Perth Music

Matt Costa turned to music when he broke his leg just when it looked like he was going to become a professional skateboarder.  Looking back at it now, this may have been a blessing in disguise as Matt has just showcased his acoustic singing/songwriting skills across Australia for the last month with friend and label-mate Jack Johnson. Released a couple weeks a go Matt Costa’s second album, Unfamiliar Faces is as soothing as it is enjoyable.  Matt Costa chats to Justin Middleton for this exclusive interview.

Click here to download the podcast of the entire interview. (12:28 - 1.5Mb)

“Make the days as full as they are long” Matt starts off with as his philosophy of life.

I asked Matt to describe the creative process he used to write and record Unfamiliar Faces.  He replied “I was living in Sacramento for a little while which is in northern California, I’d just moved up there right before I started to write the record. I put a bunch of things on this big bookshelf of mine, some of my favourite things: some 45’s, some singles, some Everly Brothers singles, Donovan singles, The Beatles singles, The Hollies singles. They were my grandmothers records which were passed down to me just recently. As a kid I was into that stuff but I didn’t know who was who, I just heard that stuff on the oldies radio station. So these records reminded me of my childhood. I also had some of my favourite books such as Mark Twain’s Life On The Mississippi and this other book called Riding The Rails, which is just a bunch of individual accounts of people in the Great Depression who were teenagers at the time and had left their homes and just traveled the rails and they would tell hard luck stories. I kinda related to those two books the most because after moving up to Sacramento I had lived a stone’s throw from a main train line that would have a train go by every hour and another stone’s throw away from that was the Sacramento and American river which are two big rivers that join together to form a delta that goes into San Francisco Bay which I would pretend was the Mississippi River.”

Matt then described specifically how this process helped with a few songs on the album.  “So I had all these things to put me in the state of mind to be creative. The song Miss Magnolia is about a house I moved into that was haunted and the people that I rented it from had told me there was a woman named Magnolia who had lived there many years a go and other tenants had told them they had seen a ghost of the woman. So that it where I got the inspiration for that song.”

“At the end of recording we needed one more song and I had bought a piano when I was living down south. I had keyboards all my life, different ones but I had never had a real piano. So I went to a piano store and they had all these great big, grand pianos and I just wanted to play them but I didn’t think I could afford them. But in the corner was this sad little pitiful piano and his name was Lester. I started playing Lester and he had all these jagged keys and had burn marks where someone had probably rested their cigarettes on the keys. I actually cut myself on the keys playing it. So I wrote this song called Mr Pitiful which was about Lester the piano.”

With guitars and piano featured heavily in Matt’s music, I asked him which he prefers or helps him writing songs.  He replied “I find it more fun to write on the piano. When I was a kid I’d always play my aunts piano, I’d sit on that and figure out melodies. I think when you sit down with any kind of instrument your hands naturally want to strum different chords so it’s hard. I think the difference between the two makes the creative process more exciting. If I’m writing something on the guitar or the piano and I hit a dead end, I just start messing around with the melody on the piano and it kind of molds into the next part of the song. I think they all compliment each other, they’re all friends.

Unfamiliar Faces is out now.  For more info on Matt Costa visit www.mattcosta.com