About us > Past productions > 2009/10 > Girlfriend
program features
Prologue: From the Artistic Director
Playwriting and the power of yes
Connecting before disconnecting: life in the Berkeley Rep box office
Musical stages: decades of music at Berkeley Rep
Donor in the spotlight: Why producing Girlfriend is sweet
In it for the long haul: this Girlfriend is here to stay
I didn’t know nobody, then I saw you coming my way
A conversation with Matthew Sweet
prologue: from the artistic director
I think humanity can be divided into two distinct categories: those who hated high school and those who loved it. (If you derived even mild pleasure from the experience, you fall into the latter group.) I hated it. At least that’s how I like to remember it. Spent most of my time feeling astonishingly weird, even in what should have been the most comfortable of circumstances. I was pretty sure that everyone was looking right through me, that my skin was not actually skin but some kind of translucent surface designed to give onlookers the best possible view of my quivering self. And what self were they looking at? There wasn’t much of a self there, as far as I could tell.
But there were things that could save me, even on the darkest of days. My friends, for one. Or this really tight pair of pants that I wore with a pair of really pointy shoes. And music. Always the music. Music that spoke to my secret self, a self that was fantastic and brilliant and irresistible. If only the world knew what the music was telling me. If only I had the courage to act on the music. Like a zillion other teenagers on the planet, I sat in my room playing music—some albums over and over again, some songs on an endless loop. I played music not just because I loved it, but because my life depended on it.
Girlfriend is a story that captures the eternal and impossible yearning of the adolescent heart. Two high school boys try to come to terms with their feelings for each other. At stake are their identities, their relationships with their families and their futures. Set to the rock music of Matthew Sweet (whose 1991 album of the same name was the inspiration for the story by Todd Almond), the play is an attempt to capture the sweetness that is buried within every teenage heart. It is a story without guile, without irony, without pretension. How oddly refreshing.
The intrepid Les Waters is at the helm again, wielding his directorial magic with a trusty team of sure-handed designers and two gifted young actors. It was Les’ inspiration to back the boys on stage with an all-girl band, giving the audience a full complement of interpretive choices. Because at the end of the play, it’s all about the choices. The ones you made or didn’t make. And the music you were listening to when you made them.
Enjoy.
Tony Taccone
Artistic Director
playwriting and the power of yes
by Katie Henry
The first and most important thing I learned at the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre was how to say yes. I was 13, awkward and terrified of what was to be my first real acting experience in the Summer Theatre Intensive. I was onstage during improv class, and my scene partner had just asked me something completely absurd. It was strange and definitely not where I had wanted the scene to go. I froze, and looked to my teacher for support. “Just say yes,” my teacher said. “That’s all you have to do. Say yes.” I didn’t want to say yes. I was embarrassed and scared, and all I wanted was to go home and swear off this bizarre theatre world forever. But instead, for reasons unknown, I took a deep breath, turned to my partner and said, “Yes.”
It soon became clear to me that “yes” was an underappreciated word in the real world, but around Berkeley Rep that summer, it was the one syllable that kept everything going. Even after the session ended, and I started at Berkeley High, the yeses kept coming. Yes, I would like to join Teen Council. Yes, I would like to go to New York with Teen Council, go to Broadway shows and meet with theatre professionals and actors. Yes, I would love to go to Berkeley Rep shows at an incredible discount with my closest friends. Those answers were easy.
The first difficult answer came in 2007. For the two years prior, I had entered the Teen One-Acts Festival, and both years I had been turned down. Those first plays—one about Shakespeare, one about evangelical Christians—had been fun to write, but I didn’t mind when they weren’t chosen. I had no real personal connection to them. So when it came time to submit a new play, I was hesitant. I did have a play, but it was a dangerous, dangerous play. On the surface, it was about a group of high-school students who gather in the school basement for a meeting of the “Eccentricity Club,” a kind of support group for the weird, the freaky and the otherwise Not Totally Normal.
