Matt Stell is one of the fastest up and coming talents – scoring two number one hits already including for ‘Prayed For You.’ Here, we interview Stell about the past year, hearing external cuts and his success so far.
Morning Matt, how are you?
I’m good!
I just saw your ‘Blinding Lights’ acoustic cover, and it was amazing. I didn’t think that song could be reinvented like that.
Thank you very much, I am a big fan of The Weeknd – the track seems like one of those ones that is going to influence music going forward . I thought that it sounded like a classic right from the first time I heard it so. It’s exciting anytime you get the chance to reinvent a song like that.
You’ve managed to do that quite a few times, reinventing stuff. Your music is so timeless and genre-less, because you’ve got that grit to your voice. Was there ever a time that you kind of thought of going down a different genre route?
I’m probably influenced by a lot of different stuff, it’s always made the most sense to me – the flavours and influences of country music that’s what comes the most natural. Country music is a fairly wide genre, you know.
It’s becoming broader by the day.
It feels like we’ve found a pretty good home there and we’re still able to be creative.
It’s really exciting what’s happening with the genre – the sound is diversifying and there’s definitely more new voices emerging which is so exciting – obviously, you are a big part of that with all your number ones in the past year or so. What does it mean to have the success you’ve had over the past year when everything’s been a little bit crazy?
Oh, man, crazy is an understatement. It’s been quite a blessing to have some success at radio, especially being a being a newer artist – that’s not always the case. A lot of radio has to do with the music first and foremost, but it also has to do with building relationships so that when you put music out, you can get ears on it. After our first single, we were able to chase a single on the chart during the pandemic, which really made the shows on the other side a lot of fun because it’s the first time we’re getting to play ‘Everywhere But On.’ It’s one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written, so to see people sing it back is pretty great.
I can imagine as a new artist – you have done such a great job of keeping the momentum and keeping the fans engaged – it must have been incredibly frustrating when things shut down and you had that momentum going into the pandemic.
What I do is kind of two jobs – one is just writing songs and the pandemic kind of benefitted that, we had more time than we ever would, so that was a silver lining to have more time to write and be creative. The second job of being an artist and playing music live was gone like a light switch – not only for me, but for the band and crew, it was pretty devastating. Now though we’re getting back to playing shows, and the numbers look good over here. It’s been a whole lot of fun to feel the energy again – it’s really special because it’s something we didn’t expect to be taken away.
Obviously you recently released ‘That Ain’t Me No More’ – can you talk a bit about that song and the first time you heard it?
Yeah, that song checks all the boxes for me – it’s so energetic, it’s got a cool melody that’s fun to sing, but it’s also got a fresh twist on classic country tropes. I love a turn of phrase – to me that’s what makes country music so unique and those twists are my favourite part of country music. This is the first single that I’m not a writer on. I moved to Nashville to be a writer and so you depend on the best song winning and that’s what I try to do. Some days I’m in the room for a great song and other days a song like this hit me in all the right places. Hardy just texted me and was like, ‘Hey, man, check this out’. I was really glad to cut that song and to put my spin on it.
Do you ever have to race to get a cut down and have to battle over the songs that you want to cut?
Oh, that definitely does happen, but being a songwriter I get it if a Blake Shelton or someone wants a song, it’ since. I understand that the way that the business is structured is that it’s basically sink or swim with radio. There’s some songs that definitely jump out of the speakers to a lot of people here, there’s a lot of talented people in Nashville.
You’ve got such a successful track record with the singles that you’ve written, so when do you decide to take external cuts?
It’s me and a couple people that I really trust – managers and the folks at the label – my managers and I typically come to the plate with what we want, and what we want to do, and thus far our label situation has been so supportive. We’ve got a lot of latitude creatively, so we just go for the best songs and we don’t pay attention with who writes what – that’s what elicits the greatest response that’s been the way we’ve worked thus far.
‘Sadie’ was one of my favourite songs of the last year. Can you talk about hearing that one for the first time?
My manager got a hold of that song and he sent it to me – the cool thing about this song is that I feel like it fits into what we do, but it’s definitely distinct in how it sounds. It made the project diverse and we don’t always have the same thing coming out all the time. ‘Sadie’ is one of those songs that just fell in our lap that was different – it relies on a melody and typically country music focusses on the lyric, that’s what I’m a sucker for – it’s got an unbelievable melody and some ear candy there. It’s able to tell a pretty cool story with pretty sparse lyrics. We thought it fit well with what we did and it was different enough that it found a home on the project.
It’s a song made for singing in a car in summer. It was just a huge soundtrack to last year. I know you’ve got the single on radio now, but can we expect new music coming in the next few months? I know you’re teasing little bits on social media.
You definitely can. We were just in the studio putting together the finishing touches on what will be an album probably sometime late summer or fall. We’re really excited about that and excited about getting that going. I can’t wait for you to hear the new stuff.
We’re excited and hopefully get you to the UK soon!
I can’t wait to get there!
