INTERIEW: “It’s the season where everything dies and when things die we become more appreciative of which is still alive” – Matt Holubowski Welcomes A New Spring On Latest Record ‘Like Flowers On A Molten Lawn’

If making life changing decisions were made based on winning a foosball game, would you still do it?

While it may sound like a plot twist in the next indie film to break out at Cannes, for singer-songwriter Matt Holubowski, his loss in a dive bar in Montreal would eventually become one small win in his blossoming career as an internationally recognized singer-songwriter.

The Hudson-born, Montreal-based musician has had a unique journey to becoming a recording and touring artist. Not wanting to miss out on getting the story first hand, I made my way to The Drake in Toronto ahead of his first show back since 2019 to celebrate his fourth studio album Like Flowers On A Molten Lawn.

The follow-up to the stunning 2020 release Weird Ones, Like Flowers On A Molten Lawn is an equally compelling neo-folk album exploring the themes of spring, cycles, and life and death. (If you’d like a great entry point, I’d suggest checking out its opening single “End Scene”). With each release, Holubowksi continues to evolve his sound and his latest brings forth lush string arrangements, intricate production details, and cinematic musicianship that brings his stories to life.

And as one would hope, talking to a person of such noteworthy talent comes with an interesting perspective on music and our progression through life. From his humble beginnings playing dive bars to selling out shows, Matt looks back on his career thus far.

We sipped on a pre-show beer at the bar and got to chatting…

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Matt Holubowski: Cheers.

Kane Wilkinson: Cheers. Yeah. Thanks for doing this by the way.

Matt: Oh yeah.

Kane: I was watching a whole bunch of previous interviews you had done and everyone was like, ‘Oh, Matt “Holubowski”, did I say your last name right?’ Just felt like I needed to join the trend.

Matt: It’s very bizarre. I think you just have to read it section by section. I don’t know what happens, but their wires just get crossed the moment that it’s more than seven letters.

Kane: *laughs* Well, now that’s out of the way, we’re going to go way back to before you started making music, because I think your origin story is actually cool.

It’s pretty interesting because you went into it not knowing basically anything about how the music industry worked or songwriting at that – you can share your story in your own words, but I know you were traveling a lot and trying to teach English in different countries and just kind of figuring. So take us back to that point in your life before you had come back to Canada.

Matt: So, in a nutshell, I studied politics and philosophies, and that was my undergrad. I never did music in any other way than playing in bars, playing for my friends. And when I say playing in bars, I mean like the small town, local bar where anybody with a guitar can go up and sing.

It’d be terrible. Which is where we all have to start. And where I was for a very long time, and still am to some extent. But I guess at one point I decided to do an exchange abroad in Paris. I’d always been living in the same small town – I’d never taken a plane, I’d never really gone anywhere. I was sort of destined to have just a classic life of, you know, I’m gonna go to uni, I’m gonna get a master’s, I’m gonna pay off my loans, I’m gonna get a house, two cars, 2.5 kids and a dog and it didn’t really sit well with me so I decided to hell with it; and I went to Paris and I did an exchange over there with all of my savings that I’d scrounged up from years of working at a pool store, which was meant for a down payment on a house.

When I went to Paris and that sort of gave me the travel bug. And through university I did a lot of traveling and I did a lot of bartending and waitering to pay to finish college and then also to continue travelling. And at some point, when I finished my degree, I had this inkling that I wanted to be an English teacher, but I didn’t really know. Frankly, I wanted to be an English teacher because I really liked the idea of having three months a year off where I could travel. So any job that could afford me the possibility of being a bit of a vagabond, that’s what I wanted to do.

And I kind of like literature too, so it worked out. And so I ended up going to Southeast Asia for like six months, backpacking in 2012, 2013 and that was sort of my pre-Masters plan to just kind of go nuts one more time before I come back and get the 2.5 kids and all that.

While I was there, at some point I ran out of money and I didn’t want to come home. I wasn’t ready to start this life and I was getting really anxious to figure out what I wanted to do and I kept telling myself and telling everybody around me that I’m gonna go do this thing. And in the end, I knew deep down that’s not what I wanted to do.

So I ended up getting a job teaching English in Taiwan and I started working there, and it really wasn’t what I thought it would be for like a bunch of different reasons, and I kind of had like a bit of a nervous breakdown over there where I wanted so bad to do this music thing, but I didn’t really know anybody that did it.

I talked about it one time and got shut down real quick, with the classic ‘what are you going to do as an artist? You’re gonna be poorer for the rest of your life’.

And I had one example in my family that somebody who had tried, not succeeded to the degree that he had hoped, and so I didn’t really have many encouraging words while I was on the trip. I was carrying around a guitar and I had a lot of people who were encouraging me, who were saying like, ‘Oh, you’re great. You should make a record.’ Anyway, long story short. I’m in Taiwan in a hotel, about to sign a two year contract to go live in Tanjung.

I’m shopping for scooters online; I would be the only like anglophone person in that town and my life would’ve been completely different. I just kind of had this epiphany of ‘ I need to do this for one year just to see what will happen at the bare minimum so that I have no regrets.’

