STACK Mar #137

84 / 99

Y ou’re sitting in label headquarters with a room full of
honchos, after a frenetic period of writing and multi-
angled pressure, and the first pressing of your debut
album begins to play. And you hate what you’re hearing. What
do you do? “Do I just scrap this thing, and I’ve wasted
everyone’s time, or do I go ‘Well, that’s just my first album
and I’ll do better next time?’ I don’t want to put anything out
there that misrepresents what I think I can do,” Matt Corby
explains earnestly. The singer-songwriter decided he couldn’t
betray his heart, and hurled the whole thing to the dogs. He
began afresh on something unapologetically himself, learning
several new instruments and doing all the demos homebrew,
and 24 months later Telluric was completed.
“What I wanted to accomplish by learning how to play
[new instruments] was, I wanted to learn them to the
standard that I hear, when I hear music in my head,” he says.
“Every songwriter walks around hearing full compositions all
the time: the guitar part there, the horns there. And if you
don’t have the technical capacity to play that sh-t, that song
Matt Corby’s Telluric is a
subtle tumult of glimmering
guitar, kooky jazz rhythms and
beautiful, absorbing harmonies.
Corby spoke to STACK about
finding the courage to break
his own rules. By Zoë Radas
visit MUSIC FEATURE
12 MARCH 2016
MUSIC