspective of a home gardener who just likes to grow things because it makes them happy, not because they feel pressure to have their garden judged amongst other gardens. Instead, it’s about the pure joy of getting your hands in the soil, spending time outside in your contained patch of growth, reflecting on your work, being grateful for your yield, and admiring the beauty and elegance of plants in a controlled environment that mimics the larger state of nature out of our control. Making music can be like that, too. We’re trying to domesticate wild sound waves, stringing notes and rhythms together in a somewhat-organized fashion in a contained space. It just feels nice to make a noise on an instrument for the sake of it, like pulling a cherry tomato off the vine and plopping it in your mouth. It’s all so personally satisfying, but also so much bigger than us. I’m reminded of the late Jaimie Branch who said “All the music that ever was and ever will be is here now. It exists in a cloud just above our heads and when we play, we pluck it out of the ether for a lil’ while before sending it back up.” The act of creating and sharing is all so much bigger than us, and when we get little opportunities to do it ourselves on smaller scales, it connects us to the bigger thing driving it all.

I felt like this in Chicago all of the time, where the buzz of the city was happening no matter what, and we could all just share its benevolence. The city didn’t care one way or the other—it just “was” and we could just “be” during those little moments of transcendence it offers through the lake, the CTA, the architecture, the history, the music, the food, the sports, the weather, the parks, the everything. My wife and I have been unabashedly going through the nostalgia filmstrips in our heads and recounting all of the incredible moments we experienced independently and together during our city lives. And as we look back, we recognize how the city brought us together and grew our love into the enormous thing that it is now.

So, that’s what Greatest Chicago Hits is about.

Hope you enjoy it!

Matt