 "Photo: Tyler Waldman/ The Towerlight")
Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Matt Duke first hit the scene with his CD, “Winter Child,” last April. He released his latest album, “Kingdom Underground,” in September. The self-taught guitarist combines jazz, folk, pop and hard rock influences. The independent artist's popular songs include “Sex and Reruns” and “I've Got Atrophy on the Brain.”
Your live sound is very different from your album sound. As an artist, what drives you to go more acoustic live?
Economically. I know that's a very anti-climactic reason but it's like when I play certain areas, I bring the acoustic around. I've been accustomed to playing the acoustic for the last four or five years. I've been playing with a full band for the last three. So if we can do shows, usually the record is a nice medium in between what it is to do the acoustic shows and to do the [larger] live shows. Because the live shows are like a full band, like a trio. It's usually exponentially more intense, a lot heavier, a lot more distorted. But when I do stuff like this, it's a lot more acoustic, just because it's fun to transpose things into like a lot more simpler terms and to focus on the lyrics a bit more too, so either way, for me, personally, it's win-win. It's fun to do either one so, but yeah, for today especially, it was definitely an acoustic kind of feel.
It made it more intimate?
Much more intimate. And even if it wasn't, I've learned to play bigger shows even with an acoustic guitar too. It feels more natural to do this kind of thing, but again, if we were going to pay homage to the record, it would be a full trio kind of set and very, very heavy and so today did not feel like that. It was a very acoustic kind of set, even with Wild Light, so it was good.
Who do you consider to be your influences?
I would say Slayer, Dr. Dre, maybe N.W.A, John Cage, people like that... If not them, maybe Pearl Jam, Ani DiFranco, Conor Oberst, the Bright Eyes, Cursive. I've always been big into the grunge scene, like Alice in Chains was a big one. Alice in Chains was a huge, huge influence on the type of music I did. And also, I don't know, Sunny Day Real Estate, Jeremy Enigk was a huge one – he's an incredible songwriter, and Daniel Johns of Silverchair.
How long have you been touring?
Just doing on and off for the last two years... Later this month, in Phil. I came back to do a lot of stuff in the northeast, which is good. I was in London, I was in Seattle doing the Pacific Northwest for a bit, down towards Los Angeles, so we've gone a good bit around the country so we'll be doing a lot in the northeast for a while, until the fall. In the fall, we'll probably just manifest out west again and it's been good. It's just nice to get down in Baltimore, because – I'll be honest with you – in the four, five years I've been playing music, I've only played down here in the Baltimore/ Towson area like a handful of times, like three or four times.
So all things considered, things turned out pretty well this time?
Yep, they did. Lemons into lemonade.
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