Tag: Matt Fraza
Matt Fraza interview in the Newport Mercury
By Bre Power Eaton | Mercury | February 25, 2015
As an elementary school teacher at Kingston Hill Academy in Saunderstown, Matt Fraza loves putting on plays with his students. The actor and director enjoys the feeling of unpredictable chaos, of not knowing what will actually happen onstage. This same feeling he now thrives on as a musician. Three years ago, the Perryville resident decided it was time to stop just listening to music and make his own instead. His debut album “Let Trouble Go” was released with 75 or Less Records last September.
Congrats on the release of your debut album!
Thanks. The late-in-life debut.
Well, you’re also busy acting and directing, right?
I kind of came to music through that. I had always played guitar, but from acting and directing, the methodology and work in that I brought to music and found out that I could write and perform songs. Before I didn’t know what my place in music was, but then it was like, Oh! You just have to work at it and memorize the best version of what you want to do. It was like acting like a musician, but now I’ve been playing music long enough that I am a musician.
If the album was a cocktail of your inspirations, what is the recipe?
The mixers that come to mind are the artists that I’ve listened to over and over again. Gram Parsons and the early ’70s Stones. I really love Elliott Smith too, but soul music at the same time.
It kind of reminds me of old punk.
That’s something we always hear too. The Velvet Underground, growing up I loved that. There’s a certain quality to it, I think. People wherever we play, they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s got some ’70s New York punk to it.’ I’ll take that as a compliment. I love that kind of music.
Has the album been a work in progress for a while?
I’ve been working on it for about three years maybe. I’ve only been doing the musical performing thing for about three years, but I had that idea, I was in “King Lear” and I was really tired from moving sets and learning all this stuff, and I wanted to do something that I could do on my own time, on my own schedule and not have to listen to what other people were telling me to do, so I wrote the songs in a couple of batches. To get through the recording, it was about three years. Kind of learning how to play shows, playing shows, and learning how to add musicians to it little by little, getting the songs from just one person playing them up to a full band.
How long have you been playing guitar?
12 or 13, around that age. I was playing but I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was messing around.
So now do you feel like you know what you’re doing?
To a degree. I know I have a place in music. I practice a lot to get better at it — just being in the frontman role and playing the guitar. So now that I know what to do, I can get better at that. I hid in the background for a long time because I didn’t think I could, didn’t think I had a good voice, but then you don’t have to feel that way. Anybody can do it.
Teaching, acting, singing. You’re kind of a Renaissance man. Is jumping to the next thing kind of a life pattern for you?
Sort of. It has been a pattern, I guess. I had that accident [in which he lost his lower left leg] when I was 16. Probably for 10 years after that I didn’t do sports. I was active. I worked all the time. I was growing a family at a young age. As I got a little bit older, I went skiing and learned that I could ski, I learned how to surf and got really into surfing for a long time, then picked up the acting. I almost made a conscious decision with music — you never get to the end of learning.
Do you mind if I ask about the accident?
Basically I got hit by a Thunderbird and that was it. I got crunched.
Have you been on crutches for a long time?
On and off. I’ll go long periods of time on the prosthetic, too. I’m kind of in a tricky spot with it right now. Because I’m on crutches and it’s icy, and then I’ll wear the prosthetic, but it hurts. So it’s hard, but it’s not stopping me. The physical stuff, it’s a challenge. But most people that know me don’t see it after a little bit. It’s not that I act like it’s not there, but I try to be fully engaged in whatever I have going on. If you have something that hurts all the time, the best tactic is to fully engage with something.
Which song seems to strike a chord with your fans?
People like “Hit the Wall” a lot since we kind of rev it up.
And it’s motivating. You sing, “I hit the wall, I kept on going. That wall couldn’t stop me.”
It’s a defiant sort of deal. And “Seventeen” people always seem to like because there’s something about it that’s heartfelt.
A nostalgic sort of feeling?
Sort of. I was thinking back on what it’s about — I’ve been married for almost 24 years — but those days, about being 17, I was friends with my wife, since when we were 12 or 13. I just remember we’d be out drinking or whatever in bars with other teenagers and she was holding me up, and she still is! (Laughs.)
Because you got married in your early 20s and started a family, do you feel like now you’re reliving those younger years?
Not really. You can’t. You know too much to be back in your 20s.
If you could open for anyone, who would it be?
Neko Case.
Why?
Because she’s a daring singer and lyricist and tours with her dog!
Another area of performance in your life is teaching elementary school, where you also teach drama.
We put on so many crazy good plays at Kingston Hill Academy. And that was part of the music thing for me, too. I like putting on a show, dressing up, and having these certain chaotic factors. A lot of it comes from that. The chaos factor is so high when you’re putting on shows with kindergarten to fifth graders. The fun of it is gigantic!
How is that similar to playing music?
Just the excitement of having a show coming up and getting ready for it.
So what do you enjoy more — making records or performing?
