STACK #137 Mar 2016

MUSIC FEATURE

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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

MUSIC

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

MARCH 2016

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