Matt Wixson Interview

By: Maxwell Barna

First and foremost, I’d just like to say that MATT WIXSON IS A GOD AMONG MEN! Just kidding, kind of. I first found out about Matt Wixson a little over two years ago. I personally enjoy his music because, well, for one, he and I share similar viewpoints. I also enjoy the fact that he is absolutely hilarious. He’s an average guy like you and I and although he is becoming quite popular these days, he has yet to adopt any kind of “rock-star attitude” – he’s really just one of us. Before you all read on to the actual interview portion of this submission, I want to tell you that this guy is pretty ridiculous; but in the best of ways. As he mentions below, he has released his CD’s on donation-only labels and makes sure that everyone knows that he’s not in it for the money. No one ever said that Matt Wixson was the best musician in the world, and I’ve come to realize that I think he likes it better that way. However, I’m going to come right out and say that he is one of the most decent human beings I’ve met in recent history, and here’s why:

YMM: So, Matt Wixson… You open up your Myspace with, “I’m not making music to earn money, gain notoriety, or change the world.” I find that to be extremely bold and honest of you. That being said, what do you do when you’re not making music? How do you afford to keep making and playing music?

Matt Wixson: I currently work overnights stocking groceries, which is no fun and not very glamorous whatsoever.  I’ve always put off finishing college because of this little tour or that little tour, and now I’m paying the price!  I’m thinking about going back to school so I can work a better-paying crappy job to keep supporting my musical hobby.  Stay in school, kids!

YMM:  You also highlight your very socially awkward teenage experience. Being as there are a lot of kids out there dealing with this issue (me not being one of them because I’m pimp as hell), what would you tell them to help them cope with it all? How did you get over it?

Matt Wixson: Well, I never used to be an outgoing person at all.  I guess I’m still not, for the most part.  For me, it all comes down to a paranoia I harbor.  I’m afraid to open up to people at all when we’re face to face, because I’m afraid that they’ll be able to use something against me, or they’re forever judge me based on some character flaw or something like that.  It’s never been a crippling fear or even something that even enters my consciousness most of the time, but I’m aware that I do it after the fact.  I kinda turned to writing (poems at first, and eventually songs) as a way to express myself to the world, without expressing myself to anyone in particular.  I don’t have people I fully trust with my innermost thoughts and feelings, so I share them with a page or a computer monitor.  Usually, by the time a feeling becomes a song that is heard by a stranger, I’ve already dealt with it in the writing and recording process and I’ve become comfortable with it.  So I guess my advice is that you gotta get shit off your chest somehow.  If you don’t have someone to talk to, write songs, paint, make mashed potato sculpture - whatever moves you – and share it with someone.  Eventually you make personal connections with people.

YMM: How did you become involved with music? Like, what was your early inspiration and motivation? Was it Ska music early on in your life, or did that come to be later on?

Matt Wixson: My parents always listened to music, but it was never ska.  When I was little, I used to hear a ton of Motown music, with some stuff like Cat Stevens and Paul Simon sprinkled in.  I finally started developing my own musical taste in late elementary school, and found ska in 7^th grade when it was the flavor of the week.  Back then, the Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, Goldfinger, Save Ferris, Sublime, No Doubt, and Mustard Plug all had these ska songs on the radio.  I fell in love most with Goldfinger and Reel Big Fish, and Goldfinger’s Hang-Ups was my first CD that was either ska or punk.  I would’ve bought Reel Big Fish’s albums first, but my mother wouldn’t let me get CDs with parental advisories!  Those two bands were the major bands that got me into almost all the music I listen to now, and eventually I found the Slackers and other bands that play ska in a more traditional style.  It all spiraled out to include the old Jamaican artists, and all the forms of reggae, and now I’m a big appreciator of that entire family tree of music.

YMM: Sorry for being so cliché, but when exactly did you discover that you had a strong talent for writing music?

Matt Wixson: I’m still not sure I have a strong talent for writing music!  I realized probably around 6 years ago that I loved writing songs, even though they weren’t good.  I was playing them using my self-taught piano skills, and it was too awkward playing bad piano and singing.  You really have to be awesome at piano to pull that off well.  I decided to learn guitar because it was a more natural singer-songwriter instrument.  I guess the time I really felt I had any merit as a musician at all was when I went to an Arrogant Sons of Bitches show and their singer Jeff (now in Bomb The Music Industry!) told me he wanted a CD with as many of my songs as I could fit on it.  I did just that, and that compilation became the first CD I ever sold at shows.

YMM: You have a couple different projects going on right now. One being the Babylon Party Machine and the other (my particular favorite) being Mixson It Up (not that I don’t absolutely enjoy your original stuff). Tell us a little bit about these projects and what they’re all about.

Matt Wixson: Well, Babylon Party Machine sprang up out of my boredom with music.  It’s very loosely categorized as “techno ska” but it’s got a bit more to it now.  The constant theme in it, though, is no real-life instruments.  Everything is recorded via synth.  The songs tend to have more typical dance beats (ska is dance music, of course, but I mean beats more akin to techno, house, hip-hop, etc.) but sometimes it’s just some electronic variation on a usual ska or reggae beat.  There’s been other various projects I’ve done that were still just one person, like a shitty rap thing and a fake country/folk band.  I’ve since decided that folk music has a place amongst the other songs I release under my own name, and I really probably shouldn’t be rapping.

YMM: I’m really interested in your Mixson It Up project. I’d like to touch base a little more on that. How do you pick the songs you’re going to mix? Better yet, how exactly do you do it? Some of your stuff has really made me laugh out loud, and I just wanted to personally thank you for it all.

