Thin Lear

The songwriter who records as Thin Lear has spent the better part of three years converting a lifetime of unresolved grief into song—his grandfather's death, his daughter's first encounter with mortality, the aforementioned cat. Longo's ability to channel such weighty ideas with such beauty and grace is what makes Thin Learn's music so meaningful.

Many Disappeared (out April 24 on First City Artists) is Thin Lear's sophomore album, recorded in Memphis with Grammy-winning producer Matt Ross-Spang (Lucero, St. Paul & The Broken Bones) and a cast of players—Ken Coomer, Rick Steff, Dave Smith—that Longo grew up listening to. We spoke with Longo in the weeks before release about exorcism, jaunty pop songs, and why the only way out is through.

Analogue: Your debut came out right as the world was falling apart. What was that like?

Matt Longo: That was a really enjoyable release up to that moment. Mostly folks didn't care up to that point, and through that release, I saw more momentum than I ever had, even through that crazy experience. But it was truly awful to be like, 'Hey, check out my new single! Don't look over there.' As someone who is consistently uncomfortable drawing attention to himself anyway, putting that on top of everything that was going on and still needing to promote was just the most uncomfortable thing.

And yet some of the themes of Wooden Cave did resonate with the moment. I'd have people reaching out and being like, 'Oh, this is important to me right now.' I could feel other people gravitating towards it. And at the same time, it just felt like, 'Am I a music promotion robot? Am I ignoring people's feelings out there that I don't know by continuing to push my product, even though I don't think in those terms at all?'

It was making me think in those terms. I'd be watching Cuomo on TV giving one of his janky PowerPoint presentations on the pandemic—that was what we did those days—and just being like, 'Oh, I've got to put up my IG post later.' And it kind of hasn't stopped since then. Has there been a mellow moment where it felt comfortable to say, 'Hey, just check out my art?'

Analogue: I wondered about that on this album, too. The first album came out just a few months after the pandemic halted the world, and now it feels like, 'Oh, hey, this civilization may end tonight—and also I've got an album coming out in a couple of weeks.'

Matt: It hasn't stopped. Yeah. I got a three-minute song you should check out. Yeah, right.

Analogue: You said the music felt connective even then. What's that relationship like this time around?

Matt: I don't feel like I'm inherently a political artist. I mean, every artist is political, but I'm not Jesse Welles. I'm not writing protest music. I've been working for nonprofits for decades. It is the way I make my money, in educational advocacy. And yet my art always feels extremely personal.

This record, Many Disappeared, is about my connection to loss and trying to figure out how to make sense of it without any religious infrastructure inside of me. I don't even have a spiritual infrastructure. And so when I experience loss, or see others experience loss, I am so out at sea for how to be present for them—or for myself. None of those things necessarily feel of the moment. But they're also never not the moment. That's the river that runs underneath humanity.

I was talking with my daughter the other night—she's three, just turned four this weekend. She said to me, 'What happens when you get old? Do you stay old forever?' I tried to take it in the other direction. I said, 'Well, you definitely don't go back. You don't become a kid again. You don't become a baby again—that only happens once.' And she stuck with it. She said, 'What do you do? Stay old forever?'

I didn't want to lie to her. This is not a Santa Claus thing where I feel comfortable hiding it. So I just said, 'Well, no. Like plants, like animals, like insects, like anything else, eventually we die.' She thinks about it for a second and bursts out crying and says, 'I don't want to die!' So I'm up until midnight comforting her, saying, 'You're not in that place right now. Mommy and Daddy aren't going anywhere.' All the things you should be saying. But I didn't hide it.

Analogue: That whole story, that truth-telling, feels like it describes your songwriting so well.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. When it works, I can take the memory of coming upon a decaying cat—which one would not think is fuel for a song, certainly not a jangly pop song—and do that Harry Nilsson thing—I'm going to give you something that is sad, but I'm going to give it to you in a way that hopefully gets caught in your head and fills you with something more buoyant, even though the topic is devastating.

