Tonight: Go See Matthew Sweet at The Heights Theater

Okay, y’all. I know that there is a lot of stuff going on tonight (Friday, September 13th) — and I mean, a lot, like, seriously, just freaking look at the list. Tinariwen at WOMH, Funeral Horse at Darwin’s Pub, Eagle Claw, Warlung, & Alone On The Moon at Rudz, Flying Lotus at Warehouse Live…our cup truly runneth over this evening.

But the absolute top of my list, I’ve got to say, is the ever-awesome Matthew Sweet, who’s playing tonight up at the also-awesome Heights Theater (seriously, it’s a really great room for music you actually want to sit back and listen closely to).

I’ve got a long history with Sweet’s music, starting back in 1991, when I was just starting college. Away from the radio hell of rural Central Texas, I was suddenly hearing stuff from all sides, stuff I’d never heard before, whether it was on KTRU, from newly-made friends, or just blasting out of some random residential college window. And this weird guy Marc, who was from Maryland and played guitar and absolutely obsessed over music — and who is responsible for a far greater chunk of my musical education than he probably realizes, even now — made me listen to an album called Girlfriend that came out that fall.

It blew me away, fully and completely. The songs were poppy and ridiculously catchy, the lyrics were smart and intense, and yet the whole thing was indisputably also a rock album, albeit not the kind I’d ever really heard before (beyond maybe catching a Cheap Trick song or two on the radio when I was much younger; I’d never known the term “power pop” before that). Some of the songs made me want to jump around the room, and some made me want to sit in a corner and cry. And, as a cherry on top, it also happened to have some of the coolest-yet-weirdest guitar solos I’d ever heard. It was a musician’s album, a songwriter’s album, but still an album a clueless kid like me could grab onto and love.

And love it I have. I listened to a lot of music in the ’90s — it was the freaking ’90s, after all — but sadly, a lot of it has fallen by the wayside, with songs and albums I was crazy about back then not eliciting much more than a shrug from me these days.

Music can be weirdly like a drug. You get that high (or I do, at least) from hearing that perfect song, that perfect riff, that perfect line, and you scramble around looking for more like that, and more, and more, and eventually the stuff that used to sound perfect to you no longer does, because you’re on to something newer, or rawer, or louder, or whatever. I’ve watched music-crazed friends take this same trajectory over and over again, eventually getting deeply into super-extreme Japanese noise or Finnish folk-metal or, well, jazz. I’ve gone much the same route myself, although with some different twists and turns along the way.

Girlfriend, though, is one of a small handful of albums that always, always sounds just as completely fresh and amazing to me as it did with that first listen. Year after year, it’s stayed with me, and every song drags me back to when I was a dumb, wide-open kid discovering a world he didn’t realize existed.

I’m not saying the same will be true for everybody, mind you; my kids, for whatever reason, hate it when I put the album on in the car. The nine-year-old actually groans and makes barfing noises, especially when “You Don’t Love Me” comes on. But hey, that’s how it works. My Thing is not always Your Thing (or, in this case, Their Thing). You just never know if that connection will click into place.

Of course, Matthew Sweet has released something like a full dozen albums in the years since Girlfriend‘s release, and hell, I like a lot of those, too (the song that just popped into my head, in fact, is “Someone to Pull the Trigger”, off 1993’s Altered Beast). He’s never stopped writing and playing, and I freaking love that, even if I’ve kinda fallen behind in recent years.

So get on out tonight — I know I’m going to try to — and witness one of the best damn songwriters/musicians I’ve ever heard or seen. Maybe it’ll click for you, too.