Matt Wixson: I don’t really know how this all came about, to be honest haha.  It’s not really anything I’ve ever focused on as a whole, and you’ll probably never see a Mixson It Up album or anything.  I just occasionally get in the mood to make a mashup track, which basically means taking two different songs and mixing them into one.  For example, I did one that has Missy Elliot’s song “Work It” with Alton Ellis’ “Girl I’ve Got A Date” as the backing track.  As far as the vocal tracks go, I have a pretty limited selection.  If you log onto Soulseek or whatever other filesharing program you might use to steal music from Metallica, you can find songs without the backing track.  Once in a while I’ll go on there and just grab a few if I find them.  For the music, I just find an instrumental part (sometimes a part with simple vocals) and just loop it.  A lot of ska and reggae songs have breaks where there’s no main melody going on, and sometimes when I hear such a thing, I’ll just remember to go back and cut it out and make a new backing track with it.  It takes a little effort sometimes to match the tempos of the two pieces, which usually involves speeding up or slowing down one of the songs.  That’s about all there is to it, though.

YMM: You’re also credited with having some of the most ridiculous song titles of all time. What would you say has been the best song you’ve written? What’s your all-time favorite and why?

Matt Wixson: This question tricked me! You started by mentioning ridiculous song titles, but then you asked me about my favorite songs.  First, let me say thanks for finding my song titles among the most ridiculous of all time haha.  I’m flattered!  As for the best song I’ve ever written, I really can’t say.  As the old cliché goes, it’s like picking your favorite child, which has to be especially tough for the parent with almost 300 children.  I like “The Everyday Joys of Sado-Masochism” because I managed to get something off my chest in a catchy way without really letting the listener in on what I’m singing about.  I like “Blind Melon Had It Coming” because it has a singalong chorus and funny bridge, so it’s fun to play live.  I have some new political songs that I like because they’re all rather blunt and describe my views on the world accurately.

YMM: From what I remember, you were playing keyboards for The Flaming Tsunami’s for a while. Could you tell us a little bit about your experience with the band?

Matt Wixson: It was basically amazing.  I was a fan of the band before joining, and it was a blast! We toured all over the country, we toured the U.K. for three weeks, we played Mustard Plug’s weekend of CD release shows with MU330, who are one of my favorite ska-punk bands… we had a lot of fun.  I got to learn about touring and healthy eating and entertaining and song writing and recording.  It was eye-opening and almost seemed like a fantasy.  That’s basically how my experience was.

YMM: Now, I’ve also heard that you no longer play for them. I had absolutely no idea. When did that split occur? Would you like to discuss any particular reason why?

Matt Wixson: I quit the band in January of this year, after spending almost exactly one year on keyboards.  Over the course of that year, I had spent a couple thousand dollars while earning almost nothing.  I felt like I really needed to get back home and spend some time replenishing my bank account, and they wanted me to move to Connecticut.  I wasn’t really that into paying for a place to live in CT, although I do love it there, and I love the people there.  It just wasn’t for me at that time.  I also felt like I wasn’t on the same page as the rest of the band sometimes.  It just seemed like it was time to go our separate ways.  But don’t fret, we’re still all on good terms.  Johnny Tsunami also plays sax in a band from MI called We Are The Union, so he’s out here quite a bit.  A month or two ago we went to the zoo together.

YMM: I was disappointed when I looked at your page and saw no shows lined up in the coming weeks and months. Is there anything that we should watch out for? How about CD’s; any new releases in the works?

Matt Wixson: Well, here’s the thing about shows.  I’m actually a pretty lazy person, and I don’t often go out of my way to set up a show.  Fortunately I get asked by other people to play their shows once in a while, so I get to do that instead.  I got home from a 3-week tour about a month ago and haven’t really been looking into playing much since.  There may be a few shows in the works, but nothing concrete yet.  I’d like to try to get some weekends off work and do out-of-town gigs within driving distance of Detroit, and I intend to head south again when it starts getting cold.  Other than that, not much is planned.  The bright side, though, is that I’ve got new music coming out.  I just released a full-length in June, and I’m quite happy with it and people seem to dig it, but I’ve got more on the way.  I’ve got an all-acoustic EP written and demo’d and I’m waiting for the right opportunity to hit a studio and do good recordings of the songs.  It’ll be my first release of real studio recordings!  I’m also nearly finished with a new Babylon Party Machine EP.  It’s going to consist of cover songs rewritten partially to update them for a new time or situation.  Both of these EP’s will be released for donations via Open Hand Records, which is run by my friend Aaron, who has played sax with me before, and who is a fine solo ska-punk musician himself.  I’m also releasing a “hits” album of something-teen of my best songs.  This is going to be released on another donation-based label, Community Records, run by Greg from the band Fatter Than Albert.  Since my last few albums have been released for free already, this will mostly consist of older songs.  And finally, I’m rather passively trying to start a band.  I’m terribly lazy so it’s not progressing much, but hopefully I’ll be performing with other people on stage before the end of the year.  It’ll probably be an extension of my solo stuff rather than something totally new, but it probably won’t replace my solo sets.  That means I’ll be doing the same songs, sometimes solo,  sometimes with a band.  Watch for that eventually.

YMM: Alright, well, these are all of the questions I can think up off the top of my head. Is there anyone you’d like to give a shout out to; any last words?

Matt Wixson: Last time I did an interview I promoted a band called the Fad, but the interviewer opted to cut that part.  I’m going to try again now.  The Fad released a killer album last year called Kill Punk Rock Stars and I contributed keyboards and a lot of gang vocals to it.  It’s ska-punk much like the Suicide Machines, or maybe it’s Rancid with some hardcore songs.  Either way, they’re an awesome band and I’m ridiculously happy to have recorded on such a fantastic album.  Check it out.  Thanks.