They’re two different parts of the same organism. The creation part was fantastic. Working with Tom Chace and Kraig Jordan on the record, making everything as good as you could make it. I think the performance is as or more exciting just because there’s an audience there and there’s a certain element of not knowing what’s going to happen.
That chaos?
Yeah! Keep the band on their toes. Not tell them what’s going to happen. (Laughs.) Bands surprise each other with mistakes. Not in a bad way. Mistakes are a part of performance.
What are your favorite theater roles?
I’ve played in a lot of Shakespeare with Mixed Magic Theatre in Pawtucket: “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Tempest,” “Comedy of Errors.” I played a major role in this show called “An Iliad” with The Wilbury Group. It was one actor and one cellist. I played Homer and all the characters in the story. It was painful to learn, but I did really enjoy it. … It’s the kind of role that I’ll be able to play again down the road. It’s kind of back to the Homeric tradition, like “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” They were passed on for thousands of years by these guys called rhapsodes and basically you’re a rhapsode when you tell the story because you memorize not the whole thing like the rhapsodes did, but they would go from place to place and present it in an exciting way. So I know I can do that.
So you’re a rhapsode?
I kind of have a rhapsode in my back pocket! I’m just happy to know that it’s there. It was worth the work.
Matt Fraza at The Met
with Back Rhodes
The Met
Main Street
Pawtucket, RI
8pm
$8
All Ages
Matt Fraza Band at Wheel House
with Billy Lord
Wheel House
294 Great Island Rd
Narragansett, Rhode Island 02882
9pm
Matt Fraza at AS220
with Mecca Lily, The Strattones, and The Conversation
AS220
Empire Street
Providence, RI
9pm
Boston’s The Noise reviews Matt Fraza, Junior Varsity Arson, Sick Pills, and Deadlands in the December 2014 Issue
Deadlands – Faceless Angels
Deadlands play dangerously close to a line that would put them into the schmaltzy bar-band blues category. What saves them from that awful fate is a skill for invoking the ghost of early ZZ Top in order to bring some character to their tracks. As often as the generic “Before You Were Born” and the “Mustang Sally”-baiting “Discotex” make me want to scream, tracks like “Bottom Feeders,” “Libby Prison Blues,” and “Fink” prove that there’s much more at hand with Deadlands than Thursday-night-dive-bar status. There are glimpses of real blues-rock genius on Faceless Angels. If you queue up those stellar moments and skip past the cheese you are certain to find something to enjoy on this record.
Junior Varsity Arson – Self Titled EP
Junior Varsity Arson is the musical project of four long-time New England rock stalwarts, Guy Benoit (Thee Hydrogen Terrors), Kraig Jordan (The Masons), Dave Narcizo (Throwing Muses), and Don Sanders (Medicine Ball, The Masons). What do you get when you throw these four guys in a room together? Not exactly what you would expect. Instead of heavy art punk, you’ll find something more akin to Devo or They Might Be Giants, as spoken/ sung by an odd combination of the guy from Cake and William S. Burroughs. If you have any taste at all you will agree that this is an oddly appealing recipe. The five songs that comprise JVA’s self-titled, debut EP roll by like some strange beat poet’s LSD-induced hallucination. “Her Parents Love Me” starts off quirkily with, “Her parents love me/ I’m such a big improvement/ over the white supremacist. Her parents hated him/ He ruined every holiday,” and continues on with a strange, American gothic love story. “Brown Jacket and Purple Keds” is a song about… actually, I have no idea what this song is about. There are references to shopping at Target, a museum, a Volvo, and shit-stains on the floor. I have to admit that I lost the story line pretty quickly. And so it goes for another three tracks of stream-of-consciousness lyrics spoken and sung over kitschy keyboards, guitars, and drums. Junior Varsity Arson’s debut sounds spontaneous—like a gang of accomplished musicians getting together on a Saturday night, simply enjoying playing together, all wondering what will come out on the other side. Thankfully, what came out the other side is utterly entertaining.
Matt Fraza – Let Trouble Go
As I’m driving down Storrow Drive one fall morning, I slide Matt Fraza’s new album into my player. The opening track is mellow folk melody that puts me in mind of a quiet house concert with a cup of coffee in hand, resting on a couch and surrounded by friends. It’s familiar, relaxing, like a stroll down the quiet roads I grew up on. Much of the lyrics lack a regular format, and have a more stream of consciousness feel to them, reinforcing the casual feeling I get when listening to songs like “Forever.” At first I was a little put off by this, but on the second third runs through the album, I think I get it—Matt, Kraig Jordan (bass, lead guitar), and Tom Chace (drums, keyboards, vocals, bass) have some stories they want to share, and it’s about the telling of the tale, not making sure it fits into a certain mold.
