Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Matt Bauer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Matt, thanks for joining us today. Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?
I am happier. I’ve had a lot of day jobs unrelated to music, and it definitely relieved the stress of knowing where my next job or next paycheck was coming from. But it was often hard to find the energy and discipline to make music the way I wanted to after a full day of work for someone else. Freelance creative work can be stressful and unpredictable, but really rewarding. And some of that unpredictability can actually be the fun of it.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I write and release music mostly under my own name and more recently under the name Memory Spells, and I write and co-write music for tv, film, commercials, podcasts etc. Sometimes I’m asked to score directly to picture, and a lot of the time I’m writing on spec to pitch songs to be licensed. And every once in a while someone asks me to produce or arrange an album for them, which I really enjoy.
I guess touring and releasing records led to music supervisors occasionally reaching out asking about licensing my songs for independent films. A good friend who I went to for advice on those contracts eventually signed me to the publishing company she worked for. And that led to more licensing opportunities for me, and first introduced me to writing for sync and writing with other artists.
A couple of my favorite scoring projects are the music I wrote for a beautiful commercial for Barneys New York that Mikael Kennedy shot in Wyoming, and music I wrote to score interviews with heroes of mine like Daniel Johnston and Ian MacKaye for Zack Taylor’s Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.
I’ve been lucky enough to have a bunch of songs licensed for tv shows too. I think my favorite placements are a couple of instrumentals I wrote for my first Memory Spells album that were licensed for the VICE documentary series on Showtime. They’re just very particular and kind of weird things I wrote for myself and I didn’t imagine anyone would want to license them.
Another favorite is Sparrow, Sparrow that I wrote and recorded with Malena Cadiz and Jenna Maranga. It was on Nancy Drew and it was a little surreal to hear myself playing banjo on tv for the first time.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding part of making music for me is collaboration. I have really great memories over the years of asking friends to sing harmony on my records and being floored by the ideas they came up with. Just bringing the songs to a place I couldn’t have thought of. And the same with co-writing. There’s something special and rare about starting from nothing or just the spark of an idea and finding something neither of you could have found on your own.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
This kind of relates to collaboration, too. When I first started writing, I wanted to do just about everything myself and control every aspect of the writing and recording process. And at the time I was mostly performing solo as well. As I started to put a band together, at first I think I micromanaged things and tried to make us sound as much as possible like the recordings I’d made. But over time I started to let go of that and I began to enjoy hearing musician’s different takes on what a song could be. I think I went from sort of a control freak about the arrangements and flipped 180 to thinking the songs should sound different depending on who was playing. For a while the band was anything from me playing solo to seven of us, and I think the magic was in how the song might sound on that night with those specific people in that place as opposed to trying to recreate exactly what I had recorded on an album.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://mattbauermusic.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattbauer/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattbauerofficial
- Other: spotify link for my project Memory Spells: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3aFz9jDku5H4r95SejEHkf?si=Wry54rF8R6-Wx_mWZZbUUQ spotify link for my Matt Bauer records: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2skZfdZYc9tibUXLzPQVDZ?si=U8ZIuJM9R0Kg6fAqUCDiXQ
Image Credits
Blake Wurtzler (All I See Is You Album Artwork) Mikael Kennedy ( Where Is My Mind, Fade Into You, and The Island Moved In The Storm photos)