This year, I am recording to 4-track tape and sharing them exclusively with subscribers to this newsletter. Every song gets paired with original art and a glimpse into the creative process.
This is a special edition of the newsletter. Not only does this month’s tune (squeaking in on the very last day!) begin side B of this year’s collection of songs, but today also marks the one-year anniversary of my time on Substack.
It was exactly one year ago that I hit publish for the first time. Back then, the email only went to myself, but promptly texted it to every friend I could think of, and I’ve been sharing these posts with anyone who will lend a listening ear ever since. Some of you have been around since that very first week. Thanks for sticking with me.
I got a late start on this month’s track because the notion that it would be a kind of beginning of the end of Volume 1 gave me some pause. The song-a-month format is meant to be something slow that works at a pace I can manage alongside all of life’s other excitements (like potty training!). At the same time, I wanted to see if I could find out where all of this was going.
As I sorted through old drafts of songs and works-in-progress, a narrative started to suggest itself. But this was only after I took three days to make a database of every voice memo and scrap of lyrics I could find—another story for another time.
This song is the first in the final series of 6 that will have something of a coherent narrative.
The songs are all about love and longing for love, but more fundamentally they are about that universal quest in search of a self.
Today we meet our main character.
Lyrics
A young man with nowhere to be,
goes out in the street looking for something to see.
He wanders all over town, when like a beam of light
grips his eyes he sees a wonderous sight.And he said:
“I can't recall your name.
It's on the tip of my tongue,
but my mind goes numb
when you stare at me.
But your face, I've seen you before.
Was it here on the street
or in my dreams
on another shore.”“Maybe one day we'll wake up in four post bed,
and I'll reach through the sheets and find your hand,
and maybe then I will understand
what it means to be somewhere and not somewhere else.”That night, the same young man,
tossing and turning, finally falls asleep.
And wakes up in a dream. Where a woman in white
gathers her dress and dries his eyes.And she says:
“You can't recall your name.
It's on the tip of your tongue,
but your mind goes numb
when you're wandering.
And that face, you've seen it before.
It was your own in the glass
that you left in the past
though it haunts you here.”“Maybe some day you'll finally rest your head
and learn your name and not someone else.
And maybe then you will understand
what it means to be human and not something else.”What it means to be human and not something else!
Pull me into the centre and cover my head,
and with all the power that you posess,
turn me into something resembling a self.
Tape Hiss, Notebooks, and Paper Collage
I like to take a moment in these posts to say something about their coming-to-be. The chosen recording medium has been my Yamaha MT100 4-track tape machine. It’s a consumer level model from the 1980s with a lot of personality—lots of hiss, high frequency aberrations, and it runs cassettes back at a slightly different speed every time you hit play.
I’m neither a hifi or lofi analog purist. In the end, I bounce all of these tracks to the digital space and do a lot of work fixing arrangements and fine-tuning the mix in that environment. This song features a technique I’ve used a lot so far that involves recording four tracks, bouncing them to and from the laptop back onto a fresh length of tape and then recording three fresh tracks which get blended with the original four in Logic. I confess that I do spend a lot of time trying to file off some of the rough edges the tape machine likes to add along the way. At the same time, the inherent imperfections in tape recordings like this help me embrace the work as it is.
When I think about why I decided to use a tape-machine for this project, I start to see an analogy with my other creative practices. Ever since my PhD program, I write every first draft by hand in a notebook. It’s been similar with visual art. All the album art I’ve made in the past year starts as paper collage, which then gets scanned and completed in the computer. Maybe I’m finding something inspiring about beginning in the realm of materials, or maybe it’s just about trying to spend a little less time in front of a computer.
Either way, here we are in a digital space once again, and I’m so glad you’re here. It means the world to me.
—Matthew
Updates
Guest post at On Repeat Records: Earlier this month I wrote a piece for Kevin Alexander’s wonderful Substack about my favourite album of 2025 so far, Foxwarren’s 2. You can also take a listen to the remix I did of “Havana” from the same album.
“It’s So Easy to Love You”: Last month I released a very special song about my 2 year old son, Robert, for Father’s Day. We did a deluxe version of the single over at Bandcamp which includes two additional tracks (one of them a feature from the 4-track series). It’s been an interesting experiment keeping up the 4-track series on Substack while also periodically releasing music to Bandcamp and Streaming platforms. I’ll be releasing another single called “Where Love Goes” as we get closer to the fall, so stay tuned!
“The Apostle Paul and the Hope of the Cosmic Christ”: In the week after “So Easy” came out, I was hidding in the Library rushing to finish a paper on the Apostle Paul and first-century Cosmology for the Atlantic Theological Conference. If that sounds like your kind of things, you can watch a recording of the presentation here.
The New Canadiana: I decided to take the month off from our usual series of interviews with Canadian singer songwriters. With a fresh baby on the way in a few months (inshallah), I’ll be pumping the brakes on the monthly pace for this series. Even so, stay tuned for more inspired Canadian folk music in your near future!
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