So I canceled everything, bought a plane ticket, came home two weeks later, and as it would happen, a friend of mine who was doing promotion for like heavy metal concerts mostly – you know, there’s like five artists, one night, just slam it all together, it’s like this week you’re the headliner and next week I’ll be the headliner. They just keep swapping and then just an excuse to like go out and play music and get drunk with your friends and it’s always the same people.

He did that kind of circuit and he also did some folk music occasionally and he happened to write me at that time, and he was like, can you replace this person that was supposed to open for this other artist.

I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. I’m coming back to, to make music.’ that’s what I wanted to do. So I come back, I do the show, I end up going back to bartending and I worked my way to pay for my first record and I’d never returned back from there. That was the last time I had a real job.

Kane: That’s crazy. It’s about 10 years later and you’ve put out 4 records now. And all of them have been doing pretty well; including this new one, Like Flowers On A Molten Lawn, which I love. Such a cool imagery and everything.

And then after you wrote that first record, you had a series of lucky events that kind of led you to growing your following pretty quickly. I know one of which is being on the “La Voix” which is hilarious.

Matt: Yeah, it is kind of hilarious. It’s a topic that I tend to shy away from when I can, not because I’m ungrateful; I don’t really have an opinion so much on it anymore.

I guess it’s different now. I’ve grown into it a little more. But I think that was something that artistically I’ve never really felt in tune with. I don’t particularly like that kind of show. I don’t want to demean it, but it’s just not something that I’m really into. But I happened to fall upon that opportunity because I put out my record “Old Man”, and I’d done like the bar circuits and I did everything I could to try to make a career without knowing how to make a career.

And I didn’t succeed. I got to the end of my year that I gave myself, and I was like, well, that didn’t work out and I don’t wanna spend my life playing music in bars. I felt like I might get pulled into the dark side of playing in that world.

I got an email from somebody who was doing the production for this, and they’re like, ‘We found your record online. We would love for you to come and audition.’ I had no idea what the concept was – I’d never heard of it. I’ve never really been in touch with that side of “culture”. So I basically just said , ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’ I’d rather not have a career than do it through that.

Kane: Interesting. Okay.

Matt: And she wrote me like four times again to just insist that it was a good idea. At a certain point I consented and it was this sort of final… I don’t wanna say desparate, it wasn’t desperate at all. It was just kind of like, “Ah, whatever. I’ll do it.’

And ultimately the deciding factor was I had lost a drunken bet with my friends, where my Anglophone friends had no idea what the stuff was, but my Francophone friends were hyper aware and they’re like, well, it’s gonna be hilarious when we laugh at you on tv.

It was all kind of a bit of a joke, but everybody did really believe in my music, all these friends. And so everybody was sort of unsure as to whether they should encourage me because they wanted me to succeed, but they knew how we all collectively felt about this kind of show.

And ultimately I lost the game of foosball.

That meant that I had to go and do the audition the next day. So I went and I did this audition insanely hungover and it was like an awful experience to be honest. I didn’t enjoy being there. Didn’t feel right.

I hate cameras. It’s kind of ironic being a front man or a singer and like not wanting the attention. But ultimately I just kind of got sucked in and it was this period in my life where I was like, I don’t really know what else to do and I don’t really want to be an English teacher anymore now that I’ve tasted the music life. But I don’t want to do it this way, but I don’t know how to do it any other way. And I just kind of went with it. I didn’t really know what I was doing and I kind of got sucked into this whole kind of machine that sort of like sucked me in and spit me out and, and then everything changed when – I don’t know if you’re familiar with the way that the show works, but there’s something called the ‘blind auditions’ at the very first stage.

And it’s like the first episode but it’s taped like three or four months before. So I’d already done it. And my girlfriend at the time lived in Paris and I wanted to go visit her. So I went to go visit her and I had a friend who lived in Serbia, so I wanted to go visit him. And then I had a friend who was in Egypt, so I went to go visit him.

So while this thing aired, I was in Cairo and, I couldn’t care less and yet I cared so much that I fled the country to not be there when it would happen. Deep down I really did want to be the pure artist that would dismiss this kind of opportunity.

But truthfully, I wanted to make music and this was a means for me to do it. I was just trying to figure it out.

Then the blind audition happened and I sold a ton of my record. It was already out, which is something that doesn’t usually happen on these shows. Most of the artists that show up, and I use artists very liberally, but the people who show up and sing don’t have like an artistic identity. They don’t have a record. They’re just like people who sing well.

I sold a lot of records and that was the moment where I was like, ‘Now I can pay for my rent for the next two months and I can quit my job.’ And then I did the next show and then I had another two month leeway where I could continue working on music.

I basically used the show as an opportunity to sort of financially give me the leg up so that I could invest all of my time in figuring out what the hell I’m doing. To like hire lawyers, get people to teach me how to be within this industry – ’cause there is no guidebook.

As an artist you just show up and you’re like, ‘How do I release music?’ What is a manager? What is a label? What is publishing? What are all these things? How do I navigate performing on stage versus navigating a studio? They’re all things that you don’t really know how to do. And so I was given the luxury of time to do that. I took it, I think I used it well enough.

