Alt-pop rocker Matthew Sweet is back on the road after a four-year pause. His month-long, 15-city tour includes a stop at the Castle Theatre Saturday night, on the heels of a limited Midwest run in February.
Sweet’s 15th studio album, Catspaw, didn’t get the traditional roll-out; he released it in early in 2021. But unlike many musicians who used their time off the road during the COVID-19 pandemic to make something new, Sweet had finished Catspaw before stay-at-home orders went into place.
“I was different than a lot of people who got into their creative projects during COVID; I’d kind of just finished one,” he told WGLT. “So, I was OK to watch a thousand hours of movies.”
Sweet wasn’t completely idle. He launched a Patreon that combines his eclectic interests, and did a few Facebook live sets. And he released covers of the Beatles’ Polythene Pam and Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, harkening his storied three-volume Under the Covers LPs with Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles.
Sweet is joined on the current full band tour by another Bangle, Debbi Peterson, who replaces Sweet's longtime drummer Ric Menck due to a conflict. Paul Chastain [bass] and guitarist John Moreman complete the roster, with Alabama singer/songwriter Abe Partridge as the opening act.
Sweet worked up a few songs from Catspaw — on which he played everything but drums in the studio version — but hasn’t committed to playing the album on this tour.
“We’re a little more still on the greatest hits,” Sweet said. “One really great thing about being an elder statesman of rock is that the people who do come are very, very into it. In my heyday, maybe half the kids at a show saw it on MTV or something and don’t really know the album and half the people are into it. Now it’s just the 'into it' people.”
In a sense, this tour about giving those fans what they crave. Four decades after a formative move to Athens, Ga. from Nebraska — prompted by his pen pal, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe — Sweet doesn’t mind revisiting the vintage end of his catalog and giving people what they want. Inevitably, that means playing songs from Girlfriend, his 1991 breakout LP about a breakup.
“When I do the old songs, I feel them the same way,” he said “It isn’t painful for me. I think people related to [Girlfriend] because I was working out my feelings. People heard it and felt their feelings. I think that’s why that album has hung on.”
New live album
On a balmy July 4th in 1993, Sweet filled Chicago’s Grant Park as the headlining act for the Taste of Chicago. WXRT-FM recorded the show, which has been unearthed from the vault and released as a live album remixed and remastered from the original digital audio tape [DAT] by Brian Kehew of The Who and The Pretenders, among others.
“I remember it really well because the next day the newspaper headline was, ‘The pope, the Bulls and Matthew Sweet,'” he said.
While Sweet doesn’t mind reliving the peak of his career and likes revisiting his most popular songs, he’s not overly nostalgic, either.
“We had no way of knowing how much the record business would change,” he said, “and I do feel lucky sometimes that I’m from before the internet. It’s such a free-for-all. It would be hard to get the same traction as an artist now. But that technology — I would have killed for.”
Sweet started out as an angsty teen making multitrack tapes on a four-track cassette recorder in his bedroom in Lincoln, Neb. Moving to DAT, he said, was a “magical dream come true.”
“Now, I just have a really good ProTools rig at home,” said Sweet, who's lived in Omaha since 2013. “It is an incredible thing, the internet. There’s no turning back.”
Matthew Sweet plays at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Castle Theatre, 209 E. Washington St. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25-$28 at thecastletheatre.com.
