PREMIERE | Genna Matthew, "Stereo"
Introducing Nashville-based upstart Genna Matthew; photographed by Kirsten Barnett.
Music can take us back to certain places deep in the catalogue stacks of memories. The feeling of spinning the dial on the radio during a drive and finding an all but forgotten song can bring about full on flashbacks to a time, place, situation, feeling or a fuzzy familiarity that is now estranged to us in the present tense. Those tonal inflections and harmonic frequencies from the AM & FM channels have the potential and potency to make our surroundings melt away as we are brought back to a point in a previous timeline that has otherwise been sequestered to the vaults and dustbins of our consciousness. In an instant it can seem as if we have returned to those sepia filtered moments spent with a former flame, listening to that same song, sharing in a discourse and attachment tied up in the imperfect impermanence of the temporal. Revisiting those places can bring a groundswell of complicated reactions, emotions and perceptions that provide an abrupt diversion to almost everything at hand in the here and now of the contemporary.
This phenomenon is the subject of “Stereo” from Nashville by way of Charlottesville, VA artist Genna Matthew featured off the forthcoming album Broken Record. Recorded with producer Jake Finch, the song is stylized like a Top 40 ballad one might stumble on during a car ride with the radio on that brings about a wave of striking recollections. Genna designs the track in the spirit and strength of how our entire beings can be transported to a previous life with people from our past and all the intricate entanglements that arrive with. Reckoning with the power of the pop song, Matthew delivers a musical missive on the inherent intensity that these audio arts posses. It is meditation on how a Billboard chart topping hit can have the mystical might to shuttle us back into an era that can consume our vision in ways that an old photo from a picture book never could.
“Stereo” sparkles with a hallow reverence for the music that makes us revisit the back pages of the past. Genna Matthew delivers a case for driving in silence when it feels as if the very spark and cadence of a song can revive something that is more than just a mere semblance of everything from the way it was and how it used to be from the time of a previous relationship. More than just a passing recollection, “Stereo” is about how all of a sudden surroundings and sounds can become a connective relic from a connection that is no more. Like the rushing pain from ripping off a bandage, Genna journeys into the memories tied up with a break-up where every street sign and charged item of landscape and topography returns to correlative component of an ex-significant other. “Stereo” is a lavish lamentation about the proverbial ghosts in the radio machine, a reluctant warning about the genie in the transistor lamp. More than a chance meeting with an apparition; Genna Matthew delivers a saudade song about what happens when our senses become imbued with the return to an epoch that has long since been dissolved into the ether of personal histories and trajectories buried deep within our hearts and minds.
Tied up in cassette tapes and reminiscences with Genna Matthew; photographed by Kirsten Barnett.
Genna Matthew provided some exclusive insights on the inspirations and emotions that informed “Stereo”:
When I'm heartbroken, I can barely listen to music because it's too intense. In an instant, the space is filled with memories. But memories don't just hide in songs; they're all around — a street, a bar, a room — an entire town echoing. I wrote and recorded "Stereo" in the thick of heartbreak when the sound was at its loudest.
Meditations on memories and more with Genna Matthew; press photo courtesy of Kirsten Barnett.
“Stereo” is about feeling the person you miss in everything around you; the memories are impossible to escape because you can’t just turn the volume down. When my producer Jake Finch and I started working together on this song, I knew I had met my creative partner for this record. Jake has this amazing way of completely understanding his artists. I felt like he saw straight to my pain, understood it, and helped me make it into something I could love.
“Stereo” is out now everywhere.
Genna Matthew’s album Broken Record will be available later this year.
Single cover art for “Stereo”; courtesy of Kirsten Barnett.