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    Interview: Musical Musings with Matt Scannell of Vertical Horizon

    melomaniac (\ˌmel-ō-ˈmā-nē-ˌak\) noun. 1. A passionate or obsessive enthusiast for music. 2. Also in weakened sense: a music lover.

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    I’d been trying to find an appropriate term to define my relationship with music; “audiophile” seemed too restrictive because it really means the individual is primarily focused on the sound reproduction and quality. I do care about that to some extent – good music deserves good equipment. But more than that, I am interested in how music gets made. I love hearing about how artists write and record songs. How did they decide use this nuance or that effect? Why did they choose that specific musician to play that particular part? What did that producer add to the session? I can recite record label names, session players, producers, discographies. I usually can’t remember where I put my keys most days, but I can surely tell you a chart position for a bewildering number of songs. For most, it’s uninteresting minutiae. For me, it’s essential knowledge.

    I also listen to music a little differently than other people I know. I get hung up on little moments in songs – sometimes it’s a few notes of tight harmony, a key change, or a phrase that I’ll replay a bunch of times because my brain is aching to analyze it. I love finding demos of songs and trying to pick out the differences between an early version and the finish product. My definition of a great song often deviates from what many would consider compelling or worthy of hype; for me, it’s all about feeling and how a track hits my senses at exactly the right time. There are a lot of music lovers in my life, but I rarely meet people who operate on my particular wavelength.

    And then Matt Scannell called me a few weeks ago.

    The founder, principal songwriter, and lead vocalist of Vertical Horizon and I found a lot to talk about; mostly the music he and his band mates have produced since the early 1990s – but also our mutual appreciation for pop music that’s layered and momentous. It was heartwarming. We spent several moments discussing a playlist he’d created on Spotify called “#WishIWroteIt: Songs I Wish I Wrote“, which I’d discovered while researching questions for our interview. I noticed he included Phil Collins’ “You Know What I Mean” from 1981’s Face Value – what I would consider one of the most beautiful tracks in his entire catalog. “You know, it’s just… bittersweet… I just got goosebumps thinking about it,” he explains. “First of all, his voice – he’s one of the great singers. And to have been a drummer in a band with one of the other great singers, and be able to step into those shoes and say ‘I’ve got this. Peter (Gabriel)’s gone and I’ve got this. I’m fine – I can do that.’ I’ve got nothing but awe for the guy.

    One of the things I love about that song is… it’s very sort of conversational. It’s not majestic… and… you feel like he’s just talking to you. And sometimes the deepest statements, or sentiments, or feelings can be spoken or expressed through the simplest language. And when he says ‘you know what I mean’ – it’s so almost… throwaway. But throwaway great. And I know I mentioned throwaway crap earlier, but this is throwaway great. This is ‘you and I are so close that I’m just gonna say you know what I mean and it says so much.’ He is diving into the deepest level of connectivity or the fabric of a relationship with these very casual words. I’m nuts about his songwriting.”

    Scannell and I may very well be kindred spirits when it comes to our musical tastes – the subtle difference between us being that he actually has the talent to create the type of music he admires, and he’s done so for almost a quarter-century. Vertical Horizon achieved their commercial breakthrough in the summer of 2000 when their sophomore single, “Everything You Want”, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It became one of the most played songs of that year and, eventually, the decade. Given its haunting, urgent melody – offset by a completely memorable chorus – it’s unsurprising that it still receives a sizeable amount of airplay sixteen years later. Vertical Horizon’s latest album, 2013’s Echoes from the Underground, continued to demonstrate Scannell’s penchant for meticulously crafted, melodic pop-rock – expertly interpreted by Ron Lavella (drums), Donovan White (guitar), and Jeff Jarvis (bass).

    This Friday, Vertical Horizon will take the stage at 90s Fest at Columbus Commons. Scannell’s excitement to play live and connect with their audience is palpable. “The most important thing of all is gratitude and letting everybody know that it’s not lost on us – and it’s not lost on me – that we are twenty-four years into this band and people still care. The great news is that people still care – and we still care. Sometimes it could fall apart on either end there – sometimes the band isn’t giving it a hundred percent, or there aren’t enough fans out there to keep them going. We’re in a situation where we have both, and you have to be so aware of that and so grateful for that.”