But really, Room 12 was about my own high school experience—the feelings of alienation and self-judgment and just being “different.” If the selection committee rejected this play, I knew that it would hurt more, that it would feel as though they were rejecting my very personal experiences. So with great trepidation, I sent it in.
This time, they said yes.
And throughout the whole rehearsal process, I returned the favor. When my director wanted to try something new, I was open. When my mentor had editing suggestions, I took them. And when the cast asked me if Room 12 was about me, I took a deep breath, and said, “Yes.”
The next year, I entered with something equally personal, a comedy about four friends navigating the college admissions process called Perfect Score. That year, I learned far more than to simply say yes. I learned what worked on stage, how to make a scene active and why tech week and sleep will never be compatible. And most importantly, I learned that if you write with truth, the audience will respond. They will say yes to you. The response to Perfect Score was overwhelming, from frustrated high schoolers to my own college counselor who sat front row on opening night. I saw the power that theatre had to influence and speak to people’s hearts.
I graduated from Berkeley High and started at New York University, majoring in playwriting. And as opportunities for contests and productions came in, most of my classmates shrugged and said they’d never have a shot at winning. They saw no reason to try. But Berkeley Rep had taught me well, and I applied to everything. And most of the time, the vast majority of the time, they said no. But on occasion they said yes, and that is how Perfect Score, a play that was developed and came to life in the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, came to be published by Playscripts Inc. in February 2010. It can now be purchased in book form or licensed for performance, and that is certainly not where I thought I’d be at age 19.
In the larger world, in the world outside Berkeley Rep, young people, especially young artists, are often discounted. We are told that we are too young, that we haven’t lived enough. We are told that we have nothing real to say. The School of Theatre constantly assures its students that they always have something to say, that their stories and their voices are important. Berkeley Rep gave me the guidance and the opportunities to discover my own voice and hone my writing and collaboration skills. But most importantly, they taught me that the most important word in theatre is, and always will be, yes.
connecting before disconnecting:
life in the berkeley rep box office
by Elana McKernan
Tuesday, 11:59am
My coworkers and I take a collective breath, put on our headsets and ready ourselves for noon.
The clock ticks on in Berkeley Rep’s box office, and the phones begin. On some days the ringing begins slowly, a tinny fugue that will build to crescendo around 12:45—the lunch rush. Other days, the advent of noon is like a gunshot at the beginning of a marathon: the calls barrel forward and don’t let up until the phones turn off at 7. We go home with sore throats and weary minds. On rare and glorious days (made the sweeter by their scarcity), the phone rings intermittently and we have time to catch up on filing, one another’s love lives (or lack thereof) and the proper way to shoot rubber bands without hurting our fingers in the process.
Though we answer dozens, even hundreds, of phone calls every day, we receive constant reminders that each call represents an individual with his or her own responsibilities, quirks and sense of humor. In this world of multitaskers, we get hundreds—hundreds!—of people calling to purchase tickets while driving. That’s fine until we come to the obligatory credit card transaction, at which point we’re torn between needing to complete the transaction and not wanting our patrons to get in a fiery crash while reading off their card numbers. Some of our phone calls can even be as entertaining and moving as our theatrical programming.
Two years ago, on one of my first days working in the box office, I remember answering a call from an unusually combative woman looking for tickets to a sold-out performance of Wishful Drinking. Horrified that my meekly repeated, “I’m so sorry, ma’am” and “I completely understand” had no effect on her, I was ready to hang up, change my name to Elana Doesalot and run away to London to live out the rest of my life as an earnest flower-seller prone to random bouts of song. When my sixth round of apologies was met with sudden silence, I assumed that the cell phone reception gods had smiled down on me and ended our call. As I reached for the “disconnect” button, I heard a strange noise on the other end—a sniffle. I froze. We had not covered this in training. What to do when a subscriber needs to exchange her tickets? Check. Nearby restaurants for pre-show dining? Check. What to do when the person on the other end of the line seems to be having an emotional breakdown? Somehow we’d missed that lesson.
