Track by Track: Matt Holubowski - 'Weird Ones'
Matt Holubowski has just released his third album ‘Weird Ones’, which is a collection of songs that celebrate being different and all things odd. He took a moment to talk to us about the album - track by track.
Weird Ones
This song was meant to be a prologue of sorts, and so is a summary of three years of my life in under three minutes. It quickly goes from reflective, to bigger than oneself - mesmerizing and wonderful, far too intense to bare, to loss of control, and then a blissful calm settles in. It ends with a sense of preparedness for what is to come.
I also sometimes liken it to a panic attack, which comes suddenly, unexpectedly. It intensifies greatly for a moment, and then settles into a calm, quiet, reflective acceptance.
Weird ones signals the rebirth of wonder, of curiosity, and of a need to evolve, to move on. A gentle reminder that change is good, and it can be as powerful as nostalgia, as great as that can be, too.
It embodies the spirit of what was the original title of the record: ‘’Something Quiet Left Behind’’.
Two Paper Moons
TPM was born out of a need/desire to have a place to escape to, at times where I couldn’t physically disappear. I became enthralled by the magical surrealism of Murakami, and wondered, what it would be like if I could create a new world for myself, one that is not so different from the one I am in that I would feel lost, but sufficiently different that I remain in a state of perpetual intrigue.
Musically and lyrically, this song is a balancing act. I wrote it in part thinking about an EE Cummings poem ‘’Spring is like a perhaps hand’’:
Arranging and changing placing
Carefully there a strange
Thing and a known thing here)and
Changing everything carefully
This song was the starting point of what I wanted this record to be about: acceptance of self, and the moon.
Stylistically, I wanted to move away from my more matter-of-factly way of writing. I was yearning for something more ambiguous and open to interpretation. As a result, the three verses and chorus are both cryptic and very specific references to deeply personal events of my life. In a nutshell, this song permitted be to be the most raw and honest I’ve ever been in song, while also feeling protected from total exposure.
Thoroughfare
A first attempt at describing my relationship with love in song. This one is about navigating the roller coaster that is attempting to rebuild a life after a long-term partnership has come to an end.
It begins in a dream, where I fondly reminisce, colourful images of a woman happily prancing through a hallway of flowers. It seems that her aura could right any wrong, but when she turns to look back, I see sadness in her eyes.
The colours fade and I’m left in a spiral pattern, seemingly destined to repeat the same mistakes as I try to find my way out, but I’m totally lost.
The scene then goes to a boisterous party, one of too many that eventually coalesce into one single meaningless, hollow, memory. Why am I there? To distract myself from thinking of her, and to see if she’s there.
Around Here
There’s an actual place that I go to seek refuge or a bit of quiet for reflection. It’s a small mountain I can hike up in about a half hour. I’ve often gone to this place with my oldest friends whenever one of us needed a good heart to heart. I know when I come down, I will feel lighter and more in control of myself.
As a person who often ruminates and tends to complicate things for nothing, it felt important to me to highlight something simple and beautiful. Especially at a time and in a world where everyone is always trying to be edgy for the sake of it, I liked the idea of a sweet ballad that wasn’t pretending to be anything else but that. It felt like a good dose of wholesome.
Down the Rabbit Hole
I wrote the first part of this song a long time ago, back in 2011. I had just returned from a six month student exchange at a university in Paris, where I studied Political Science. I had never left my small town for any amount of time until then, and when I returned, it seemed like everything had changed.
I felt at the time that I had lived so much, and had so much to say, but the world back home was trucking along the same as always, and my seemingly epic stories of road trips around France, getting high and going to museums in Amsterdam, skating on the Eiffel Tower, and getting lost in Venice were falling on deaf ears. It was hard to relate with anyone anymore, and I felt terribly alone.
Years later, as I started working in music, I realized that the exact same sentiment came from touring. More specifically, DtRH came after experiencing the stark contrast of existence that was performing in front of a huge audience, and two hours later, doing a load of a laundry alone at home.
It’s about how ludicrous life can be. And it’s also about rumination and the dark, twisted vicious cycle it can create. And it’s about laughing off self-indulgent pity parties we sometimes throw ourselves.
The Highlands
This is sort of the thematic pre-cursor of TPM. I had been reading about nordic and Scottish folklore, and I thought it would be interesting to write about something like that - something removed from my usual rumination, and closer to mythical, fantasy-like story-telling.
The Highlands is about being caught in the mouth of the Loch Ness, and having to choose whether to jump out into the lake, or to be swallowed up by the monster’s mythology, therein becoming a part of it. It’s about how scary it can be to live a fun, exciting, varied, adventurous life. But once you’re in, you’re in, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.
Weird Ones II
I had initially intended on extending the original Weird Ones to be less of a prologue and more of a full song, but no matter how I rearranged it, it always felt like it wanted to be a summary of the past two-three years or an introduction to something.
