Matthew Sweet

Despite a long-running and consistent career, power-pop master Matthew Sweet will always be most associated with Girlfriend, his breakthrough hit from 1991. By the time of that album Sweet had already been working for ten years. Born in Nebraska, he was drawn by the music scene to attend college in Athens, GA. There he befriended R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, with whom he formed the short-lived duo Community Trolls; their only output was three songs that have been bootlegged. He joined two more Athens-based bands, Oh-OK (fronted by Stipe's sister Lynda) and the Buzz of Delight before getting signed as a solo artist. His first two albums came out on two different major labels-- Inside on Columbia and Earth on A&M-- and neither was successful. During a personal low point, in which his first marriage and record-label deal both fell apart, Sweet wrote songs for an album to be called Nothing Lasts. When he decided to use a 1960s-vintage film image of actress Tuesday Weld for the cover and Weld didn't like the implications of the title, he renamed it Girlfriend after one of the songs. Hailed as a landmark of power pop, Girlfriend was actually harder-edged than anything he'd done before, with three downtown New York figures sharing lead guitar: Richard Lloyd (ex-Television), Ivan Julian and Robert Quine (both ex-Voidoids). The album got a storm of press; alternative radio hit on the title track, "Divine Intervention" and "I've Been Waiting," and Sweet stayed on the road for the next two years. The followup album, Altered Beast was a more sprawling, less accessible work that began Sweet's habit of slightly tweaking his sound on each new album; He'd embrace California pop on 1997's Blue Sky on Mars and psychedelia on 1999's In Reverse, and even make a Japanese themed album, 2003's Kimi Go Suki Raifu, inspired both by his fanbase there and by his love of anime. Sweet's most notable side project was a string of three Under the Covers albums with Bangles frontwoman Susanna Hoffs, on which they covered favorite songs from the '60s, '70s and '80s. During 2002-03 he formed the songwriters' supergroup the Thorns, with Shawn Mullins and Pete Droge; this lasted for just one album and tour. During 2014 he and his wife Lisa both did research for the Tim Burton movie Big Eyes about the artist Margaret Keane, whose work was another of Sweet's passions. After leaving Los Angeles to return to his native Nebraska, Sweet recorded Tomorrow Forever , which was both his first double album and his first fan-funded release. Contributors were invited to vote on the 38 songs he'd recorded, of which the most popular 17 made the album. Tomorrow's Daughter, the followup release in 2018, included the songs that hadn't made the cut first time around.