“Ma’am?” I asked. “Ma’am? Is everything al—”
“I was just diagnosed with bipolar disorder. My husband’s leaving me, he’s taking the kids and I, I just…I need to see this play. I know I’m just one of the many, but…I could really use some hope right now.”
I ended up taking her number and finding her tickets to a different day, but what haunts me even two years after that conversation is how easily we could have disconnected without connecting. Though every day in the box office is (thankfully) not so dramatic, the phone calls we receive each represent a window into the lives and hearts of our patrons—from the man who recently shared a hilarious blonde joke with coworker Christina Cone (after which he paused awkwardly and said, “You’re not blonde, are you?”) to the long-time subscriber who sends us a personalized card each time we help him out with a ticket exchange.
Christine Bond, our ticket services director, concurs that one of the best parts of her job is “talking to patrons with whom I’ve developed relationships over the years.” Christine is not only in charge of managing customer relations, but also building a season into the ticketing system. “I divide my time among customer service, managing the staff and working on the more technical, computer-oriented end of things,” she explains.
Indeed, it’s difficult to get bored in the box office. Even those of us working primarily on the customer-service end of things have learned to explain, finesse and (hopefully) connect before disconnecting. Because theatre is such a uniquely personal and sometimes therapeutic experience, we have a great deal of respect for the public’s eagerness to experience our plays, and we take the time to get to know our patrons on a personal level. Next time you call in, feel free to introduce yourself. We’re listening.
The Berkeley Rep box office is open from noon to 7pm Tuesdays through Sundays. The staff is happy to connect with you at 510 647–2949.
musical stages:
decades of music at berkeley rep
by Chad Jones
At Berkeley Rep, the wind doesn’t exactly go sweeping down the plain. And if you happen to hear 76 trombones, that probably means there’s a parade on Addison Street.
Since its inception in 1968, Berkeley Rep has opted to produce many more plays than musicals, at least if your definition of a musical is My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music. But from the very beginning, music has been a major presence at the Theatre—often in surprising and inventive ways.
Madeleine Oldham, Berkeley Rep’s literary manager and dramaturg, appreciates the relationship Berkeley Rep has with music on stage. “Our love of music is vast and diverse, and as I see it, we’ve never felt constrained by a particular kind of sound,” she explains. “We’ll feature everything—from modern classical to rock ‘n’ roll to opera to folk—and blend it with our commitment to storytelling to create full, rich theatrical landscapes. I think music is inherently theatrical, and I love that it doesn’t have to sound like a ‘musical’ for us to want to put it on stage.”
Most recently, Berkeley Rep has produced several widely acclaimed rock-oriented shows with Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s Passing Strange and Green Day’s American Idiot, both of which ended up on Broadway. Now, with Matthew Sweet’s seminal album Girlfriend on stage, it might seem Berkeley Rep is in the musical theatre business. But music, in one fashion or another, has been there all along, just never in predictable ways.
Mitzi Sales, Berkeley Rep’s first managing director, recalls that musicals in the early years were an “occasional thing.” In general, she remembers, “Berkeley Rep rarely produced musicals in its first 15 years and never what one could call a well-known American musical.”
Long before Twilight took a bite out of its vampire-loving audience, Berkeley Rep produced a popular 1974 show called Dracula: A Musical Nightmare, with book and lyrics by Douglas Johnson (who also directed) and music by John Aschenbrenner. Turns out the script not only had teeth, it had legs—and it went on to productions in many cities. Aschenbrenner and Johnson also created the bicentennial musical Yankee Doodle: A Myth with Music, which featured Johnny Appleseed, Betsy Ross and King George III as characters. One critic described it as “a gleeful cross between the Sonny and Cher Show and the live coverage of the SLA shootout in Los Angeles.”
