The Amazing Side

Matthew Pryor, front man and founder of the New Amsterdams, has to get hit over the head sometimes. By a song, that is.

“I have 20 songs already written for my next album, and I’m just getting started,” he says. “I write a lot of songs, to find those few that I’ll record. A song has to hit me over the head pretty hard for me to want to do it. Basically a song has to stick in my head long enough for me to not hate it anymore by the time we actually record it.”

Hate it? Surely Matt Pryor doesn’t hate his own songs.

“Of course I do. It’s like when you hear a song on the radio. The first couple of times, you think, ‘Wow, this is a great song.’ Six months later when they’ve played it to death, you’re like, ‘Man, I’m so fucking sick of this song!’ My trick is, I have to come back around to it. When I first write it, I love it, but then we dissect it and arrange it and demo it and then record it for real. Then we listen to the mixing and mastering and all that, and finally, I’m like, ‘Okay, I absolutely am so sick of this song, if I hear it one more time, I’m going to kill myself.’ But if I can come back around to it later and like it again, then it usually has some kind of staying power. I judge things on a sliding scale from tolerable to amazing. Well, actually, I guess I should add crap to the end of that scale too, huh? But something has to be on the amazing side for me to put it on an album.”

Only nine songs made it onto the New Amsterdams’ latest CD, Story Like a Scar, a collection of smooth acoustic rock. Most of the songs are slow to mid-tempo, serene but still obviously rock-based. Part of the emo group Get Up Kids in the late ’90s, Pryor started the New Amsterdams as a side project. Once he left the Kids, he became a full-time Amsterdamer and made a significant change in style. Pryor points to his own changing tastes as the reason.

“I just want to write stuff that I would enjoy listening to if I was the audience,” he says. “The idea is to have my music be as diverse as possible without sounding schizophrenic.

“Having people know my music from when I was with Get Up Kids, that’s a blessing and a curse at the same time. If people enjoy the Get Up Kids stuff and remember me for that, that’s great because I’m really proud of the work I did with that band. But at the same time, I hope that people would be interested in what I’m doing now. It’s not for everybody, I know that. If they like it, cool. If they like the older stuff, that’s fine, too. I’m proud of the older stuff, but I can’t write angsty punk-rock emo songs anymore because I’m not 18 anymore. If I did that now, it would be this forced, trite stuff. I have to write about what’s in me now.”

Pryor says his new bandmates (guitarist-singer Dustin Kinsey, bassist Eric McCann and drummer Bill Belzer) also have something to do with his new sound.

“We are definitely all of a like mind, from a creative standpoint,” he says. “It’s sort of like you’re all walking around with these ingredients; you have the carrots, another guy has the water, and another guy has the chicken. None of you can do anything much by yourself, but all together you can make soup…I like what happens to my songs when we do them as a group. We add a little bit of Dustin, a little bit of Eric, some Bill, and that makes the song better, I think. I’m sort of the foundation of it and everything else builds on that, adding one layer and then another.”

Pryor says that while he puts a lot of effort and emotion into his songs, fans shouldn’t assume they’re a window into his private life, not even seemingly personal ones like “Turn Out the Lights” (“I’ve been wrong / But it’s all right / There’ve been long and lonely nights / I was lost until I found you / Turn out the lights / I’ll stay if you want me to”).

“People confuse the singer with the song,” he explains. “That’s natural, and I understand it. But I’m not my songs, and I’m really not whatever you think about my songs. If I’m very, very angry one day, I can write a very, very angry song. But then, for me, it’s done. It was just a temporary mood and it’s over. The song, however, stays the same, and ten years later, people hear it and think that’s still who I am. In fact, it’s just who I was for a few minutes.

“It’s like, just because I write a song about the day I found out my girlfriend was cheating on me with my brother, that doesn’t mean anything. Really. It’s just a song. Maybe I was talking about my experience, or maybe something I heard about, or something I saw happen to someone else. Don’t go around thinking my girlfriend and my brother got something going.”

Still, Pryor’s personal life does manage to leak into his music. A new father, Pryor has launched a children’s music project, the Terrible Twos. His daughter, Lilian, and son, Elliott, act as resident critics. (Lilian reportedly complained to her father that his song about dinosaurs needed a volcano in it.) Those might be the only two critics Pryor readily listens to. “I don’t pay reviews — or reviewers, for that matter — too much attention. I usually read the article and if it’s negative, then I just assume they’re idiots,” he says with a laugh. “I’m fine with someone who actually doesn’t like my music saying so, as long as they articulate it well. As long as it isn’t just venomous and hateful.

“And I consider the source. Is this just some kid out in nowhere with nothing else to do but blog about music that he hasn’t even heard? That, I don’t think anyone takes very seriously. I think if you have a real job doing this, I might listen a little bit, but even then, not really. I’m my most vocal critic, anyway…Believe me, that 13-year-old blogger in the middle of nowhere doesn’t have anything on me when it comes to criticizing my music.”