    Tell me about the first time you picked up a guitar. What prompted you to do it?

    “Well, I think the impetus for playing the thing just came from the fact that it was in my house – it was in my family’s home. My father had a pretty nice guitar, actually, and he sort of let me bang around on that for a little while until he realized I was actually showing some intent there. And then he realized ‘I better buy him something of his own that he can beat on and save this one for when he’s actually up and running’. So I’m glad he did – he bought me a Stella, which is a Harmony budget brand nylon-string guitar. I just remember playing that thing excessively, you know – trying to figure things out. I think the first song I ever figured out on my own was “My Best Friend’s Girl” by The Cars. But I didn’t know that you could fret the notes with your left hand – I thought it was all just open strings, like a harp. My father really clearly didn’t play very much – I probably would have thought otherwise. So yeah, I sort of just started plunking around on it, and my dad showed me that you would actually fret the notes on the guitar to make other notes and to make chords. So I had a Mel Bay chord book and tried to learn on my own.

    After a few years – long answer to a simple question – I took some guitar lessons at my school, and I officially became just completely obsessed and spent nearly every free waking moment playing the thing. And it’s really been that way for – I’m forty-six now, so about forty years. It’s a big part of my life. The performance side of it, honestly, was more of an afterthought. I guess maybe I shouldn’t say afterthought, but it wasn’t the primary directive. I’ve met some other guys along the way who sort of wanted to be rock stars, you know, and that was their sort of motivation. And nothing wrong with it – it’s just not where I was coming from. I just wanted to play the instrument – I was just obsessed with it, so I think it was more about getting together with friends and forming bands whose aspirations were no greater than to play the basement. Our parents’ basement (laughs) ”This Saturday night at 8 pm! Get your tickets to the basement!’ You know, and that was great – we played cover tunes. It was more about the camaraderie and the joy of being able to actually sound like a band. That was really what drove me and drove us.”

    So, music certainly seemed important in your house growing up. What songs do you remember hearing your parents play?

    “I remember hearing ‘Something’, the Beatles tune. My dad would play the Beatles a lot. But there’s this incredible electric guitar part – I think it was (George) Harrison playing that. But I remember hearing that tone and the melody and just being obsessed with how beautiful it sounded. So that was one of those things – and ‘Come Together’ – a lot of Beatles stuff in my family’s house when I was growing up. Also, James Taylor, who was a massive influence on me as a singer, certainly. I mean, if you listen to our early independent records I sound like I’m just trying to be James Taylor. That didn’t work out, so I had to learn how to be me. But those records – and Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon; there was a song called ‘Kodachrome’. There’s a little nod to that on our latest album Echoes from the Underground – there’s a song I called ‘Instamatic’. And Rickie Lee Jones, Carole King – a lot of that stuff. But then my folks also got into ABBA, and Electric Light Orchestra, and the Bee Gees when Saturday Night Fever came out. There was a lot of varied and pretty cool music going on then. So, it was a very, very wide range of stuff.”

    When I listen to your music – and I picked up on it immediately when I heard “Everything You Want” for the first time, and I continue to hear it on many songs on Echoes from the Underground – it’s the melody that resonates the most. It’s what seems to float to the surface. When you write, do you intentionally begin with a melody, or are you more driven by words or phrases at first?

    “Something will generally come from just sitting down with the guitar and just trying to play something I haven’t played before, which will then just sort of spark me singing nonsense syllables. And, you know, making words but not thinking about what they are what they mean. And what that does is sort of nudge me toward a melody that is compelling to me in concert with those chord changes on the guitar. And I do find that I start with one melody – and very often, that’s the one that ‘makes it’, which is kind of interesting. But also, very frequently, it’s about nudging that and creating some nuance and variety and shaping it so it’s the very best it possibly could be given the music that it’s paired with. And that is generally where I start – and then what happens is words, as I’m just making up words and sounds with my voice, a word will come out that just feels right. Like “Lovestruck”, for example, from Echoes from the Underground – that was the word, you know what I mean? And once that sort of revealed itself… I do view songwriting as a fairly receptive art form. You’re kind of letting your heart, and your mind, and your fingers sort of tap into this subconscious… spiritual… whatever you want to say or however you want to look at it – you’re kind of looking to harness, honor, and receive inspiration.