Some of the music heard at Berkeley Rep was created specifically for plays. Rock music pulsed through Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime in 1985 and Stephen Dietz’s Painting It Red in 1987. Folk music could be heard in Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie’s American Song, and classical opera figured largely in Don Juan Giovanni, Figaro and Brundibar. Even Celtic music (Peter and Wendy), traditional African-American music (Spunk, Polk County) and jazz (The Hairy Ape) has filled Berkeley Rep’s theatres. Among the great musicians who have created music at Berkeley Rep are Max Roach, Joshua Redman, Tan Dun and Jon Jang.
Mitzi was especially fond of The Tooth of Crime, Shepard’s story of a battle between an old-school, Elvis-type rocker and a nihilist punk rocker. The score by Stephen LeGrand was performed on stage by a four-piece band, and as Mitzi remembers, “I would go down and stand in the vom on weekday matinees just to hear the music.”
Longtime subscriber David Rosenthal is a fan of musical theatre (especially of Stephen Sondheim) and has enjoyed the variety of musical offerings at Berkeley Rep through the years. His favorite was Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money in 1989, a ferocious satire of high-stakes finances written primarily in rhymed couplets and underscored with music by Stephen LeGrand and Eric Drew Feldman.
“I mentioned to Tony Taccone recently that Serious Money was ripe for a revival to show how unsurprising the recent financial crisis was,” David says. “Such a big undertaking with music might be too expensive today. Irony much?”
Berkeley Rep has conducted musical experiments as well, most notably in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which featured a sung third act with a score by Paul Dresher, and in Steven Mackey and Rinde Eckert’s Ravenshead, a solo opera.
This season happened to feature two very different rock musicals. Who knows how Berkeley Rep will surprise audiences and re-interpret the musical in the future?
“I’ve wondered since I was a kid why there only seemed to be show tunes in the theatre, and why there couldn’t be room for other styles and genres,” Madeleine asks. “Berkeley Rep has answered this question for me by providing that room. Many of our commissioned writers have expressed interest in exploring a musical component in their plays, and I find this very exciting. We are expanding the notion of what a musical can be.”
donor in the spotlight:
why producing girlfriend is sweet
by Sarah Nowicki
Guy Tiphane has been a producer at Berkeley Rep since TRAGEDY: a tragedy in 2008. We talked recently about producing Girlfriend and why he remains involved with the Theatre.
What made you interested in producing Girlfriend?
Les Waters was the motivating factor, as I’ve produced shows he’s directed in the past and trust his artistic vision. Girlfriend is something I didn’t see Berkeley Rep doing. I saw it workshopped at TheatreWorks two years ago, and I kept saying, “I don’t like musicals.” When Berkeley Rep announced it as part of the season, Dramaturg Madeleine Oldham convinced me it’s not really a musical but more like a rock album. Before agreeing to produce, I listened to Matthew Sweet’s album and liked it, so I agreed to put my name on this one.
What do you enjoy about being a producer?
I enjoyed producing The Lieutenant of Inishmore. I was able to see it many times from different points of view. Les’ goal was to make the show over the top. I don’t like the sight of blood and the gory details, but the production worked because it was so absurd. I also produced TRAGEDY: a tragedy. I enjoy being at the design presentations, and I love watching the show from the booth with the stage managers.
You’re bringing a large group to the performance on April 15, which is also night/OUT, a post-performance party for the LGBT community. Why do you keep coming back to Berkeley Rep’s special events?
I really like the opening-night events, with the pre-show dinner and the party after the performance. I like the social aspect and the casual environment of these events. I’ve been to other theatres’ events, and they’re just not as much fun. I bring my friends with me, and it is a nice place for us to socialize.
You live in downtown Berkeley. How have you seen the downtown arts community change since you’ve been here?
I’ve lived downtown for three years. It’s been great to see the arts grow. After Freight & Salvage went in, I thought, “Where can I put in my own theatre?” It will be really great when the UC Theatre is renovated into a music venue.