Sick Pills – Sickening
Classic-era punk, particularly of the UK variety, presented us with a lively alternative to bloated arena rock, and the best of its purveyors, particularly the Buzzcocks and The Jam, also offered up some pretty snappy tunes to go with the attitude. This propensity carried forth into the so-called college rock of the ’80s (aka indie rock), and we find plenty of that attitude and tunefulness here, particularly on the opening track, “Wormfood.” But the same opening gambit tropes which seemed so refreshing and new a generation ago have now become cliches: telepathic guitar lines; anti-love songs; stop and start dynamics; brawly Pistols-like chaos; sludgy intros; machine-gun staccato; cinematic whangdoodle; abrasive textures; pounding clamor; grudging grindoramas; feedback-laden echoplex tunings, and so forth. No bad, all in all—just lacking in anything genuinely novel.
Motif Magazine reviews the Matt Fraza album ‘Let Trouble Go’
When I was a youngster I used to get so excited when the mailman would show up with whatever useless gadget I had ordered from the back of last month’s Star Wars comic book. The anticipation of receiving that bauble was often more fun than actually getting it (and by the way, those damn X-ray glasses never did work…). Of course today I’m a cynical old man who doesn’t get worked up over much, EXCEPT for when my mailman brings me the latest batch of fresh CDs from Motif to be reviewed. Today’s accumulation included a very unusual offering from the good folks at 75orLess Records, titled Let Trouble Go by Perryville, Rhode Island’s own Matt Fraza.
I have to admit that at first blush I didn’t know quite what to make out of this very raw and loose rock ‘n’ roll collection. Perhaps to the uninitiated, Fraza’s vocals may seem slightly pitch-challenged and somewhat monochromatic. The record’s overall production might be politely labeled unadorned or sparse. But I submit that those are the same people who didn’t appreciate Lou Reed’s vocal drone, or who could never quite get past Bob Dylan’s nasally affectation. In fact, those are the kind of people who probably never understood what rock ‘n’ roll was all about in the first place. But Matt Fraza understands the loftiness of rock and all that it entails. How could he not? He waited almost four decades to release Let Trouble Go, inexplicably his first! Clearly he’s not concerned with pop culture trends, and nicely auto-tuned, Pro-tools recorded garbage aimed at the teenie bop brigade. No, this is serious music, written and performed by a serious man who goes for raw emotion rather than neatly-packaged.
The album kicks off with a straight ahead roots rocker “Seventeen,” which sounds like an unholy marriage of The Band with Graham Parker. “Lord only know I need you by my side, Lord only know I need you by my side, so c’mon pretty baby and take me for a ride.” We’re not reinventing the wheel here, folks, it’s just good old fashioned rockin’ fun: “Too Much Love” straddles that tenuous line between Jerry Lee Lewis/’50s boogie and punk rock. If The Killer went straight into the studio with Mick & Keith after a night of binge drinking their weight in Brewmeister Snake Venom (Google it … ) they’d likely come out with something sounding pretty close to this. “I’ve got too much love, I’ve got too much love inside of me, well that must be why I wanna get with every girl I see.”
Featuring some very tasteful electric organ from Tom Chace, “Libertine” is Fraza’s ode to the adage: “If it feels good, it can’t be bad.” In that great talk-sing style of Fraza’s, the song starts with his declaring: “Whatever you want just go ahead and do it – Whatever you want just go ahead and do it – You can live off sin or take heroin, just do it.”
Setting aside the frenetic rockers, Matt Fraza lowers the tempo on the title track “Let Trouble Go” and in doing so, gives the listener a rare glimpse of the man in perhaps his most vulnerable of all the songs. While earnestly strumming a sweet sounding guitar, Fraza creates a heart-on-sleeve moment, akin to those times Keith Richards steps up to the mike to bellow out one of his soul-crunching ballads that only he could pull off with such raw sincerity. “Don’t you think that maybe father, in this life, we could all find peace?…Don’t you think that maybe father, just like a dream, we could let trouble go.”
Granted Let Trouble Go does have, as his press kits claims, “echoes of Nilsson, Lou Reed, and The Glimmer Twins…” But Matt Fraza waited a lifetime to commit to tape what clearly had been playing in his soul for quite some time. When an artist’s work is synonymous with the man, that’s a true hit. And on that score, Let Trouble Go is a smash.
Matt Fraza at Pancho’s
Fundraiser for OMF Skatepark
6-9pm
Pancho’s
Narragansett, RI
5pm
Monument Thief, Deadlands, Matt Fraza, & Six Star General at The Parlour
The Parlour
North Main Street
Providence, RI
9pm
Matt Fraza at Artifact
Artifact
Peace Dale, RI
8pm
Matt Fraza – Let Trouble Go
75OL-190 Matt Fraza – Let Trouble Go CD
$9.99 S&H Included
Digital download is available here
Track Listing
1. Seventeen
2. Too Much Love
3. Forever
4. Sunset’s In
5. Libertine
6. Let Trouble Go
7. Watermelons
8. Tell Me
9. Hit the Wall
Let Trouble Go is the debut album by actor, surfer, and songwriter, Matt Fraza. A literate, melodic, and emotionally direct transmission from the witch-haunted wilds of Perryville, the record was captured by Kraig Jordan at Plan of a Boy, and features the production skills, voice, drums and keys of Warren’s nifty man, Tom Chace.