A Good spin on Hospital Music
From the shadows of depression, anxiety, insomnia, bipolarity, divorce, and betrayal comes a stripped down Matthew Good collection of tracks that leads listeners through the mind of man whose world has been turned upside down.
“My divorce, its betrayal, the usury, the falseness of those that had surrounded me for so long had constructed a wall in front of me, one which I would daily stand before unsuccessfully attempting to engineer a way over,” Good wrote on his website.
“The feeling that washed over me when certain individuals that had been prevalent in my life were not there nor would come to the hospital during my stay, and the feeling that I had reached a point in my life where everything that I was represented little more than a prison from which I could not escape.”
From song-to-song the album takes you for a ride. There's calm and chaos, there's confidence and despair, and there is a new level of openness and honesty in the writing. Like every Good album the work has changed and evolved. Hospital Music is more stripped down, yet is still comfortably similar to his previous work. It is lacking the huge rock songs found on previous efforts with the exception of the epic 54-second track “I Am Not Safer Than a Bank”.
The overall tone of the album is much slower with greater influence on song structure and writing, with more of his Nick Drake and Bob Dylan influences showing. For the recording of the album, Good took over the production controls and recorded a majority of the instrumentation.
The blatantly titled “She's In It For The Money” reveals a side of Good that is generally not heard in many songs. He usually structures the songs more metaphorically, blurring the stories so they're not so obvious. He speaks quite honestly about emotion, opinions, pain and vulnerability that he experienced while working on this album.
“Prior to recording Hospital Music I spent a great deal of time confronting the past… I had not been all that honest with myself. That, more than anything else, influenced the material on this record, producing, at times, uncomfortable realizations represented in song,” Good wrote.
Fans of his past work will not be disappointed by the new album because it features everything that Good fans have come to expect. With each album he continues to evolve and focus on the art of music providing albums that are actually worth buying. Good is touring in the fall in support of Hospital Music, but no London dates have been announced at press time. He will be in Toronto on October 26 and Sarnia on October 28. Check out www.matthewgood.org/shows for more details.
“My divorce, its betrayal, the usury, the falseness of those that had surrounded me for so long had constructed a wall in front of me, one which I would daily stand before unsuccessfully attempting to engineer a way over,” Good wrote on his website.
“The feeling that washed over me when certain individuals that had been prevalent in my life were not there nor would come to the hospital during my stay, and the feeling that I had reached a point in my life where everything that I was represented little more than a prison from which I could not escape.”
From song-to-song the album takes you for a ride. There's calm and chaos, there's confidence and despair, and there is a new level of openness and honesty in the writing. Like every Good album the work has changed and evolved. Hospital Music is more stripped down, yet is still comfortably similar to his previous work. It is lacking the huge rock songs found on previous efforts with the exception of the epic 54-second track “I Am Not Safer Than a Bank”.
The overall tone of the album is much slower with greater influence on song structure and writing, with more of his Nick Drake and Bob Dylan influences showing. For the recording of the album, Good took over the production controls and recorded a majority of the instrumentation.
The blatantly titled “She's In It For The Money” reveals a side of Good that is generally not heard in many songs. He usually structures the songs more metaphorically, blurring the stories so they're not so obvious. He speaks quite honestly about emotion, opinions, pain and vulnerability that he experienced while working on this album.
“Prior to recording Hospital Music I spent a great deal of time confronting the past… I had not been all that honest with myself. That, more than anything else, influenced the material on this record, producing, at times, uncomfortable realizations represented in song,” Good wrote.
Fans of his past work will not be disappointed by the new album because it features everything that Good fans have come to expect. With each album he continues to evolve and focus on the art of music providing albums that are actually worth buying. Good is touring in the fall in support of Hospital Music, but no London dates have been announced at press time. He will be in Toronto on October 26 and Sarnia on October 28. Check out www.matthewgood.org/shows for more details.
