Matt Nathanson Sings His Sad Heart (And Mine)
I was two days out from a breakup when Matt Nathanson’s “Sings His Sad Heart” tour stopped in New York. It was sold out, but a friend of mine had an extra ticket at the last minute. And although the February weather was that awful “wintry mix” of snow and rain, I needed to get out of my apartment.
A few songs into their set, Matt and his longtime bandmate Aaron Tap played a cut from his new album that I didn’t know well, and the opening lines struck a chord:
Do you remember when we met, the first thing that you said / ‘I’m done with men, they all let me down’
Okay, Matt, you have my attention.
“Sings His Sad Heart” is a breakup record. Most of its songs are about the messiness that comes with processing the end of a relationship and moving on (or, in some cases, helplessly watching the other person do those things). On some level, I was aware of this theme; the album came out last fall. But even though I’ve been a fan of Matt’s for a long time, I hadn’t listened closely to his latest release. I’m kind of a purist when it comes to the sound of the music I like. I gravitate toward “real” instruments, with as little discernible digital distortion as possible. On “Sings His Sad Heart,” Matt experiments with drum machines and tech-y sounding production effects. This is not unusual for popular music in this day and age, and I didn’t think the songs were bad…it just wasn’t my thing.
But this was an “acoustic” tour: just guitars, keys for one song, and Matt’s and Aaron’s two voices. Without all the electronic bells and whistles, I really listened to those songs for the first time. Stripped down to their core melodies and lyrics, one line after another cut to the quick of something I’d felt or thought about the ending of my own relationship:
Some people see the diamond, some can only see the flaws / we made perfect little movies that no one ever saw
Everybody looks for love where it’s not / everybody wants to know they matter
One round of coffee, and one last goodbye / you and I are gonna see the sun rise, it’s just gonna be from different beds next time
The sensation of standing in the front row while an artist performed songs that echoed my own freshly failed romance was jarring, but also, somehow, reassuring. This is partly because of Matt’s wry, self-effacing, comedic stage presence. Between sad songs, he basically channels a profanity-prone standup comic, and it’s hard to sulk or brood when the person onstage is cracking jokes.
But more than Matt’s sense of humor (or the giant Wheel-of-Fortune-inspired stage prop that is the centerpiece of this tour), it was the songs, and specifically their words, that delivered a kind of comfort: the reassurance that someone else had felt what I was feeling and believed it was worthy of sharing with an audience. Matt Nathanson doesn’t know me, and he certainly didn’t know anything about what had just gone down in my romantic life. And yet, just by singing some songs he wrote, he unexpectedly made me feel seen and understood.
I love live music, so I can almost always count on a concert to cheer me up. This show did more than that. I don’t know what the odds are of scoring a last-minute ticket, to a sold-out concert, on a tour promoting an album full of breakup songs, two nights after calling it quits with the person you’ve been dating for half a year. What I do know is that if you’re listening, sometimes the right songs have a way of finding you when you need them.
