Matthew Sweet, ‘90s power pop icon, has matured over the last couple decades, but his guitars are as loud and crunchy as ever. Sweet is in town performing at City Winery in support of his latest album “Tomorrow Forever.”
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The record came together after the singer — known best for his singles “Girlfriend,” “I’ve Been Waiting,” and “Sick of Myself” — moved back to his native Nebraska and built a new home studio. Shortly after moving, his mother passed away.
“I’d been back for many months, so I got to spend really good time with her,” Sweet tells “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes. “But I also felt a weird kind of numbness, and it caused me to not really get started as quickly as I’d planned to on the record.”
Sweet says that as he got further into the songwriting process for the album, the emotions surrounding the loss of his mother began seeping into the music before more tragedy struck.
“I did a batch of slower, moodier songs and a lot of my feelings came out through those. I finally fulfilled putting the record out in June and then my father passed away just a couple weeks after that. So it’s strangely bookended. But I got to spend lots of time with him because we’d been back in Nebraska, so I feel lucky to have been there.”
One song on “Tomorrow Forever” called “Nobody Knows” deals explicitly with love and loss. One standout couplet is “I get a lot out of love without caring what it costs / it’s never going away when you’ve suffered such a loss.” The chorus references walking into the light. Sweet admits that the loss of his mother had an impact on the song.
“That song deals with […] how we’re all alone in a way, and the ending of things, none of us really know what it means or where we go… but it’s okay. It’s a part of life.”
Sweet’s mother’s presence can be felt in other songs on the album. He points to “You Knew Me.”
“My mother and I were very alike,” he explains. “I suffer from bipolar disorder and she suffered from it even worse and was undiagnosed. And so we had this relationship that was very close but sort of fraught—we both really had each other’s number.”
None of this is to imply that “Tomorrow Forever” is a sad, moody record. Fans of Sweet’s classic work will find some familiar sounds here. The songs are full of hooks, the harmonies are lush, and there are the requisite guest appearances, from the Bangles’ Debbi Peterson to Rod Argent of The Zombies lending some beautiful piano work to the song “Hello,” a late-in-the-album number which also includes another familiar trait of Sweet’s songwriting: science fiction.
“Time travel is something that gets into my music, time itself is something I muse a lot about,” Sweet says.
The chorus of “Hello” declares its narrator to be from the future. With Argent’s gorgeous piano work and a more wide-open sound than his ’60s pop-inflected tunes, the song gives the back half of the album an optimistic lift. It perhaps suggests that, though love and loss are never far away, there is reason to look forward to tomorrow, forever.
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