I chose to reinforce these particular lines because it had indeed been a strange, difficult, somewhat harrowing couple of years, and I guess I needed to make sure whoever would listen know that even if it was real hard, as sometimes life can be, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.
Eyes Wider
It’s funny to think that this song barely made it on the record, because it seems to resonate with people the most. Maybe because it’s the most ‘’single-esque’’ song on the record.
The first line is an homage to Nick Cave’s ‘’Wide Lovely Eyes’’, which is definitely my favourite of his (maybe tied with ‘’Sun Forest’’, which I heard the day I recorded the synths for ‘’mellifluousflowers’’, and was the catalyst for the minimalist folk/modern thing we tried to do on that song).
I’ve never had such a love/hate relationship with a song before. I hated it for being so simple, and lyrically straightforward, and loved it for the same reasons. It’s just such an easy song to play, but despite where I actually landed, I’ve always wanted to make music that was at least somewhat challenging.
But there was a point last year where I started thinking to myself ‘’why am I making this so hard for myself? Why can’t I just write a good tune, and be happy with it just being fun and pretty?” So I wrote this song almost as a parody of itself, and had almost immediately wanted to trash it, but it was so much fun to play that we decided to roll with it, and it became one of my favourites to play live.
What’s more, I tend to be very self-critical, and singing ‘’don’t be so hard on yourself’’ night after night is such a powerful reminder to myself not to always take things so seriously.
Greener
The grass is always greener on the other side. That old cliché! Well, I happen to love clichés, and I became painfully aware of this particular one when, after dreaming of making music for a living, I found myself actually doing it with a relative success, and for a portion of that time, I felt like absolute garbage.
It was a plethora of different things that made me feel that way - largely personal things, and also in part professional frustrations - but at the time, as far as anyone was concerned, I was on top of the world. Inwardly though, I was a mess, and any complaint coming from me was met with something like ‘’you’re so lucky to be doing what you’re doing!, or ‘’So many people only dream of making music for a living” or ‘’yeah, but look at all the amazing things happening’’.
All of it was said with good intentions, but also with an underlying (false) belief that someone who succeeds can’t go through a rough patch.
Greener was also about the inevitable comparison game that comes with having to have somewhat of an online or public existence. You just don’t want to go there, it’s insane to go there. It’s also about not pretending to be something you’re not for the sake of appearances (I also reference this in TPM - ‘’to pretend is not the same as existing’’).
Moon Rising
Moon rising is about trying to become a morning person without a schedule, because the person you are with operates in that way.
I am not a morning person. But I have sometimes wished I could be. Being nocturnal has its perks, but it also definitely comes with some drawbacks as well. Night owls are more likely to drink or do drugs, are less likely to exercise or be exposed to the benefits of the sun, and are more likely to procrastinate. As a result, I’ve often attempted to abide by ‘’early to bed early to rise’’, but have always failed miserably. It’s hard to say if it’s just my nature, or if being a bartender and subsequently a touring musician embedded it in me.
At a time when my life was becoming increasingly busy, I was often glued to my calendar. To the dismay of my then girlfriend, I would have to pencil her in in order to have time for her. She despised that, and the calendar soon became a point of contention as our relationship dwindled. When we split, I had a mental image of burning a calendar as if it was some sort of redemption.
This song is also about a handful of other really lengthy stories, references and confessions hidden between the lines.
mellifluousflowers
mellifluousflowers is about the struggle with, and the acceptance of the self.
If you can only write when you are down, then you are doomed to either embrace the darkness, or to endure a happy, perpetual writing block.
Lucky for me, life is an ebb and flow of happiness and misery, so I’ll likely always have fodder for my songs.
Love, the Impossible Ghost.
Anyone who writes music has probably at some point been asked by a partner to ‘’write them a song’’ or asked ‘’is that song about me?’’.
I have always refrained from writing or talking about my relationships, but at the time that I wrote this song, I was in a place where love had completely disappeared from my life, and I was beginning to question if perhaps it would never return, or worse, that it had never really existed in the first place.
Hope is a wicked thing to know when you’re feeling down in the dumps, and certain that’s just where you belong.
I wrote this one in Krakow in November 2018, where I was spending two months laying low. I had been there before for a short time with the girl in question in December of 2014. The day I wrote ‘Love,…’ I accidentally stumbled on the apartment we had stayed in together, and for the first time since we broke up in the fall of 2017, I came to the sullen (and very delayed) realization that we would never be together again. I wept by the doorstep, and returned home to write the song. The sense of simultaneous heartbreak and relief of knowing for sure is a feeling I’ll never forget.
We decided not to cut this song at all despite its length, and I even added a minute of silence at the end, because I felt like it took so damn long for everything that’s happened to me in the last few years to sink in, and I’m glad I took my time to let it happen, because I understand and appreciate it so deeply now. I hoped that that extra minute would give listeners a moment to let it all sink in as well.