    So it can be almost like a trance-like kind of experience where I’m just making sounds and I just record everything so I don’t lose bits and pieces. Because very often the most subtle nuance is what makes a song go from being okay to really good. And also from really good to great. So I’ve learned the hard way along my journey to be very liberal with the use of hard disk space recording those sessions.

    But yeah, you’re right – I think the melody is what is compelling me. And then I try to find lyrics that maybe resonate well – you know what I mean? So yeah, you’re right. I don’t know if I’m consciously like ‘melody is the most important thing’. I don’t know that I would say that so much as melody is what starts to draw the lyrics out of me. And then it’s very definitely about ‘okay, now I have to say something’. But I’ve heard enough of, and not to belittle other people’s songs… I’ve heard enough of what I would call throwaway lyrics – that they were just easy rhymes, you know, and that was enough. Not to say I haven’t done that, but I don’t wanna do that anymore. I want to be saying something I believe in – I want to say something that’s worth repeating hundreds of times at hundreds, if not thousands, of gigs throughout my career. So the lyrics really do have to mean something to me, but yeah, I’d say the melody starts to draw them out.”

    Let’s go back to your Spotify playlist for a second. You also listed Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” as one of the songs you wished you’d written. What specifically is it about that song that makes you say “why didn’t I come up with that?” I mean, I think I know the answer, but I want to hear your take.

    “‘Scarborough Fair’ starts with that haunting, haunting guitar part. To me that… if I had been in the room with a guitar in my hands and that had come out, I would have been happy to just stop there and just have it be an acoustic little piece and go ‘wow look at me! I just wrote one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.’ But to go from there to those incredible lyrics and that perfect melody – and that perfect harmony. ‘Scarborough Fair’ is Songwriting 101 all the way up to songwriting doctorate class, you know? It’s everything. It’s the beginning and the end – the alpha and omega of it all. I could never pick one thing about that song. I would just say that hearing it for the first time, I realized that the craft of songwriting can be as big as you make it – meaning as universal and as far reaching as you can possibly make it. And then it can be as small as you ever can conceive. Like when he’s mentioning ‘parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme’… to me it’s like…’wh…what?! You’re naming herbs?!’ It’s just so huge, majestic – and then so small and specific. Obviously, I love bittersweet love songs and songs that don’t just say ‘I’m happy and know it and I’m gonna clap my hands.’ When he says ‘she once was a true love of mine’, it’s like ‘okay… I’m in so… I just doubled-down on this song.’ You couldn’t get any better. That’s just a perfect song.”

    You’re now looking back on a career that spans over two decades. What aspects of yourself as an artist do you think have evolved the most since you began your professional career?

    “I think – first of all, it’s a really great question – and thank you. I think probably the thing that comes to mind first is I used to feel like I had to explain myself with my lyrics – ‘I feel this way because of this or that.’ Very much A+B=C. And each song made sense on first listen because I started at the beginning and ended at the end – that type of thing. As time has gone on, I guess I’ve grown probably more attracted to some of the vagueness of..’.it’s not the black and white, it’s the grey. It’s not love or hate, it’s real life.’ And so I’m not perfectly miserable, and I’m not miserably perfect – I’m somewhere in the middle. Lyrically, then, I’ve become probably more comfortable with little sketches of moments. When I read Hemingway – he’s somewhat of a polarizing author – I love the fact that he makes me fill in the blanks. I love that when he talks about about a house, for example, I’m filling in the furniture, and the colors of the walls, the windows… and everything. I’m using my experience and my frame of reference to complete the picture. He’s telling me what’s happening and what people are saying and what’s going on, but everything else gets sort of colored in by the reader. I’m really drawn to that. In no way, shape, or form would I compare what I do or who I am to someone as iconic and beyond great as Ernest Hemingway, but we’ve all got to be inspired, right? So I’m inspired by his economy of language. And the net effect of that is not that he’s just purposeful or reserved in his sentence structure and the way he described events – it makes me much more active as a reader.

