The first album cover I recall is Thriller, it came out in 1982 eand I had come out in 1979. The first song I ever remember hearing was by a radical man and musician called Keith Green. My parents had seen him perform on his piano in Hollywood several times but I did not as he was dying in a plane crash about the same time I was hearing his songs.
The first time I heard a hip-hop bass line was about ‘91 as far as I can recall; the location was Idaho and the music was not coming from where I was but a party across the way. I was hanging out with some Mennonite kids whose folks were a few steps more conservative than mine and their house had no radio or stereo; some households had musical instruments and others banned even these. I recall that bass line wandering or stumbling drunkenly from the party and ending up in our midst. You could barely hear it but you could feel it.
The first time I ever heard hip-hop was on the radio at a friend's house in Palmdale, CA. If you didn’t happen to catch the name of a track after it played on the radio in the early ‘90s it could be hard to know what it was. Sometimes the impact of things is not realized until sometime later; it took me roughly 20 years of humming the chorus of ODB’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” to friends and strangers to figure it out.
The first cassette tape I bought was Pokinatcha by Christian-approved punk rock band MXPX. By 1994 I had found a double-deck tape player and Nirvana. The Keith Green tape in my Walkman at youth group outings only said Keith Green but the sounds were now Kurt on a stage in NYC sad and awkward and beautiful. The first compact disk I purchased was Motzart’s Requiem. In those days my dad would say that if you want to find Matthew, look between his headphones; in these days it’s the same though the headphones look different and my volume level is now up out of necessity more than anything.
Besides my relationship with my parents, I don’t figure I’ve had any other relationship last as long as the passion I’ve had for the music. Relationships go both ways though and so I see my music creation as a bit of a fulfillment of that. For all the nights held by her comfort and for all the days driven by her passion I make music.