Canadian standout Matthew Good is still below U.S. radar

by Brian McCollum

Detroit Free Press (MCT)

18 March 2008

Music might be the universal language. But here’s one hard fact about the American cultural conversation: Canadian doesn’t always translate.

For every cross-border rock success - Nickelback, Barenaked Ladies, Alanis Morissette - there’s an Our Lady Peace, a Great Big Sea, a Sloan - acts that loom large on the Canadian landscape while failing to lure the stateside masses.

You can place Matthew Good firmly atop that list.

In the 1990s, the Vancouver musician emerged as one of his homeland’s standout stars, a singer-songwriter who combined pop’s sweet melodicism with the darkened edges of college alt-rock. With his Matthew Good Band, he sent a series of intelligently cultivated records to the top of the Canadian charts, dominating radio playlists and the Much-Music video channel.

But despite a brand of openhearted, make-the-girls-cry music that forged deep audience bonds, Good never quite cracked the wider U.S. market. And, six years into a solo career, the 36-year-old says that reality is just fine by him.

“Being where I am in my career, and what I accomplished in Canada - and being my age - touring the States now is just fun,” says Good. “A lot of Canadian bands out of the gate try to make some huge impact. At this point I’m not. I just want to play some shows for some people.”

Good is touring in support of “Hospital Music,” an occasionally grim but ultimately hopeful album written in the wake of a divorce and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The venues he’s playing are small, but the shows are lengthy - often stretching more than 2 ½ hours - in what Good describes as a musical conversation with his audience.

“It’s such a pleasure to do. In this business, if you’re lucky enough to be around 15 years after you started - I have to adhere to that Tom Waits adage: If you can play small rooms that are packed around the world, then that’s a career.”

In May, he’ll hit the road again, this time with a new five-piece band, an ensemble that will present his music with what Good calls a “Wilco-esque feel.” But playing the acoustic solo shows, as he has since “Hospital Music” was released last summer, is a creative outlet to which he says he’ll always return - a chance to reassess his own body of work as he brings it back to its roots.

“It’s a new perspective, especially going back and doing songs that were really big radio hits, breaking it down for the first time in a decade to where you were in your living room,” he says. “You’re onstage, and suddenly it washes over you: `Wow, this is where I was when I wrote it. This is that frame of mind.’ Then the song just comes out of you, 10 times what would have come out of you.”

Like all his albums, Good says, “Hospital Music” was a deliberate, self-conscious attempt to capture a moment - a task he calls “a massively important thing to do in life.” Last year found him going public with his bipolar disorder, or manic-depression, diagnosed after he was hospitalized in 2006 for an overdose of anti-anxiety pills.

It’s a paradox for Good: He describes the disorder as a frustration that “follows you everywhere. It’s like one of those order wheels at a diner, where there are always another five orders waiting. It never stops.” Yet he knows it’s also part of the same mental process that keeps him creatively fueled.

“Creation is destruction, and it has to be filled up somehow,” he says. “It’s just a battle. It’s a battle with yourself.”

Good says he’s watched the saga of Britney Spears with a combination of pity and dismay, seeing the worst side of showbiz rearing its head as the taboo of mental illness shows itself once again. It’s sadly familiar, he says.

“These are the things in our business that have always perplexed me. You’re dealing with people of a completely right-brained and artistic nature, but they’re supposed to be living this perfectly happy life?” he says. “The truth is, in this business you can lie or you can tell the truth, and that goes for things you struggle through.”

Good has found peace since his topsy-turvy `06, he says. And while he knows he may struggle psychologically for the rest of his life, he’s content to have carved out a career path that seems to have him covered from here on out.

“You know, if you can survive the early in years of being in a band, especially in the era I came up in, then you’ve made it,” he says. “If you can last for 14 or 15 years, I don’t see how you can be mad about much.”