Where is Matt Sharp?
We've all seen the blue album cover a million times — four solemn, unassuming guys who seem to be saying "hey, um, we made this album that we think is pretty cool, could you maybe listen to it and tell us what you think?" Weezer in 1993 was made up of Patrick Wilson, Rivers Cuomo, Brian Bell, and the one who, appropriately enough, is wearing a red-and-white striped shirt, Matt Sharp.
Since that photo, Sharp has been a real-life Where's Waldo. He left Weezer after their Pinkerton Album and devoted himself fully to his other band, The Rentals. After making two albums with them, he practically disappeared off the face of the Earth by moving to Leipers Fork, Tenn., a small town with only one restaurant on the outskirts of Nashville.
Sharp stayed in a small farmhouse in Leipers Fork for six months and worked on songs for his upcoming solo album, then moved back to Los Angeles where he recorded the album.
Now he is about to embark on what will possibly be his greatest adventure yet. He and former Cake guitarist Greg Brown will be touring America, playing in a series of very small, intimate and unconventional venues. They have already played a few shows in Los Angeles and will be coming to Arizona this Sunday.
Their most outlandish venue so far has probably been the mattress store that they played at 1 a.m. in Beverly Hills. Sharp and Brown sat on a bed in the center of the room and formed a semi-circle of other beds around them for the audience.
"It was fabulous," Sharp says. " It was like an opium den. There was no one being critical and we actually had a few people sleeping in the corners."
If you're hoping to catch the duo at Sleep America when they roll through Arizona, don't cross your fingers. They will, however, be playing at Stinkweeds, the indie record store in Tempe.
"We're trying to play places with an interesting atmosphere and most of them have been pretty small," he says. "I think we had about 500 people in the biggest place we played, so that was like the Madison Square Garden of the tour."
Sharp and Brown met while collaborating on a song for a movie soundtrack a few years ago, and Sharp has been chasing him down ever since.
"I tried to convince him to join the Rentals," Sharp says. "But he was still in Cake at the time so I just had to wait it out. He was featured on a lot of songs on the new record."
The tour is also an opportunity to find a record company to release Sharp's new solo album that he hopes to come out in February 2003.
"We will be talking with record companies along the way and seeing who is going to be the best person to house it," he says. "We're looking for someone who is not going to have too many preconceived notions of what they think an album from me might be like. It will be a chance to wipe the board clean."
Lately, Sharp has been trying to "wipe the board clean" in many different aspects of his musical career. Currently, he is involved in legal action that involves a dispute over creative rights on the first two Weezer albums.
"There's really not that much I can talk about," he says. "When I was in Weezer, my dedication and love to the band was so pure and I had such a good time that I'd hate to start slinging mud around by talking about the stinky stuff.
"I read an interview with Dave Grohl about all of the legal stuff they're been going through with Nirvana and he just said that it all stinks and you've gotta just try and hold your nose through it."
Like most people in the public eye that are involved in the legal process, Sharp is reluctant to try and explain the ins and outs of his case, but he says he understands why people are so interested.
"We're in an age when everything is so quickly out in the open," he says. "Back in the day, if some guy from Led Zepplin had an issue with someone else in the band, people would probably be like 'oh that sucks,' but now people have so many more opportunities to really get into it all."
The new album should be very different from the work that Sharp has done with Weezer and the Rentals. According to Sharp it will be more ambient, sparse, slow and acoustic with no bass or drums. Whereas the rentals stuff was all over the map with styles, this new album has more of a consistent theme and a center.
"With the last Rentals album I really had a feeling of wanting an epic experience," he says. "As good as ambition is, sometimes it clouds you up to the point where you're only trying to see this one basic thing and it gets lost in the arrangement."
"When I was in Leipers I spent a lot of time listening to artists whose music was so direct that it was like the artist was right there sitting in the speaker singing right to me. This tour and album will be a chance to try and do the same thing."
Reach the reporter at joy.hepp@asu.edu.
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Matt Sharp, formerly of Weezer, with Greg Brown, formerly of Cake, at Stinkweeds Record Exchange, 1250, E. Apache Blvd., Tempe, 480-968-9490), Sunday Sept. 15, $10. |
