Matt Holubowski took the time to craft Like Flowers on a Molten Lawn, a more experimental fourth album, which arrives with spring, the season that inspired its entire creation.
If you thought the melancholy Montreal singer-songwriter was more of the fall type, you were right. “It’s always been my favorite season. I found it more poetic, because everything dies in the fall and it reminds us that life is precious. »
But “something happened” and the idea of spring, flowers and the cycle of the seasons is everywhere in this album inspired by a text by the American poet E. E. Cummings, Spring Is Like a Perhaps Hand.
“I talked about it, I thought about it constantly. In this poem, it is as if we were watching spring forming. You see it settle, like a painter who throws a color, who observes and waits. I’ve wanted to create this way for a long time, doing things slowly. »
Matt Holubowski welcomed us on this first day of spring – a coincidence – in his Mile End studio, cluttered with instruments after a day of rehearsals with his musicians. It was there that we met the talkative singer for the release of his previous album, the very beautiful Weird Ones, in February 2020. A few weeks later, everything closed – he was even the one who had given one of the last big shows in Montreal, March 4 at the MTelus.
The tour that was planned then never took off as expected. But even if it talks about rebirth and apocalypse, Like Flowers on a Molten Lawn is not an album inspired by the pandemic, specifies Matt Holubowski. What she brought him was rather “the luxury of time”, to learn and to create, without obligation.
Synths, software and recording techniques of all kinds have become an obsession for the musician. He even says he spent two weeks following a tutorial on how a 1970s echo machine works!
“I’ve always been afraid to step into this world because it’s so endless. But I came home and it’s like I’m never going to run out of toys, that I’m never going to see the end of it. »
Which makes him especially happy. So Like Flowers on a Molten Lawn would be a geek album? He smiles, satisfied. ” Such ! I could tell you about it ad nauseam. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this excited about something,” says Matt Holubowski, who concedes he could “be into turning pitons and plugging wires” for the rest of his life.
He ended up writing songs anyway, and it was producer Pietro Amato who was there to help him channel all of this new assimilated technique. “Without Pietro, I think I would have made an album just of sound effects! »
Matt Holubowski is convinced that this whole process made him “exponentially more creative” and gave him a better understanding of his songs. The album thus developed slowly, through trial and error and weeks spent in chalets or studios with its musicians. “It took a year and a half. We tweaked, we scrapped entire tounes, we started again. »
The result is a textured, rich and evanescent album, which juxtaposes drum machine and drums, mixes rock guitar and a symphony orchestra, includes French horn and koto, and in which he mainly plays keyboards. “I’m just playing a song on the guitar. It’s a deliberate choice, “says the musician who was introduced to the world of synths.
“I was afraid of becoming a cliché of me on the guitar. I felt like I wasn’t reinventing myself enough. By recognizing my limits, it allowed me to focus on other aspects of my creativity. »
The goal in all of this: to look in the mirror with a “raw and honest look”, to put yourself in danger, not to rest on your laurels. He sings differently for the same reasons, not to rely solely on the “dynamism” of his voice.
It’s clear, Matt Holubowski doesn’t like going on autopilot very much. “That’s how I like to live life. But if this album is different and more experimental, he sees it above all as the continuity of his previous ones. And he is now as tempted by the instrumental album as he is itching to return to the acoustic guitar as he was in the days of his first album, Old Man.
“What the process made me realize was accepting that I’m not caught in a style cage,” says the singer, who is about to go on tour again and hopes his album can continue to evolve into a show. And if he still oscillates between springtime joy and autumnal sadness, he awaits the sequel knowing that a career in music is made of many more disappointments than successes.
“We’ll talk about it in a year, if I still want to be a spring guy. »
