part of my childhood. My Granddad was a
musician and he was also a professor at the
Southwestern Seminary there in Fort Worth
for over fifty years. He was one of the most
influential people in my life, no doubt, and an
amazing man. All of that to say is, the lineage of
church and music runs really deep in my family,
so from a young age I was learning music. My
Dad was asking me questions before I knew
what music really was. If we listened to classical
music, he would ask me if it sounded happy or
sad, and he was teaching me about minor and
major songs and chords.
I came through the church, and started playing
guitar at the church around twelve, and I just
wanted to spread my wings and learn to
do everything else. It was just the way I was
wired. If I played guitar, I wanted to learn to
make it sound good, and so I’d go back to the
soundboard and fiddle with it. Then I wanted
to learn that (engineering). That was the next
challenge, and then it was drums, and then I
eventually started singing and leading, and just
kind of spread my wings and tried to learn as
much as I could.
When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I
started playing at other churches, not just at my
parents’ church, and that was fun. I had some
mentors early on. Actually, I had this studio at
my Dad’s church early on, and it was about the
size of a really small closet. It was tiny. I just
put as much gear up there as I could, I didn’t
fully know what I was doing. There was a guy
who had come to look at redoing a sound
system at the church, he was really well known
around the area and had a lot of connections,
and he heard me doing something up there
in my little closet studio when he was walking
by, and so he walked up there and he sat with
me for the next two and a half hours and we
worked together. I was seventeen at the time,
and from that moment he just saw something
in me and took me under his wing and gave me
every opportunity really you could think of for
the next five years. This guy was a big mentor
to me, and he saw something in me, in a tiny
little studio in a tiny little church in Fort Worth,
Texas, and gave me much larger opportunities.
That’s really when things started to take off,
and the rest is history from there, from the
different churches I’ve been around, the
different communities I’ve been a part of, the
different roles I have played. If I were to say
something that makes me who I am, it’s the
diversity of how I’ve done a lot of these things
and not just stuck to one thing. I think that’s
why I have my role and why I love to produce,
because producing is not looking through one
tiny portion at what you’re doing. Producing is
zooming out and looking at the entire process
of the way music is created.
[WM] Absolutely! I guess after learning so
many instruments the only way to go forward
for you probably was producing.
[Matt] In a way, yes. It is in the sense that
July 2020
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