TBA/News
Matthew Good's Hospital Music
Is More Than Just An Album Title
By Steve McLean
Matthew Good
Matthew Good's 1995 Last Of The Ghetto Astronauts debut was one of the best selling independent releases in Canadian music history, and he's been one of the country's most successful - and definitely one of its most outspoken - artists ever since.
Matthew Good Band's Underdogs and Beautiful Midnight have both been certified double-platinum for selling more than 200,000 copies in Canada, and he's moved close to a million domestic copies of all his records combined. His most recent solo effort, Hospital Music, debuted at #1 on the Canadian sales chart when it was released last summer. That came as a pleasant surprise considering that Good was admitted to hospital after suffering a breakdown, which he later found out was a result of having bipolar disorder, while writing for the record. He ended up revealing more of himself in his songs than he ever had before, no matter how painful it sometimes felt. Despite the bleakness of much of his subject matter, both fans and radio programmers embraced it, as both 'Born Losers' and 'I'm A Window' were top 10 hits.
"I didn't think anything on this record would be commercially viable at all," Good confesses. "Everyone was talking about singles and putting out 'Born Losers.' I said, 'It's acoustically based and has a bit of a weird alt.country feel to it. I guess you guys can try, but I don't see that it's going to do well.' And lo and behold, it did, which is kind of the story of my life when it comes to music."
Good is proud of his evolution as an artist, even if it's meant that some albums weren't as well-received as others. He says it comes down to a choice of what kind of music you want to make and what kind of career you hope to have.
"You can continue to play a game of placation where you end up producing musical redundancies. The first one might have been genuine, but after that it's kind of pointless. You play that game to placate an audience and, to a much greater extent, the mechanism for which you're working - which is trying to make money off of you. Or you make the conscious decision to make records that don't necessarily fit into set categories or patterns, and then you deal with the fallout. The reality is that half or more than half of your audience will leave, but the rest of them that are left are going to be with you for life as long as you continue being genuine in that way. For me, it would be a pretty big disservice for me to not just do what I do naturally."
Good's albums have been released by Universal Music Canada since 1999, but his contract ended with the company following Hospital Music's release. Even though he didn't have an American record deal, he was approached by iTunes USA about issuing Hospital Music through its online store simultaneously with the Canadian release date. It debuted at #17, which was unprecedented for a record with no label affiliation whatsoever. The experiment has since been expanded to include Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and Good is considering following in the footsteps of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nail's Trent Reznor and bypassing labels altogether now that he's a complete free agent.
Good now uses medication to help control his bipolar disorder, but he says that coping with a mental illness is a day-at-a-time thing and he never knows what to expect.
"It's what you have and it's part of who you are. You live with it and you deal with it every day, and you take it as it comes."