Why do you support Berkeley Rep?
Berkeley Rep sustains the highest quality in every aspect of the production—from stage management to the design teams, even to the front-of-house staff. I know people who work in theatre, and they all look up to Berkeley Rep. Berkeley Rep sets a standard for the theatre community and provides valuable opportunities for people to get involved with productions who may not have done so otherwise.
Supporters at all levels are invited to catch a glimpse of the inner workings of Berkeley Rep. For your invitation, click berkeleyrep.org/give or call 510 647–2907 and make your gift.
in it for the long haul:
this girlfriend is here to stay
Compiled by Madeleine Oldham
Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend may not have been a multi-platinum bestseller, but it captured the heart of many a discerning listener. Legions of fans remain fiercely devoted to Sweet’s emotional songwriting and underdog persona. When the album first came out, no one expected it to become the sensation it did. We talked with playwright Todd Almond and other diehard Matthew Sweet fans to find out what’s so special about this unassuming yet captivating collection of songs.
I listened to Girlfriend every day when it came out in the early ‘90s. I dubbed copies (on cassette tape, of course) for my friends. I made my family listen to it on long road trips. I’ve bought it, misplaced it, replaced it, loaned it, uploaded it (these days), downloaded it and gifted it over the years. I wrote a musical about it, for heaven’s sake. Girlfriend is a thing on the planet that I love very much, and this musical is as much a love-letter to that album as it is anything else.
—Todd Almond, playwright
Can you articulate what drew you to the album?
I was unhappily living in Dullsville (Santa Fe), which is where my Dad lives. I hated it and was trying to move back to San Francisco. I was comforted by this music when I would play it while driving, and it would be one of the few things that I enjoyed doing. But this isn’t so much of a “memory” record for me. I can gladly listen to it nowadays and appreciate it on its own terms.
—Michelle, usher at the Warfield Theatre
If you listen to the album today, what does it make you think of?
I’m listening to it right now, and it makes me think of the girlfriend I just broke up with. These nice little complete and decorated sentiments put that relationship into a bit of perspective. It makes me feel better, actually. Matthew Sweet has a way of pounding my own significance into the ground with backing vocals and searing guitars.
—Jonathan, photographer
Do you have a particular memory associated with Girlfriend?
Most of my memories of the album are of me driving (or, rather, sitting) in LA traffic singing along at the top of my lungs. “Nothing Lasts” is probably the most emotional song on the album, and I remember driving back to my apartment after breaking up with my girlfriend and playing that song. I didn’t sing along—I simply remember noticing the way the lights outside the car played across the dashboard as I drove. It wasn’t a heartbreaking moment, just a sober realization that it had to end eventually.
—Christian, story artist at Pixar
Do you have a favorite track?
I love all of them, but my top three are probably: “You Don’t Love Me,” “Winona” and “Thought I Knew You.” Oh wait…there’s “I’ve Been Waiting.” Oh yeah…“Looking at the Sun.” Oh forget it—I can’t answer the question. I love the whole thing.
—Cheri, accountant
i didn’t know nobody, then i saw you coming my way
by Mike Sablone
In 1992 (in suburban Massachusetts I wasn’t cutting-edge enough to have noticed that the album came out in 1991), I was 15 years old. My music taste, much like that of most suburban kids in a predominantly white suburb, started with comedy albums (Weird Al, Monty Python) and evolved into mostly rap and hip-hop (Public Enemy, Dr. Dre).
I had skipped bands like, say, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin (I’m not too ashamed to admit that I just Googled their name to make sure I spelled it correctly), or that other band…the Beatles.
So when I first heard “Girlfriend” and “Evangeline” and “Divine Intervention,” it was like someone had plugged in my brain to this astonishing new series of sounds. Melody. Guitars. Drum fills. False endings. Vocal harmonies. I had no idea the history behind the album. All I knew was this record spoke to me.
