I’m not great at telling people about all the creative stuff I do. But since it’s a New Year, it’s a new me, or whatever.
I’ve been writing and performing music since I was in junior high. My favorite memory is walking out of a guitar lesson because I wanted to learn some Queens of the Stone Age, and this guy wearing a conkshell necklace wanted to teach me a Christian rock song. My dad lobbied for me to do sports. My mom lobbied for me to do art and music. I compromised by playing football (small-town Louisiana in a division with teams that maybe had 20 players max) and learning drums.
By now, I’ve released several albums under the name The Widowers (the rock group that would get a little too rowdy for a show that had maybe 30 people at it at most), and electronic beats under the name Matthewthomas (I don’t know why other than I love The Chemical Brothers and Aphex Twin).
This post, however, is to tell you about a new musical project called Infinite Runner. It’s heavier, moodier, and I’m proud of it. The first Infinite Runner release is called Piece of Cake. I’m releasing it on Tuesday, Feb. 13, because Tuesdays are when music is supposed to be released. I will die on that mountain. I do not care if I’m the only one. And yes, CDs are better than vinyl. “Warmth” in sound is an illusion. It depends on speakers.
But I digress.
Infinite Runner started as a joke, a way to fill time in 2020. Remember that hellscape? If I had free time, I would plug in my laptop, boot up LogicPro, and connect my guitar to this rickety USB/instument cable device, then voila, I’m recording. It started as a nu-metal tribute, because I was writing about that, and it just sunk in as often whatever you listen to does. Those bands — Deftones, System of a Down — that’s how I learned guitar. I printed out tabs of their stuff, memorized the numbers, then I was playing “My Own Summer,” “Chop Suey!,” and every other jam from that era.
For a time, I hated that I loved that music. I thought I should be smarter or not admit that I bought Taproot’s Welcome (which has a song called “Poem”) on the same day I bought …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s Source Tags and Codes (10.0 from Pitchfork).
But back to this project, I sent a shitload of demos to Paul Kintzing of German Error Message, pretty much my brother and someone I’ve been playing music with since those same junior high days. In his wisdom, Paul was like, “Hey, this is cool and funny, but why are you trashing this? You like nu-metal, that’s fine. Dig deeper. Take this heavier music seriously.”
In between freelance assignments, I kept coming back to that idea of digging deeper and went for it. Soon, I was reassembling demos. I was pitching down entire guitar and bass tracks. I was writing honest lyrics and not doing it for validity or to meet someone else’s standards of how something should sound.
At Paul’s advice, I started working on this batch of songs with George Pauley, engineer and mixer extraordinaire and the guitarist/vocalist of The By-Gods. I was re-recording vocals and drums and bass at his place. Then, George sends it to this Grammy-winning mastering wiz. I get these tracks back, and I’m like, “This is exactly what I want to do, musically.”
Is it nu-metal? I don’t know. I don’t care. If anything, Piece of Cake is what I think a lot of people are going through — being super self-aware, navigating a constant need to be present and posing, thumbing through endless entertainment choices but knowing none of this really quenches my thirst. In the midst of all this is a very real confrontation with exhaustion, depression, anxiety and grief.
That’s a little vague, but I don’t want to write about my self too much, and this has already gotten way too long. My point is: I’m proud of this little release, and I would love it you listened to it, streamed it, downloaded it, purchased it — whatever, whenever, however.
Thank you. Now, back to some cartoons or some other bullshit.