I'm trying to expunge these memories from myself. The songs, as they are for most songwriters, are like the exorcism of that. And it just lessens. You let the pressure out when you're able to find a vehicle for the memory. When I think about watching my grandfather die, feeling that same thing—the memory of him being in so much stomach pain in the hospital, he crawled into a ball—I'll never get rid of that. And I hope I never do. I want to carry that for him. But I've got to lessen the pressure of it. So it has to go into a jaunty pop song.

Analogue: Did you share any of that when you went to record in Memphis? Did they know what the songs were about?

Matt: No. I get self-conscious about it. I just go in and sing, and I feel like, 'Okay, hopefully the melody is strong enough where people aren't going to balk at playing on it.' I typically don't explain the meaning of a song to the people I'm working with. I just hope that, at best, folks are feeling the intention that's going out there.

Ken Coomer—who played drums, who I've really respected for a long time for what he's done with Wilco and elsewhere—we didn't exchange any words. We just sat behind the kit and started playing. The first song we recorded was "The Haunt." We did a couple of takes, and he came up to me after and told me the story about his family member. And I was like, 'All right, this is going to be great. This session is going to be fantastic because this is where I'm at.' And if I can not drag people down, hopefully, but like pull them closer to me, and we're all standing behind the same intention of a given song. I feel like that's what happened with the songs, for better or worse. When I listen to it, I hear everyone is behind the idea. I didn't explain it. I just think this group of people understood it as we were playing it. And that's the best I can hope for.

Analogue: How did you end up working with Matt [Ross-Spang] in the first place?

Matt: I have a habit of harassing people I respect until they either tell me to fuck off—which happens—or they go, 'Okay, fine, I'll work with this guy.' I reached out because I heard the work he'd done with The Mountain Goats and Cut Worms and obviously Margo Price. I really liked the way he framed the vocal within a song. I have a habit in the past of mixing my vocals like it's the me show, and I wanted these vocals to still stand out but also be of a part of the song. He has a really great way of doing that. I had the demos of about 20 songs and shared them with him, and he invited me down, and off I went.

This was actually, I think, one of the last records he made at Sam Phillips Recording Service—he built his own studio after this. It was really wonderful to go into a place that felt haunted with these haunted songs.

Analogue: Was going to Memphis itself part of the vision?

Matt: I'm a New Yorker at heart, and in the same way people think about the Catskills and Woodstock, that's the way I think about Memphis. It was one of those bucket list things. And it just made sense for these songs because I wanted them to feel communal. I didn't want the record to be as lonely as it could have sounded. However sad it sounds now, I didn't want it to sound isolated.

Analogue: The album took a long time to come out. How did you handle waiting?

Matt: Terrible. Not good. I'm fairly prolific—I've been writing the entire time. I actually wrote two other EPs after recording this record and released those because I was like, all right, I'm just going to keep putting out music until I find a label for this thing. But I was worried that by the time I released it, I was going to be a different guy. And that's the danger with the release cycle—I was scared I wasn't going to be up to the task of talking about something I didn't believe in anymore, that I couldn't relate to.

I mean, thankfully, the topic is never out of style, really. But when Silver Bridge went up as the first single, I put it on headphones that morning just to finally do it. I was so anxious clicking play, so worried about what I was going to hear, worried it was going to sound like it came from someone else. And luckily it didn't. I was just like, 'Oh thank god, I still relate to it.'

Analogue: What did you take from that?

Matt: I don't want to put any piece of work on a pedestal because it took a long time to make or a long time to come out. I just want to keep working. It feels less consequential if something doesn't do well, and also less consequential even if it does. You clip the high end and the low end, and then the emotion is connected to the process and the creation, as opposed to the reception. That's where we all get tripped up.

I'm actually in the midst of recording a new album right now with Sam Cohen (Kevin Morby). He's got a studio in upstate New York, and it's basically the two of us playing everything. I cannot wait to get back there. I love playing in front of people, and I love live shows and that connection, but honestly, it's the studio, it's recording—that's why I do this. I do all the other stuff to get to a place where I can be recording for as long as possible.

VISIT: Thin Lear

Photo: Anna Rhody