Hearing the song “Girlfriend,” I finally understood what pop music was there for. It was there for me to understand that I wasn’t alone. It was there to tell me, “Don’t worry, I know you are a ball of terrified emotions right now, but this guy, this guy right here? He’s going to say everything you’re thinking. Everything you’re going to think. Everything that has been thought of before. And it’s all going to be OK.”
Popular music is popular because of this reason. This is why music works—it convinces teenagers that they’re not alone. It allows people to express everything they’re feeling, but in four minutes of perfect melody.
When I got to college two years later I met my best friend by talking to him about this album. We talked about how there was supposedly a college class that examined how perfect this album was. We talked about how pissed off we were that it wasn’t our college that offered this course. We then talked about the radio show we’d co-host for the next four years.
Girlfriend has a special place in my heart, but if I’m forced to say my favorite song it’s “Evangeline.” I remember MTV discussing the song, telling me that it was about a Japanese anime character. I remember trying to find out everything I could about this character. I remember then not caring, and making the song into a song that I wrote about whatever girl I had a hopeless crush on at the time.
You ask if the album still holds up for me? Ask me about the last girl I had a crush on. Ask me if I made her a mix CD. Do you need to ask me if I put “Evangeline” on there?
(Well, I might not have, unless I’m feeling bold. I usually wait ‘til the second or third mix CD. You can’t put “Girlfriend” on there—that’s just too obvious, and also? Kinda creepy. But I can kind of, sort of [but not really] get away with “Evangeline.” Note: this could be why I’m still single. I haven’t found the girl who appreciates this song as much as I do.)
I saw Matthew Sweet perform every time he came to Providence while I was in college. I drove down during the summer to see him in, like, 1995. WBRU, the terrible college radio station in Providence was playing “Good” by Better Than Ezra seemingly every five minutes. Driving around post-concert, I swore that if they played it twice while we hung out I’d buy the damn album to get them to stop playing it (the theory being that once I bought the record the radio station wouldn’t need to sell it so relentlessly to me). They, of course, played it four more times in the next 90 minutes. The next day I went and bought the record. I have no idea where that record is. I can still tell you exactly where my copy of Girlfriend is.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I would take a bullet for Matthew Sweet.
Mike Sablone is a dramaturg working for Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, where he develops new plays and musicals. He warns you not to get him started on anything music related as he won’t shut up. He is currently working on a 500-song Best of the Decade compilation that will rank songs, in reverse order of amazingness from 500 to 1. The CD will also include liner notes.
a conversation with matthew sweet
by Madeleine Oldham
Picture someone who has dedicated his life to rock ‘n’ roll: Matthew Sweet is hardly the first person who comes to mind. A polite, generous, hard-working Midwestern boy, Sweet comes across as, well…very sweet. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1964, he has built a lengthy musical career through talent, perseverance and authenticity that defies traditional stereotypes of the raging, self-destructive musician. He has managed to remain his approachable and unpretentious self in the face of a world that revolves around flash and image. Berkeley Rep’s dramaturg and literary manager, Madeleine Oldham, had a chance to talk with Sweet last year during his Sunshine Lies tour, and the following are excerpts from that conversation.
You’ve been making music for a very long time now. Is it still fun?
You know, that’s a really good question. I think it is still fun for me. It’s a very hard business as far as trying to make it support you and your life and all that, and so I think there’s always this tendency when things aren’t going well to think, “Well, maybe I just have to do something else.” And I’ve gotten to a point a couple times where I felt that way. But I always tend to feel a lot better when I do music. It’s just what I do. I think there were times when I was afraid nobody cared, and I had to get used to the idea that no one else has to care about it but me.
But other than that, I think it’s always remained pretty fun for me. People will ask me, “Why did you get into music when you were really young?” And it’s the same kind of thing—it made me feel better than anything else, and I could lose myself in it and feel somehow freed a little bit from life, you know? And I think it’s still that way when it’s fun because it’s just something different; it’s a whole other way of feeling and thinking. It just kind of takes me away from real life.
