Matthew Sweet biography
Sidney Matthew Sweet (born October 6, 1964, in Lincoln, Nebraska) is an American alternative rock/power pop musician. He was part of the burgeoning Athens, Georgia, music scene in the early and mid-1980s before gaining commercial success during the early 1990s. He continues to release albums and to tour.
Early career
As a teenager in Lincoln, Sweet wrote and recorded songs on four-track cassettes, and in the ninth grade joined the band the Specs which resulted in his first recording on a battle of the bands LP produced by a local radio station. Sweet set off to Athens, Georgia in the early 1980s after graduating from Lincoln Southeast High School in 1983 to attend college and join the vibrant Athens music scene, most famous as the home base for R.E.M. and The B-52's. In 1983, Sweet collaborated with R.E.M. member Michael Stipe under the name Community Trolls as well as being in Stipe's sister Lynda Stipe's band Oh-OK, and that year also formed the power-pop duo, The Buzz of Delight with drummer David Pierce (Oh-Ok). They released an EP Sound Castles on DB Recs later that year.
In 1985, he was signed to a solo recording contract with Columbia Records. One album, Inside, was released by Columbia in 1986 to good reviews, but limited success.
Sweet was then picked up by A&M Records where he released his second album, Earth (1989), again without commercial success. This period marked a personal and professional low point for Sweet, as A&M lost interest and his marriage failed.
Sweet quickly recovered and formed a new band including Richard Lloyd, Robert Quine, Greg Leisz, Lloyd Cole, and Fred Maher. The new group spent 1990 assembling Sweet's next work, originally titled Nothing Lasts.
Commercial breakthrough
In 1990, A&M released Sweet from his contract, and he signed with rival Zoo Entertainment. The album, still under construction at the time, was retitled
Girlfriend and released in October 1991. This album featured a classic set of pop-rock songs, was considered by many to be an artistic breakthrough, and quickly garnered impressive U.S. sales (spawning a Top 10 single with the title track). The video for the title track was aired on MTV, MuchMusic and Night Tracks and features Japanese animation, of which Sweet is a fan. The animated clips in the video for "Girlfriend" are taken from the movie
Space Adventure Cobra, and the video for "I've Been Waiting" uses clips of the
Urusei Yatsura character Lum Invader, of whom Sweet has a tattoo.
Sweet's follow-up album, Altered Beast (1993), was a more diverse and less immediately accessible album than Girlfriend; the album divided fans and critics who had mixed reactions to emotionally intense and brooding tracks like "Someone to Pull the Trigger" and "Knowing People". A notable single, "Time Capsule", became a music video classic directed by Douglas Gayeton. The highly conceptual work featured extreme closeups of Sweet singing while supine on the grass. As he performed, his body was slowly covered with cockroaches which wrapped his body with twine. The final shot showed him pinned to the ground in a literary homage to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
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