Interview: Matt Nathanson Is the Most Nostalgic Guy in the Room

When Matt Nathanson started writing his new record, he had a vision. He wanted it to be political. He wanted it to be uplifting. He wanted to inspire his listeners to see a brighter future.

The songs that came out of him had other plans.

Sings His Sad Heart, the follow-up to Nathanson’s 2015 LP Show Me Your Fangs, is personal instead of political, sad instead of uplifting, and lost in thoughts about the past instead of looking forward to the future. It is a complete contradiction of the album that Nathanson wanted to make. And yet, it’s also the most at home he’s sounded on a record since 2010’s breezy Modern Love.

Then again, Nathanson has always been an artist defined by his contradictions. He’s a riotously funny and jovial live performer who makes crushingly sad records. He’s a guy who exudes confidence and charisma onstage but admits he isn’t very confident as an artist. And he’s a songwriter who’d name the happiest song on his record “Sadness.”

When I spoke to Nathanson in August, I called him “the most nostalgic guy in the room.” It’s a role I often find myself playing: the guy who digs through TimeHop every day and sends pictures and “remember this?” messages to old friends, or the guy who spends entirely too much time thinking about people he lost touch with, wondering if they ever think of him too.

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Patrick Stump to Score Documentary Series

Patrick Stump

Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy will also be scoring the upcoming documentary series Let Science Speak. Business Insider reports:

The series features a stunning, original score by composer, and Fall Out Boy front man, Patrick Stump (Pacific Rim, Big Hero 6). “When I was a little kid, if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would always say “Scientist,” without hesitation,” says Stump. “So to use my music to help tell the stories of these people who are essentially my heroes is very cool.”

Let Science Speak will inform and engage viewers about the importance of science in our ever-evolving world. Each episode features a scientist and their field.

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Patrick Stump Talks Scoring New Film ‘Spell’

Patrick Stump

Billboard sat own with Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy:

I’ve scored a few films and some shows; I’m not an old pro but I’m comfortable as a composer now. He’s the first director — or anyone involved in production I’ve worked with — who’s also a pretty great musician. It was one of the easiest I worked on because there were just language things… He was so quick to describing what he meant. It’s one thing to describe, say, chords: “Why don’t we go to a minor here?” But it’s another thing, not just knowing the nomenclature, to also know the purpose behind stuff. “Why don’t we try something like this here?” He has a very clear idea of what he wanted and it allowed me to just play.

Patrick Stump Composing Score for ‘Alice in Wonderland’

Patrick Stump

Dana Schwartz, writing for Entertainment Weekly:

“When you’re doing a score, it’s kind of like acting, really, because you have to get in the head of a character,” said Stump, “whereas with Fall Out Boy, if I’m writing a song, I’m going to have to get on stage every night and sing that. It’s really for me. Writing a song is more — not selfish, but you’re focused on what you would want, whereas in a film you’re just focused on telling the story.”

Review: Matt Nathanson – Some Mad Hope

Few albums sound more like growing up to me than Matt Nathanson’s Some Mad Hope. Last year, for my 26th birthday, I wrote a blog post where I chose one defining song from every year I’ve spent on the planet. “Car Crash,” the opening track from Some Mad Hope, was my pick for 2007. For me, that song—and this record in general—marked the end of youthful innocence and the beginning of something a little more complex and a little less black and white. It’s tough to imagine a better record for that moment in life than Some Mad Hope, which effortlessly pairs pop hooks and anthemic arrangements with emotionally weighty lyrical work. What is tough to process is the fact that this record—the one that marked the start of my journey from youth to adulthood—is now 10 years in the rearview.

Some Mad Hope would prove to be Matt Nathanson’s breakthrough, but it wasn’t his first record. On the contrary, in Nathanson’s catalog, Some Mad Hope holds the status of being the sixth LP. He’d moved the needle slightly in the past. His cover of the James hit “Laid” opened American Wedding, the final film in the initial American Pie trilogy, and his fifth album, 2003’s Beneath the Fireworks (produced by future Springsteen collaborator Ron Aniello) spawned reasonably well-known tracks like “I Saw” and “Curve of the Earth.” But until this record, Nathanson tended to be known as an artist who put on a fantastic live show, but could never quite translate the energy and fun of his concerts into compelling studio records.

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Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump Cast in Animated Movie

Patrick Stump

Variety reports that Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy will be doing various voice-over roles in the upcoming animated film Gnome Alone. He’s also working on the score and has written an original song for the movie:

Patrick Stump of the band Fall Out Boy performed multiple voice-over roles, composed the score and has written an original song to be performed by Becky G, whose character discovers that her new home’s garden gnomes are not what they seem, she joins the gnomes to fight against little monsters who have invaded through a portal from another world.