Matthew Connor feels the dark tension of American life with ‘Lose This Number’
Boston songwriter to release striking new single and video on August 26
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Matthew Connor’s new album ‘Disappearances’ set for release this fall
Photo Credit: Sam Quinn
BOSTON, MA [August 26, 2022] – Matthew Connor doesn’t just write songs, he creates worlds and sets them to music. The Boston-based artist, an evocative 21st-century crooner whose songwriting acumen has allowed him to dance freely across a genre spectrum that’s definable solely by the audience’s whims and moods, has been relatively quiet since the pandemic hit so many moons ago. On Friday, August 26, Connor is reawakened with a slow burn illuminated by midnight, as he and his unmistakable baritone voice return from the shadows with “Lose This Number,” a stirring new single that pushes his avant-pop into even greater theatrical and cinematic territories.
And that’s by design. “Lose This Number,” complete with its dramatic video of noir voyeurism and retro cool, directed and edited by Connor himself, is the start of a new chapter for the Alabama-born, Boston-weathered musician. Later this fall, Connor will release Disappearances, a grand artistic gesture that aches and yearns in both nature and stature, his first new music since 2020’s “This World” single and first extended release since 2016’s critically-acclaimed Night After Night EP.
With its tremolo guitars and Portishead-styled beat, “Lose This Number” sets a sharp tone for the album ahead, with a sonic lean into country balladry, a jazzy melody/chord structure, and hazy specters of espionage and militarism swirling around an all-too-real sentiment many of us have experienced since we last sat down with Connor’s lived-in storylines.
“‘Lose This Number’ is about losing someone to a cult, in a sense,” Connor says. “It’s about the uneasiness in America these past six years, in particular; that uncanny feeling of looking around and realizing your neighbors, family members, even friends have bought into some seriously unhinged beliefs, have become people you no longer recognize.”
Though the first song written for Disappearances, “Lose This Number” is simply one chapter positioned in the middle of the 10-song album, which follows a running storyline of people who have gone missing under varying circumstances. It’s a haunting turn for a songwriter who has soundtracked our overnight lives; whereas before Connor would often provide an air of uneasy tension about our motives and persuasions, here he has pulled back the curtain to reveal empty spaces where life was once lived, and the feelings of desperation we experience when the answers are not so readily available.
“In some ways I feel like it’s the most direct song on the album,” Connor explains. “I wanted to lean in a bit of a country direction with Disappearances, but not in an especially obvious way. I think each song has a distinct vibe, but that thread of spectral country really ties everything together, along with the analog touch of my co-producer Jeremy Page. Lyrically, every song on Disappearances is a ballad about someone who has disappeared; in the case of this song, both the narrator and the ‘you’ they are singing to have disappeared, in different ways.”
Such a dramatic songwriting vision usually lends itself to a magnetic visual component, and that’s at play in the “Lose This Number” video, which accompanies the release. The clip, produced by Jen Bagley and shot by Denez McAdoo, was filmed at Regent Theatre in Arlington, back in Spring 2021; for Connor and most of the crew, it was the first time they were able to be together since the start of the pandemic. Suddenly, a song from an album about those who have disappeared was a conduit for bringing people back together.
“My original vision was to do a more straightforward performance video, where I would be decked out in something ghostly and glamorous, singing in a dingy underground bar to a very bedraggled audience in military-ish garb,” Connor admits. “But COVID threw a wrench in that – a large group of people in tight quarters indoors was obviously not possible.”
Connor found his ultimate inspiration flickering across the screen. “In 2020, I spent most of my quarantine time watching movies – I watched a movie nearly every day, and found that going to the theater was the pre-COVID activity I missed the most. Tsai Ming-liang’s film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, about the last night of business at a run-down movie theater, especially resonated with me; the ‘Lose This Number’ video was something of an homage to that film. It ended up being a performance video after all, but with an added layer of abstraction: instead of singing directly to an audience, my performance was mediated through a movie screen, much like how we have grown accustomed to watching concerts via Zoom and YouTube.”
Media Contact: Please direct all press inquiries to Matthew Connor at mc@matthewconnor.net or Michael Marotta at michael@publisist.co.
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‘Lose This Number’ single artwork:
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‘Lose This Number’ production credits:
Song Credits:
Written by Matthew Connor
Produced by Matthew Connor & Jeremy Page
Mixed by Jeremy Page
Mastered by Kevin Blackler at Blackler Mastering
Cover photo by Sam Quinn
Matthew Connor: Vocals, guitars, keys, clarinet, samples & programming
Jeremy Page: Guitars, bass, keys, additional drums & programming
Andy Bauer: Drums
Karen Sarkisian: Pedal steel
Video Credits:
Directed and Edited by Matthew Connor
Produced by Jen Bagley
Director of Photography: Denez McAdoo
Camera Assistants: Rich Chandler, Sam Quinn, Billy Thegenus
Hair/Makeup: Alicia Dane
Construction: Andy Laffin
Production Assistants: Kenneth Frank, Mary Hewey
Extras: Jen Bagley, Kenneth Frank, Maura Johnston, Joya Jones, Sam Quinn, Billy Thegenus
Car courtesy of: Andrew Smalls, Melissa Williams.
