A LupEND Blog Interview with Matthew Santos [Part 1]

(Photo courtesy of Stephanie Bassos)

A while ago I told you that I'd be doing an interview with Matthew and I asked you to send in some questions, remember? Well, here's part 1 of the interview! Thanks to everyone who sent in a question and thanks to Amanda for setting this up! Enjoy!


LupENDBlog: What's up Matthew? First off, thanks for taking the time to do this interview, we really appreciate it. So...what have you been up to within the last couple of weeks?

Matthew Santos: I’ve been in the studio a lot trying to tie up loose ends on the record, while also making sure we got our ducks in a row for it’s release. Played a few solo shows and am gearing up for some full band shows as well.


LEB: Let's talk about your upcoming album. Do you already have a title for it and is the late Fall release still on?

MS: I haven’t committed to a title just yet…there are some working titles that I won’t disclose now, but the release is intended for sometime in early to mid December.


LEB: Lately you performed a few new tracks during your concerts, for example "Born to Do" and it seems like, sound-wise some of the new stuff is much more rock/pop driven than the things you did before. Was that one of the things you were pushing for when you started to record the album....like creating more rock tracks with a little bit of a harder, edgier sound?

MS: Well this album was probably the most difficult one for me to make thus far due to many circumstances. First, I’m an indie artist at heart and I felt tremendous pressure to create pop music, or at least to make a few songs that any one of the labels we were pitching to would be interested in.

This situation was ripe for internal conflict because a large part of me didn’t really want to make pop music for a mainstream label release.

Secondly, the song that really got my name out there to the music industry and to the world at large was obviously “Superstar”, which is a song I didn’t write that speaks very little of the music I love to make. So I wanted to try and create a few songs that held a similar level of high energy yet was still me, which was something I’ve never done before.

The irony is that within these experimental pop/rock songs were lyrics that spoke of an indie artist caught up in a mainstream whirlwind (as in “Wide Eyed Fire Fly”) or of the nature of radio mega hits that dominate the airwaves (as in “On the Radio”).

This was sort of my response to being suddenly thrown into the world of pop music with little to no preparation. I went from recording a live, acoustic folk album in my basement to performing in front of 30,000 people a night on a Kanye West tour. My world was turned upside down overnight.

So yes, I was pushing for a more edgier sound than what I’ve done in the past. It was just another step in creative exploration and growth for me and a response to the life situation I found myself in. There are also some low key folk tunes on the album that resemble some of the music I’ve done in the past.


LEB: I wanna talk about one thing that permanently comes up when people talk about you, mostly people that only know the tracks that you did with Lupe. They say "He's a Chris Martin clone" or "A wannabe Adam Levine". What do you think about people who say stuff like that?

MS: People who dish out those lazy comparisons clearly haven’t listened to my music. I feel like it’s an ignorant, surface assessment of my art. It’s like you spend a good part of your life refining your craft for someone to just come around and casually discredit 90% of your influences.

If you were to put Chris Martin, Adam Levine and myself in a room and asked us all to write our own song entitled “Ignorant Comparisons”, we would each write very different sounding songs.

Once my album comes out in December these associations will become irrelevant, or at least I hope so.


LEB: Ok...so on Twitter you recently said that you plan to release a single soon...can you already tell us which track it will be and will there be a video for it?

MS: The first single we plan on releasing is called “You Will Be Saved”. It’s a song about institutions that offer a promise of happiness or “salvation” only if you follow their rules, or pay their fees. It’s the “safety in numbers” or “group think” mentality that inspired this song. There will be a video at some point.


LEB: Talking about videos...you are featured on "Shining Down" and I know that a lot of people are wondering if there will be a video for the song...do you know anything about that?

MS: I’ve heard rumors of a video for “Shining Down”, but I got nothing.

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This was part 1 of our interview with Matthew, in part 2 (which will drop later this week) Matthew talks about his 2nd feature on Lupe's upcoming album "Lasers", his band and how much they are involved in the whole creative process. He also shares his thoughts about Japanese Cartoon, tells us who he'd like to take out on a date and answers some of YOUR questions!


Make sure to check Matthew's FaceBook, Twitter & MySpace for more info's about what's going on, upcoming shows and so on...