It might not be the Matt Mays show you’re used to, but he’s pretty sure you’re going to dig it anyway.
The singer-songwriter lands in Jasper Nov. 2, just one stop on a months-long solo tour across Canada.
Ditching most of his band for an acoustic guitar and a little backup from bandmate Adam Baldwin, Mays has stripped down his sound in an attempt to connect with his audiences in a different way.
When his band’s tour finished earlier this year, Mays says he just wanted to keep going, “so it kind of made sense to do something different.”
He wants to “give [his] mind and soul a chance to rest and recharge,” he says. “It’s digging a little deeper.”
At 34, music for Mays is about digging deeper, but as a teenager he just wanted to be cool.
He remembers idolizing his sister’s boyfriend, thinking he was so cool because he played the guitar.
When he taught Mays the chords to Tom Petty’s “Free Falling,” Mays couldn’t stop playing them.
“I must have played that riff for a month.” He says it was so easy to re-create a song that he loved so much, and it felt amazing.
Fast forward to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Mays was in art school, uninspired by his courses, and “failing out of college horribly.”
When he realized he was spending more time in the recording studio than doing his coursework, he ditched college to focus on music.
“It just kind of happened,” Mays remembers, “I was spending all my time with the four-track, and just flunking all my courses.”
He hit every open mic he could find, eventually hooking up with Ruth Minnikin and Dale Murray to play in the country rock group The Guthries.
Mays got a taste of fame with The Guthries. They toured across Canada and the UK, putting out two albums in the four years they were together.
Mays left the band in 2002, just before they finally called it quits. That same year, supporting himself by working three jobs, he put out his first solo album.
Mays finally felt like he made it when he was in a Canadian Tire, buying a repair kit for a busted tire. He heard his song “City of Lakes” on the radio and thought “wow, I’ve got to turn this into something,”
“I wanted to jump up and tell everybody,” Mays remembers, “it was awesome.
“Then I had to go back outside and change my tire,” he remembers with a laugh.
Trevor Nichols
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