We were lucky to catch up with Matt Mayhall recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Matt thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you tell us about a time that your work has been misunderstood? Why do you think it happened and did any interesting insights emerge from the experience?

I wouldn’t say my work as an artist/composer/bandleader has been misunderstood or mischaracterized. When you are the artist, you can do what you want and if it’s honest and convincing enough, your intent will be understood by those who are paying attention. The same is largely true as an instrumentalist for hire, only I didn’t really fully understand this until after I had done a few of my own creative projects. In most circumstances where I’m being hired to be someone else’s drummer, I’m being called upon to interpret what is there and provide something that will complement what is there. This takes honesty and the courage of my convictions in the same way that it would if it were my own project. There are other situations in which it’s just my job to go in and execute. My take on things isn’t needed. If it’s a wedding gig, I have to just go play “Uptown Funk.” No one wants my interpretation of it! For a long time, I was more comfortable in this world. I wasn’t as interested in being an artist. I just wanted to gig, and I felt like I was versatile enough to compartmentalize and farm myself out to a lot of different people doing different things. I achieved a lot operating this way, but I wasn’t as focused. When you operate like that, it’s hard to feel in control. I definitely went through a long period where I was less self-directed and more reliant on others, and this maybe led to my work and my playing being perceived by others in ways that I resented or maybe felt like wasn’t helpful to me. Becoming a father started to put an end to that for me, and then the pandemic REALLY put an end to it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a musician. My primary instrument is the drum set. I also play various keyboard percussion instruments (marimba, vibraphone, etc.) and keyboards. I’m a composer. I’ve released a handful of records of my own music. I’ve been a drummer in a variety of situations. My training in music school was jazz-focused, and that’s where most of my creative interests reside. But I’ve done a lot of touring and recording as a drummer in the singer-songwriter/indie pop and rock worlds. I teach a lot, mostly privately. I’ve held various adjunct positions at a few different colleges and universities. I do remote recording sessions on drums and percussion from my home studio. I’ve also done some composing, arranging, and producing music to picture, some DJing and curatorial stuff.

I’m originally from Reno, NV. I went to college there. I moved to L.A. in my 20’s and lived there for 16 years. Now I live in the Pacific Northwest, just outside of Portland, OR.

Most of my most noteworthy accomplishments thus far happened in my L.A. years. I worked with Aimee Mann steadily for about 4 years and still do intermittently, both in her touring band and as a part of The Both, her collaborative project with Ted Leo. In the jazz realm, I play a lot with folks like Jeff Parker, Chris Speed, and Paul Bryan. I was pretty heavily entrenched in the scene at the now-defunct ETA Highland Park since its inception.

Post-pandemic and post-relocating to Portland, I’ve been leaning more heavily into doing my own things, spearheading creative projects, booking my own gigs and trying to create my own little musical world. I have also been working here with a great singer named Jimmie Herrod, who is an incredible artist and composer in addition to being a touring member of Pink Martini and appearing on The Voice.

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

I feel like I’m in the midst of the biggest pivot of my career right now. A lot of things happened in quick succession over the past few years that changed the calculus for me substantially. I got married, had a child, turned 40, and then there was a pandemic and we relocated. I’m still playing, but my day-to-day is completely different. This is not a bad thing. I feel like we all had to pivot in some way during the pandemic. The outcome of that period of time was that I’m now more fully committed to being myself, instead of always feeling like I had to be calculating my every move depending on who was in the room. L.A. can be a bit of a bubble. It is its own musical ecosystem unlike any other in the world. Portland is different. Music occupies a completely different space in the culture here. Audiences relate to music in a different way. This is something I’ve had to navigate and readjust to.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Be more like Europe? Haha… For decades, we’ve been hearing stories about American musicians who have expatriated to Europe in search of a more sympathetico audience and/or more favorable working conditions. It’s almost cliché now to point to Europe or Scandinavia as the model for how to operate as an advanced society, but it’s become a cliché for a reason. When you go there as an artist to perform, you feel it. They’ve been a society for longer, they’ve been through hellish modern wars on their own soil, and they’ve learned from it. It feels like they are the adults in the room, and we are the whiny adolescents. I don’t know… perhaps this is all in upheaval now. But in the past, my feeling has been that there’s a perspective over there and a resulting system that is more favorable to artistic pursuits, especially in regards to things like healthcare and child care. Whether that’s due to the richness of their cultural legacy, or geopolitical history, or some combination thereof, I don’t know.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mattmayhallmusic.com
• Instagram: @mattmayhall

Image Credits

Live Photos by Eron Rauch
Portraits by Miriam Brummel