It probably wouldn’t surprise many people, upon meeting Matthew Good for the first time, to find him withdrawn and somewhat sullen. This is the man, after all, who sold shirts embossed with the message “I Heard Matt Good is a Real Asshole.” Good’s music isn’t exactly bubble-gum pop, either; he is well known for his introspective yet anguished lyrics.
It is a rainy afternoon in downtown Vancouver, and Good fits in with the atmosphere. Today, however, he is sullen for a reason: “He’s sick,” says Paula Danylevich, Good’s publicist, as we walk into his hotel room. “But don’t worry, he’s not contagious,” she adds.
Remnants of room service litter the doorway. By the looks of it, Good enjoys mussels — there is a tower of shells piled high on a plate. He sits at a small table, wearing his signature glasses, with his laptop open in front of him. Like the carnage of shells heaped outside the door, Matthew looks as if he has seen better days.
“I have borderline pneumonia, and I am on a ton of medication. It’s not fun,” Good says as I sit down. He sighs as we shake hands, but brightens up once we begin talking about his new album, Arrows of Desire.
Unlike Good’s current condition, his new album has a lot more pep. Departing from the slower, ballad-filled albums like Hospital Music or Vancouver, Arrows of Desire gets back to what made Good famous in the first place: rock n’ roll.
Almost as if to emphasize his rebellion from rigid guidelines, Good lights up a cigarette and inhales deeply.
“It’s a back to basics record. Coming off how heady Lights of Endangered Species was, it was something I wanted intrinsically to do . . . when I sat down to write it, I wanted to get back to the roots of the matter,” he says.
Arrows of Desire does exactly what Good intended. Fundamentally, the album is quite reminiscent of Matthew Good Band, which dissolved in 2002. Good’s solo work has careened away from good old-fashioned rock for quite some time, and a return to his roots could have proved disastrous. Reflecting an earlier sound can often come off as repetitive drivel or make the artist seem as if he is trying to recapture his glory days of yesteryear and escaped youth.
Arrows of Desire defies the odds, though. With punched-up, slightly distorted guitars, basic drumming, and a powerful vocal performance, Arrows of Desire is an anthemic piece that is familiar, but not the exactly. Good has managed to do what others have failed at — return to an original sound without illiciting a completely cringe-worthy response.
Religious references seem to spot the album with songs like “Via Dolorosa”, “Arrows of Desire” and “Hey, Heaven, Hell”, but Good shakes his head, waving off any notion of spirituality in the album: “I am secular humanist,” he states. Almost as if to emphasize his rebellion from rigid guidelines, Good lights up a cigarette and inhales deeply.
“Via Dolorosa,” he says, explaining the references, “has the historical context of Christ . . . but it also has a literary sense of the passage into suffering. This song is more about the crisis of humanity. It’s about any kind of trial that you have to endure, or any trial that you cause others to endure. It’s [about] the madness that resides in those realities.”
Brimming with metaphor, Arrows of Desire is a not the average sex, drugs and rock n’ roll album. But Good isn’t exactly a normal rockstar, either. He currently lives on a ranch in Mission, BC, with his wife and three children. Instead of tales of drunken shenanigans and pretty women, Good shares stories of family life: “My oldest daughter broke her arm yesterday. She got thrown from her horse, but she was tough about it,” he says.
Don’t expect Good’s simple, less-than-rockstar lifestyle to stop him from making music, though: “You don’t have the choice to stop when you are an artist. It’s not just something you can shut off . . . As long as I can somehow make records, I will make records.”