Filmed at Regent Theatre, Arlington
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Matthew Connor short bio:
Matthew Connor is a crooner for the 21st century, writing heart-wrenching songs that combine the windswept ideals of classic American balladry with stark depictions of modern-day alienation. The Boston-based Connor has a haunting voice that conjures ghosts of past heartbreaks, and he pairs it with spectral guitars that recall country tearjerkers and alt-pop brooding. —Maura Johnston
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On Matthew Connor’s Disappearances, by Brad Nelson:
Places of disappearance are pervaded by a sense of mystery and melancholy. Think of moonlight shivering over stalks of wheat. Trees in the forest cross hatching into new unreadable black metal band logos. Floorboards in an old house weeping in the most abandoned keys. This is the kind of scenery that Matthew Connor’s new album, Disappearances, plants itself in, the realm where one can cross over from the missing to the gone. Every song on the record is a story of someone parting the curtain of reality and slipping behind it; some of the disappeared are runaways, some have been taken, some have been swallowed up by darkness without evidence or explanation, but each missing person opens up a mystical emptiness in the place they’ve left behind and in the people who still live there.
“Someone’s disappeared again / and now they’re dragging the reservoir,” Connor sings on the opener “HeatLightning”; his Scott Walker-esque baritone thrums against the steady heartbeat of a bass drum and a guitar ruminating somewhere between country and old rock and roll but never fully giving into either. Connor plays in the shadows of both genres throughout the record – think Chris Isaak if he really disappeared into the BlackLodge just like his character in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. In fact, Connor’s work on Disappearances is more than a little Lynchian, particularly in the mode of Peaks and Mulholland Dr.; his songs thrill and despair at the impossibility of knowing someone completely, the missing pieces in our images of other people, especially since those images are subject to constant erosion. “He was gone before the memories finished forming / I’ve forgotten if his eyes were grey or green” goes a lyric in “Sawdust Trail,” the narrator attempting to pin down the last remaining details of a phantomic lover that rises from a lake.
The real keeps bending into the surreal in this way over the course of Disappearances, people wandering so far from home and so deeply into themselves that they no longer recognize the world around them. Bridges and codas open like trap doors in the songs. The percussion can sound like some stumbling through a field crunching dead leaves underfoot, or like a riding crop sounding in the distance. It can also crackle like an old record, or rather like a sample of an old record you might hear creaking its way through a Portishead song; on“Lose This Number,” the first single from the record, such a drum figure stutters through the track and pulses against thick spiderwebs of guitar, as Connor’s voice sings of the loneliness and the feelings of disappearance that accompany a friend’s betrayal: “When they come for me / and they’re going to come / don’t you come running to my aid.”
Connor’s keen observations of the ghostly trails people leave behind is what binds the songs on Disappearances together, even when the arrangements are crisp and spangled as a Nudie suit, as they are on “Desaparecido,” a legitimate country ballad that builds and builds until it’s suddenly a political song for Linda Ronstadt to sing, complete with choir. But the album is also capable of the stillness of a garden at night, beauty shrouded and complicated by the dark. “Driftwood” is one of the most gorgeous moments on the album for this very reason, the pale light of Connor’s falsetto sinking into a coursing riverbed of strings and guitar, his narrator wanting to be fully aware of the moment before their disappearance – or possibly even their death – “I want to see it coming / I want to look it in the eye / I want to know what hit me / I want to blow a kiss goodbye.” After Connor stops singing, the strings and guitars coil into a vortex that the song disappears down. And just like that, it’s gone.
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Media praise for Matthew Connor:
The music of Matthew Connor has been featured in NYLON, Out Magazine, Vanyaland, Flaunt, Glamour, PopMatters, AllMusic, Kaltblut, Songwriting Magazine, Bistro Awards, Cambridge Day, Sound of Boston, and other fine publications and outlets.
“‘Night After Night,’ the latest from Boston-based singer Matthew Connor, combines a lighter rhythm than you might spend the night dancing to, but just the right tempo to settle your mind after a night out. Connor’s soft voice paired with the floating rhythm could easily make its way into any lounge where people sip wine on velvet couches instead of pounding shots on a cracked leather barstool.” _Out Magazine
“Connor has decided to take his music in a new direction — darker, deeper, and more raw.” _Flaunt Magazine
“If you listen to Matthew Connor‘s latest album, a cinematic masterpiece, you’ll hear a clean, well-produced mix of instrumentals that accompany his voice. It’s no surprise he composes soundtracks for films. ‘Midnight Blue’ is an eerie, immersive experience. It feels like walking into the haunted house of an opera singer cast away from the choir for being just a bit too daring and subversive.” _Sound of Boston
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Matthew Connor press photo:
Photo Credit: Sam Quinn
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Press Contact: michael@publisist.co or mc@matthewconnor.net
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