We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Matt Wagner. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Matt below.

Alright, Matt thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Before we talk about all of your success, let’s start with a story of failure. Can you open up about a time when you’ve failed?

When I started college, I discovered Twenty One Pilots for the first time and my life changed forever. When I heard their song, “Goner,” I immediately saw a stage show in my head and decided that I would write a jukebox musical based on their 4th album called Blurryface: The Musical, despite my limited theatre experience at the time. Thankfully, youthful ambition kept me going and I eventually finished the project in 2017. I then spent a year revising the show and eventually put together a workshop for the musical in the summer of 2018 to test the show in front of a live audience. The workshop exceeded all of my expectations and so I moved to New York City the next year to stage a full production of the show after making more revisions. The full performance went even better than the workshop and I filmed the performance in order to create a trailer for social media to rally the band’s fan behind the project. When I released said trailer, it immediately went viral within the community but sadly sparked substantial controversy. After gaining over 3,600 instagram followers in a day for the project’s page, I emailed Twenty One Pilot’s management and gave them my pitch for endorsing the project but sadly I was sent back a cease and desist letter and the project was shut down. From there, Kerrang, Alternative Press, and iHeart Radio covered the story and I then used to publicity to launch my own artist project MNERVA and create a following on Tik Tok.

Although things didn’t go my way, I truly regret nothing because following this dream til the end taught me how to write scripts, arrange music, create a marketing plan, and lead team members. I still use every single one of these lessons now for MNERVA and the publicity from going viral allowed me to skip the initial acquiring fans phase of the journey. Even though it failed, the ideas and themes of Blurryface: The Musical lives on in my music and directs my artistic vision everyday.

Matt, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hello! My name is Matt Wagner and I’m an artist and playwright based in Nashville, TN. I’m originally from Germantown, MD and I’m the son of two former musicians. Music has been a massive part of my life since I was young and I have been playing drums for over twenty years now. Music became more than a hobby for me when I joined my first band, Remedy, at age 13 and that experience taught me how to sing, write songs, and cultivated my love of rock music. I eventually moved to Nashville for college and quickly fell in love with hip hop. Eventually, I began combining my rock, hip hop, and theatre influences and created my artist moniker, MNERVA. The name comes from a Deftones song and is the Roman Goddess of Wisdom. With MNERVA, I work to change the conventional wisdom of alternative music and prove that there is room in the current music landscape for rock and hip hop hybrids.

My greatest accomplishment as MNERVA is definitely my upcoming EP, “Invincible” which will be released in January of 2023. Each song on the record is inspired by a different style of music but cohesively comes together to tell the story of my journey through therapy how I learned overcome my shame and accept happiness. The record ends with a Finale track that mashes up all of the songs on the record and arranging that was one of my proudest moments as a creative.

As MNERVA, I primarily talk about my mental health struggles and my difficulty to accept life’s many changes. Through my lyrics, I hope to give a voice to listeners who don’t how to voice their issues and connect with a generation who also feels in over their head.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Watching a crazy idea become tangible is definitely the most rewarding part of the creative process for me. Ambition is a wild beast and my ridiculous ideas are always reigned in by my team in the production process but, through the journey, the wild ideas become so much better. Collaboration is key to creating something truly great and I love seeing the progression of a concept from a small seed to a full fledged record or musical. Without my team and support network, none of my ideas would ever amount too much, but I love steering the vision through the process.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When the 2020 pandemic hit, MNERVA was a hip hop artist inspired by rock music and I rarely sang. During lockdown, I went through a terrible depression and almost quit music multiple times because I didn’t see the point anymore with live music being shut down indefinitely. But rather than give up, I moved back home and returned to my rock music roots. In doing so I realized that I was only writing hip hop because I felt I was supposed to when in reality I always had wanted to be a rock artist. That change in mindset gave me so much creative freedom and now, I’m proud to say that I absolutely love the music I’m making. Had I not changed my genre, I would definitely be much less successful because my heart wasn’t in hip hop; I rap but I’m really not a rapper. My story is a great example of why it’s best to create what makes you excited instead of what you think will make you successful; audiences can sniff out inauthenticity from a mile away.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mnervaofficial.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mnerva_official/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IamMNERVA/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzEIr-xv5kfETBGlD2LNgXQ