Singer/songwriter Matthew Payne recently released new album Better Times. It marks his first full-length album, and is a follow up to an EP that he released last year. Two “spirit guides” to the album for Payne were Red Headed Stranger by Willie Nelson and Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen.
Payne’s own songs were recorded similarly, and have a bare-bones stripped-down feel. The ten songs that make up Better Times “tell stories of conflicted characters at their brink, looking for a way forward, trying to carve it out, trying to make something better, trying to believe that ‘better times come from these.’”
For his debut album, Payne wanted to keep it simple: he recorded the songs early, right after he’d written them, to capture their spirit immediately. To complete the trio were Kevin Smith (Willie Nelson, Bennen Leigh) on upright bass and Marty Muse (Robert Earl Keen) on pedal steel or resonator. JM Stevens added harmony and percussion, as well as co-produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered the album. The album is all acoustic, performed live, and sent through tape at East Austin Recording.
“Better Times,” the title track, is a Country song, and tells the story of “being caught in the middle in life, caring for an aging parent who is experiencing dementia and Alzheimer’s and raising a son – the joy and the sorrow.”
Each song on the album has its own character, and its own narrator, but the songs have interrelationships, emotionally and musically, and “create one overall conceptual narrative.”
Matthew Payne has been honored by being a finalist at Kerrville’s New Folk, and performer at many festivals, including the Dripping Springs Songwriters Festival, Bandera Songwriters Festival, Corpus Christi Songwriters Festival, and Pecan Street Festival in Austin, TX.
He currently shares songs around Central Texas, sometimes across much longer distances, solo or with a band. He can be found at his monthly residency at the historic Hole in the Wall, or bringing songwriters from all over together to play music and swap songs at other residencies and swaps in town.