    I’m not sure how successful I’ve been at any of it, but I’ve tried to be okay letting some of the lyrics be a bit more cloudy – you’ve got to squint a little to get through them. And sometimes that means just feeling right about something; like if something feels right, then it is right. I used to… if something felt right, I needed to know why and dissect it and break it apart and then put it back together – ‘do I really feel this way?’ Well, I feel that way right now – I don’t ever need to feel this way again. But right now I do, so let’s honor that – and that’s the lyric, you know?  I guess I trust myself more to say what I mean – to be content enough as a singer and as a lyricist to know that it was a feeling I was having at the time. I don’t necessarily need to feel that five years from now when I’m singing this song for the thousandth time. But ninety-nine percent of the time, as a side effect, I tap right back into where I was. When I sing a song like ‘The Man Who Would Be Santa’ from Running on Ice, which is however many years old… 1994, I think it was – I’m right there thinking about my dad and writing this song where I’m saying ‘I’m sorry for being a jerk.’ But a song like “Frost” is probably a good example of a lyric that’s very… haiku. It’s very anti-Hemingway – it’s like ‘hey, wait – I don’t really know who’s doing what or what’s going on. Are we in a bank robbery? Fields covered in frost? I don’t really understand what’s going on – I don’t know.’ And that’s okay, you know. It’s just feelings – all those feelings and images come together to form more of a haiku-like… and I’m not really knowledgeable about poetry, but I do love reading things that are little images.”

    How do you and the rest of the band work on new material? Is it a collaborative process?

    “Yeah, really the truth about how we work – generally speaking – is I tend to write the songs and I start recording them in my studio in Los Angeles. Then I bring Sean Hurley in to play bass on it – he’s an original member of the band, but he doesn’t tour with us anymore. Occasionally he’ll play with us, but he’s got a wonderful career as a session player and producer, and he tours with other artists like John Mayer. So bass performance happens that way. Ron Lavella, who is the touring drummer for the band… I get him out to Los Angeles and we track the drums pretty late in the process. Creatively, it’s very much sort of me in the studio being the crazy mad scientist going down a wormhole of insanity (laughs). And then coming out the other side and saying ‘hey guys, this is pretty much ready now – can we add your spice to the mix?’ But it’s not a terribly collaborative writing process, and I play the guitars and keyboards and program the drums and do most of the singing. A lot of it is me in the studio. The wonder of it all is that live, we get to then take these songs and see if we want to nudge them one way or another. Fortunately enough at this point, I think I’ve been doing it long enough to know if a song makes the record how to craft it and hone it so it will be a good thing to hear live. But occasionally, we do make little changes to make it better in a live environment. Most importantly, the guys I work with are such wonderful people that it’s fun for us all to be together. And now having done this for so long, I relish the fact that I get to be excited about going out there and playing these songs again for the however many hundredth time. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’m with really great people who are glad to be there. And most important of all is the audience – the people who literally put gas in our tank and get us to the next town so we can continue this crazy ride.”

    I want to ask you about your partnership with Richard Marx – and by the way, I love that you have a partnership with him because I think he’s an exceptional songwriter, singer, and producer. How did that come about?

