Mat Kearney: Mat Kearney

It took Mat Kearney nearly half a dozen albums to title a record with his own name.

But sometime in early 2023, as he sat with the exceptionally warm and true songs comprising his seventh studio release, the Nashville-based artist realized that this would be the album to make the cut. “In a way, the project felt reminiscent of when I first started making music,” says the experienced troubadour. “But it’s also a culmination of all the art, craft, and abilities I've been honing over the years. I realized it just felt like me.”

Being yourself is the work of a lifetime, but a convergence of factors helped nudge Mat a little closer to that goal this time: hard-won independence, a blossoming creative fellowship, and life stress that left him with no other option.

The independence was largely a product of Mat having spent ten years tightening his recording game at his own Black Barn home studio, now a well-worn creative hub “with an old piano, dusty cables running into the garage, like a chia pet that keeps on growing,” he says. “It’s like an old friend, where you know their strengths and weaknesses, and you work within their limitations.”

At the end of 2022, when the arrival of a third daughter brought the need for a bigger home, Mat leaned in for a last dance with Black Barn, using it to record and produce the bulk of the 12 songs on Mat Kearney. “I’d been growing as a producer for years, working more and more on each record, and on this one, I decided to make the leap,” he says. “To trust my own gut and abilities enough not to pull in someone from the bench at the last minute.”

His greater confidence moved him to embrace another first: bringing in an existing band, The Brook & the Bluff, to help realize the sound and vibe he had in mind. “I was just a massive fan of the band,” says Mat. “First Place was my number-one played album on Spotify.” When he said as much to his close friend Micah Tawlks, who produces the group, “Micah was like, ‘Let's just get them to play on yours!’”

In their earliest sessions together, Mat felt a new organic presence emerge with these distinctive voices. “Usually, you're in a recording session and the other guys are hired guns who look at you and are like, ‘Do you like this?’ ‘Would you prefer this?’ But these guys aren’t session players, they just have this feel together. And my favorite music is like that: people leaving space for each other, each one’s limitations complementing the other’s. And in a weird way it became like a democracy.”

Mat and B&B singer Joseph Settine cowrote one of Kearney’s favorite new songs, “Sumac,” which might be a keystone to the album’s sound. “It’s a breezy and organic, yet with a deep groove – everything I love in music. That sweet melancholy really resonates with me.” Mat says. In early conversations, Mat referenced some of his all-time favorite albums: Paul Simon’s Graceland, Bob Marley’s Exodus, John Mayer’s Continuum, early-’90s A Tribe Called Quest. “I realized I like albums that are sort of a slow- burn. They don't demand your attention, but earn it over time..”

The first track, “Headlights Home,” cohered when Mat was sitting on the white sands of the Florida panhandle and discovered an old voice memo he’d left on his phone—an airy, tumbling melody that he realized was better-suited to a chorus lyric that had left him and some cowriters stumped. “I basically rewrote the whole song by myself right there,” he says of this road song, a classic trope songwriters need a good decade of touring to really own.

Many of the other songs came in a similar way: dormant or slow-forming ideas ignited by the moment and the company. When Mat met with the more EDM-oriented producer Mokita, the pair created “Good Thing” and “Drowning in Nostalgia” “really fast,” says Mat. “We had nothing, Mokita started playing chords on the guitar, we came up with the hook for the chorus, and I was like, ‘I got the story.’”

With blazing speed, he jotted down verse after verse about the sort of past-haunted drifter Springsteen or Paul Simon sing about. “I found I was deeply moved by these characters because I related to them. Like a man whose memory of running out of a burning house feeds his lingering desire to sabotage or burn down the good things in his life. I’ve done that myself.” They walked in that morning with nothing and went home with a fully-produced song.

Most creative people live for those moments when, as Mat says, “you feel like the song already exists and you’re being given it line by line.” While his more usual mode is the hard, steady, sometimes obsessive grind, life didn’t give him that luxury this time . “At the start of this record, I was at a breaking point,” he confesses. “My mom had a cancer scare, the arrival of our third kid seemed like it was gonna sink us—it was the most difficult period of my entire life. I simply didn’t have the energy or bandwidth to fret too much over my music, which gave me the freedom and courage to chase pure moments. It was either a true expression of what I’m excited about saying, or it's nothing.”

Though the result reminds Mat of how he started out, Mat Kearney is no scrappy debut. It draws deeply from the music community that sustained the artist over nearly two decades, ever since he was rapping spoken-word verses over strummed guitar in Nashville coffee houses, burnishing a sound and writing style that would land songs from his major-label debut, Nothing Left To Lose, on hit TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy and NCIS, and building a devoted community of fans on tours with John Mayer, Keane, and Sheryl Crow. Though he now has over 2.5 billion global streams, Mat still considers himself a do-it- yourself craftsman.

You hear this person speak between the lines of “My Two Hands,” a gentle shuffle that wears its Bob Marley influence lightly, melding a reggae groove to pedal-steel guitar and folksier sound—the refrain sharing his desire to build a paper boat, a home, a world, a life with my two hands. “For years, I’ve known that I’m more like Cal Ripken than Mark McGwire,” Mat says. “For me, it’s about making contact and getting on base, over and over. It’s like, build the ship as you sail it, build the house you’re living in. Brick by brick, day by day.” And recognizing those moments when it pays off.

“Usually, when I’m finishing making a record, I have a hard time listening to it,” says Mat. “Either I’m tired of it, or insecure, scared, or just want to move onto the next thing. But for some reason, each time I’ve put this one on, I’m surprised—like, ‘Oh yeah! I love this song!’” The album even passed Mat’s age- old test for new music. “It’s when I get in my car and my homies are riding shotgun: Am I pumped to play them this thing?” he says. “And on his record, it really feels this way. I keep getting the response I always hoped for. Which is: ‘This is one of the best records you've ever made.’”