Matt Maeson

Growing up in Virginia,
Matt Maeson got his start performing for inmates at maximum-security prisons
across America at age 17. “I’d get up and do these acoustic songs on my guitar,
and they’re still the best shows I’ve ever done,” says the Austin-based
singer/songwriter. “You’re playing for all these people who are treated like
they’re monsters, and it feels like spreading some light into a really dark
place.”
On his debut album Bank on the Funeral,
Maeson uses his deeply incisive songwriting to explore the tension between
light and dark in his own life. The album redefines the limits of the classic
singer/songwriter’s sensibility and shapes a sound that’s richly textured and
gracefully experimental. And with his soulful vocal presence, Maeson again
reveals the raw-nerve vulnerability that prompted TIME to praise him as “never
afraid to investigate his past and his demons, resulting in songs that are
clear-eyed in their honesty and raw around the edges.”
Centered on Maeson’s candid storytelling and gritty poetry, Bank on the Funeral takes its title from its
closing track: a quietly hypnotic number written for a beloved uncle, who was
murdered when Maeson was six-years-old. “He was a criminal when he was younger,
but once he got himself together he’d go out and minister to the people he used
to hang around with — the people the church would never try to reach — and
then one of those guys ended up going crazy and killing him,” says Maeson.
“What inspires me about him is how he’d go to the places no one else would go
and talk about the things no one else would talk about.”
Throughout Bank on the Funeral, Maeson brings
a similar courage to his songwriting, imbuing every track with an often-brutal
self-awareness. On the album-opening “I Just Don’t Care That Much,” he fires
off a litany of confessions (“Maybe life was just a bet/That I lost to drugs
and cigarettes”), brilliantly offsetting all that heavy-hearted deliberation
with his bright melodies and upbeat rhythms. Later, on the fast-paced and
horn-laced “Legacy,” Maeson’s spirited and sometimes-howled vocals relay some
borrowed wisdom about self-salvation. “That song’s about a night in Virginia
Beach when I was drunk on the street with my friends, and an old man came up to
us and started talking about life,” Maeson explains. “The lyrics are basically
me writing out everything I remember him saying.” But for songs like “The
Mask,” the album shifts into moodier and more darkly ethereal terrain, a potent
backdrop to his gently urgent vocal performance. “‘The Mask’ is about how
everybody has a mask they wear and how that always roots back to something —
some point in your life where you started pretending, and then eventually
started believing that’s who you really are,” Maeson says.
One of the most arresting tracks on Bank on the Funeral, “Beggar’s Song” begins
in hushed guitar tones and softly pleading vocals, then unfolds into a
stubbornly hopeful epic with gospel-like intensity. “I wrote ‘Beggar’s Song’
when I was broke and hungover at SXSW, and everybody was partying and I was
just over it,” Maeson remembers. “It’s about spending the last two years on the
road and what that’s felt like — that line ‘I’m a beat-down, washed-up son of
a bitch’ has definitely been true on multiple occasions.”
In the making of Bank on the Funeral, Maeson drew
equally from his instinct-driven songwriting process and from the natural
musicality he’s honed since he was a little kid. Originally from Norfolk,
Virginia, he was born into a music-loving family, including parents who played
in heavy metal bands throughout his early childhood. The same uncle who
inspired “Bank on the Funeral” gave Maeson a drum set when he was a toddler,
then left his nephew his own drums after he died. At 15, Maeson learned a few
guitar chords from his father and soon began writing songs, playing his first
live gig at a Chick-fil-A open-mic night and then moving on to the
penitentiaries. “My dad was a criminal growing up, but he ended up turning his
life around and becoming a youth pastor,” Maeson says. “Later on my parents
started a prison ministry, and I went along with them to play my songs in the
prisons.”
As he built up his
body of work, Maeson increasingly relied on songwriting as an emotional outlet.
“I started getting into a lot of trouble, doing a lot of drugs, getting
arrested,” he says. “Music became a way of getting things off my chest, and I
started writing with more honesty.” In addition to working construction 12
hours a day and doing community service on his time off, he began traveling the
country with a notebook and a guitar, often going back to play in the prisons
where he got his start. In 2015 he began posting his songs online and quickly
drew attention for “Grave Digger,” a starkly powerful track about “trying to
figure out how to navigate life after realizing that everything you were told
growing up isn’t necessarily true,” according to Maeson. He soon signed a joint
deal with Neon Gold/Atlantic Records, then made his debut with Who Killed Matt Maeson — a 2017 EP featuring his
breakthrough single “Cringe,” which hit #12 on Spotify’s US Viral 50. With his
sophomore EP The Hearse arriving in spring
2018, Maeson next headed out on tour with Bishop Briggs and took the stage at
major summer festivals like Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo.
In bringing Bank on the Funeral to life,
Maeson continued to tap into the cathartic power of making music.
“Songwriting’s always been very therapeutic for me,” he says. “Wherever I’ve
lived, there’s always been a secluded closet or bathroom where I could sing
really loud and not bother anybody.” And though he regards his songs as
“conversations with myself,” Maeson’s underlying mission is to include others
in that catharsis. “What I try to do is help people know that, even if their
problems feel so specific to their lives, everyone’s going through something
that feels just as specific,” he says. “If I can write about what’s upset me or
what I’ve learned from, and somehow help other people feel recognized and
understood, that’s always the ultimate goal.”