    “It started just being an admirer of his work, and not only did I love his songwriting and singing – I also loved the bands he had playing on his records. One of my favorite guitar players in the world is a guy named Michael Landau. Richard had Mike play on a lot of those early things as well as Steve Lukather, who’s another one of those guys who is stunningly great. I knew he had incredible taste in musicians. When you pick the right guys – that says a lot about you. So I knew he knew what he was doing just by the people he surrounded himself with. We met at a Super Bowl thing down in Tampa one year – I guess it was around 2004 – and we just sort of hit it off. The thing that was cool about it – and rewarding and fun for me – was that he knew our band and liked our band. That was amazing, you know, to have someone whose music you really admire say the same thing about you – it was like ‘whoa… okay… alright… thanks!’ We just sort of were in each others’ lives a little bit at that point, and we’d write occasional emails to one another. About two years later, we started to really… I think we came through Chicago and got together with his family, and we all hung out and got along. And then it became clear ‘okay this guy’s… we could be really great friends.’ Which we have become.

    But it’s interesting – when you become friends with somebody, you don’t always work well together. It can be very sort of bad for the friendship if you work together. So somewhere along the line, we said ‘well, let’s give it a shot and try to write something’ – and it was effortless. It was so easy. My strengths and his strengths added up to a wonderful collaboration – a very easy creative partnership. And we share a lot of similar tastes, and yet there are ways in which we are very different. And that’s wonderful because every time I sit down to write with him, I feel like I’m going to learn something – and not in any professorial kind of ‘you’re the teacher and I’m the student’ way. Just ‘you cook with those spices, I cook with these spices… check this out!’ And that’s a lot of fun. So we wind up really enjoying collaborating. We wrote together for the last record on ‘You Never Let Me Down’ – the first song on the record – and we’ve written for the new record I’m working on now, as well. It’s been wonderful – we did some acoustic shows together for awhile and we’ve done two records as an acoustic duo… one in the studio and one live… which was so fun. And the other thing that’s great about that in performing with him is that I’m not a natural singer – I’ve really got to work at it. He is an incredibly natural singer, and I hate him for it (laughs). I absolutely hate him for it. We’ll be backstage and he’ll be talking to somebody, doing anything other than warming up – and I’ll be in the corner making these crazy, goofy noises and whatever else I have to do to get myself ready. He’s just a natural. It’s good to be around people who are really talented.”

    I hate asking this question from a journalistic perspective, but it seems to be a necessity. What’s next for you?

    “We’re working on new music – I don’t know when it’ll be done. In the past, I made promises I couldn’t keep – and didn’t keep – so I won’t start nailing that down quite yet. But there will be new music and we’ll just continue to play. You know, the music business has changed so much that you’ve really gotta get out there. It used to be that you’d sort of do tours to promote the sale of records. And now the whole dynamic of the business has changed that we sort of make records to keep awareness that we’re still out there to play shows. And it’s fine – either one’s fine with me… I mean, I don’t mind either way. But it is a pretty simple model: let’s keep making music that’s inspiring to us and hopefully, therefore, will be inspiring to our fans. What that really means is ‘let’s keep pushing to remain creative and remain vibrant and be a voice of conviction.’ And then hopefully by doing so, we compel people to keep us in their lives and go the extra mile to come and see us. I know very well what it’s like to have a concert at nine o’clock on a Tuesday, and you’ve just worked all day long – the babysitter may or may not make it and you’ve got kids and… It’s so easy just to say ‘you know what, we’re gonna skip it and watch Game of Thrones instead.’ So I’m always amazed and so honored when we get the nod over Game of Thrones… I mean, I think Game of Thrones is doing just fine. But I’m telling ya that some people choose us over Game of Thrones, and I’m grateful for that.”

    Vertical Horizon will play 90s Fest Friday, September 16 at Columbus Commons, 160 South High Street, Downtown. The festival runs from 4:00 pm through 11:00 pm, and is an all-ages event. Tickets range from $40 to $249.99, and are available HERE. More information and news about Vertical Horizon can be found via their official website.

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    Grant Walters
    Grant Waltershttps://columbusunderground.com
    Grant is a freelance writer for Columbus Underground who primarily focuses on music and comedy. He's a Canadian transplant, born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and schooled in Vancouver, British Columbia. Grant is also the co-author of two internationally acclaimed books: "Decades: The Bee Gees in the 1960s" and "Decades: The Bee Gees in the 1970s." He has also penned numerous articles and artist interviews for the nationally recognized site, Albumism.
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