And when you had those moments of “maybe nobody cares,” did you ever seriously think about doing something else?
I don’t think so, really. When I started out, I didn’t have any concept of what it would be like to have fans and all that. I really only cared about recording and writing songs and making a record. I didn’t really realize that you won’t get to keep doing that if you don’t sell some, you know? And my first couple records didn’t really sell, but I was lucky enough to follow the guy who had signed me around to a couple of labels. Then when Girlfriend took off, which was kind of a slow process, it was like this whole other dimension of what people thought about me. That sort of freaked me out and also added a lot of pressure, business-wise, to come up with something someone was gonna like, which wasn’t the kind of artist I was to begin with. So I think it put a damper sometimes on my spirit, just knowing there was that kind of pressure there, and in a weird way, even at the times I did the best, there was still this feeling it was not enough. And the music business was already heading the way it ended up at the end of the ‘90s, where it really started dissolving into people caring less and less about the music and more and more about actual numbers they could move.
So I think only when I was asking myself, “Will I get to make more records?” did I ever start to get worried and lose faith. But I like to go on my own MySpace page and see what everybody says about me and interact with people. Whenever I get it together to release something, I’m always really surprised that there’s anybody out there that cares. And it doesn’t need to be a large amount now, cause I’ve been around for a long time and the game has changed so much and I can sell small amounts of records. We’ll break even and make more records. And I think there’s some correlation between the less big business it is, the more I’m able to relax and get back to feeling like I did initially, which was just excited about music and doing it really mainly for me.
I also love playing live because you find out there are people out there who really do care about music, and they also care about seeing music live. And so I think that right now, people like me are trying to figure out how exactly you get to the people who do care if you release something.
And do you have thoughts about how you do that?
It’s really the same way we got going on Girlfriend in the beginning. I mean, it wasn’t like it suddenly happened. It started really small on a grassroots level, and lots of people worked hard to get other people turned on to it.
And that’s how we used to feel about so many artists—all those artists that we just revered from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Then records became less important as computers came in, and the Internet and all that, and there were just so many things to look at and be into. Back when we were into records, we would just sit in our rooms and it was all you had as your shield against your parents, or whatever.
How do you see the music business now?
Music itself is so unique, that I think it really can be independent of all those things. That’s why I think if you’re a musician who just does it, you can get in the mode of it, and it has its own life. And you hope it will find some people that like it so you can make a living. I mean, I wish somebody would just give me millions of dollars, and I would give my music away for free for the rest of my life—I’d rather do that! Before people were downloading music I would say to my manager, “Can’t we just, like, give it away free and just make money some other way?” ‘Cause I hated that feeling of pressure on the music to be successful.
Why do you think Girlfriend was such a successful album for you?
Well, I think basically people related to it. I was talking about feelings and relationships at a time when really it was an era of bands that were much less clear about what they were saying. The record didn’t sound like any other records right then either. So it was kind of radical sounding at the moment, which gave it this sort of grooviness thing. But I really think people just related to the feelings in the songs. It’s an interesting thing to see, and it’s really cool how much impact that can have. Like, that makes someone really never forget you, you know?
a matthew sweet discography
Full-length releases
Inside · 1986
Earth · 1989
Girlfriend · 1991
Altered Beast · 1993
Son of Altered Beast · 1994
100% Fun · 1995
Blue Sky on Mars · 1997
In Reverse · 1999
The Thorns · 2003
Living Things · 2004
Kimi Ga Suki · 2004
Sunshine Lies · 2008
Compilations, Cover Albums, Collections
Time Capsule: The Best of Matthew Sweet · 2000
To Understand: The Early Recordings of Matthew Sweet · 2002
Under the Covers, with Susannah Hoffs
Vol. 1 · 2006
Vol. 2 · 2009