Kane: Yeah, it’s paid off. That’s for sure.

It’s always interesting because those reality shows – there’s so much stuff that happens behind the scenes that no one’s ever gonna be aware of. And people just disappear after the seasons over, you know? They were just names blowing in the wind. It’s a good point that you had stuff already established, so it was easier for you – compared to the other people – to stick around and use that to your advantage.

Matt: Yeah. I could really write a book about that, I might one day about that whole experience. I had like a private inside view of this weird machine, and the psychology of it is something that fascinates me.

Psychology of the contestants, of the people who watch the show. It’s so strange. This is also coming from somebody who doesn’t consume reality TV and stuff like that in general. I just don’t get why people would sit and watch somebody in a house and like bickering at each other, it’s just so removed from anything that I would find interesting. But I have a lot of friends who watch it, so I’m interested in why they’re interested in it.

Matt: I tried to reconcile the fact that I was there. It was like I’m selling records, and if this doesn’t work out, this might be like a really good sociological experiment that I could write about.

Kane: Yeah, like a consultant or something. It’s people’s trajectory are always so fascinating to me as well. I just love the progression of people’s careers and things like that.

And fast forwarding to now the fourth album, great stuff. I know your sound has been slightly evolving with every release. And this one especially; there’s a lot of flourishes and details to it, production and the instrumentation. And I understand too that this tour that you’re gonna be doing was also a bit bigger, and I was told I should definitely ask you about some tree that you were gonna have.

Matt: Yeah, so it’s definitely a more experimental record. For me, it kind of happened at a moment where everything came to a stand still and I suppose I just had a lot of time on my hands and I’d always been a bit of an esoteric singer songwriter where it was a lot of ideas and words that would be juxtaposed with guitar or piano or some form of song structure that you can play from the beginning to the end.

And I’d never really delved into any of the technical side of things. I bought a couple of synths but I didn’t really know how they worked. Just used the presets but I didn’t really know how to record myself or how to engineer myself or how to use a microphone to even just record acoustic guitar and make it sound decent.

So I spent two years just doing that, and it was like YouTube tutorial upon YouTube tutorial, reading hundreds of threads about various compression, EQing and all that stuff. But I’d never, I never ever gave a thought to them. And so a lot of this new record was born from just turning knobs and plugging things in and trying to figure it out.

Matt: And then later, Pietro Amato, who produced the record, was the one who sort of pulled me back and was like, ‘We’re not making a noise record. We need some songs.’ And then the tour itself we built this sixteen foot tree that is really beautiful and we built this huge bell jar and a whole vegetation. It’s a bit of a surreal magical post-apocalyptic dream.

Kane: That’s kind of sick. Well, it’s too bad you weren’t able to set it up [at the Drake] Plus the stage downstairs is so crammed.

Matt: Yeah. Well, we were gonna put the tree in the crowd actually.

Kane: There’s a lot of like garden analogy just on the record: grass, spring. I saw that it was inspired by that E. E. Cumming’s poem…

Matt: ‘Spring Is Like A Perhaps Hand’. I’m fairly intimate with that poem.

Kane: I’m kind of curious, I’m sure like most people, poetry is a bit of a challenging subject to really fully comprehend. So what’s the relationship between that poem and your album, would you say?

Matt: It’s the direct link to its creation. I would say I’m in no way intimately familiar with the structures of poetry in any sort of educational or technical way. It’s more like, I don’t understand poetry, I feel it. I never try to understand what the person is trying to say. I just sort of make my own meaning. I don’t really care what it actually means, but sometimes words and ideas evoke something to you that could be so far from me, in the same way that you might think, oh, this song is about this, but it’s not about that.

So this particular poem was the genesis for a song called ‘Flirt With Boredom’, which is on this record that I wrote a number of years ago that I tried to record over three different albums in four different studios with different tempos, different keys, different vibes, different instrumentation. The song initially was like a Rage Against the Machine-meets-Beach House and now it’s a super laid back piano acoustic-type ballad.

I guess that that song came to me at a moment where I really needed the spirit of spring, of renewal, of rebirth to come to me. And so I started to become really obsessed with the idea of spring.

And that’s really interesting because I always said that my favorite season was fall because I always thought it was the most poetic season because it’s the season where everything dies and when things die, we become more appreciative of that which is still alive.

I guess too much death at some point makes you want to think about rebirth a little more, or focus. If you listen to sad music, when you’re sad, it makes you feel good. But if you continue listening to sad music only and forever, then it’ll just perpetuate a cycle of sadness.

So I guess I needed to listen to something more upbeat and I needed to think about Spring more.

Kane: That’s fair. Naturally, there’s a strong philosophical aspect of the album too. I understand that you were trying to avoid that as like a heavy, thematic element of your music for a long time, but you kind of just embraced it for this one. Was there anything that kind of stirred that?

Matt: Yes and no. I mean, I embraced it and not embraced it. So the best way that I can describe the way that I end up with a theme for the record is the producer who produced my three first records, Connor Siedel, he kind of caught me in one of these interviews where somebody was asking me, ‘What does this mean, ‘Weird Ones’?’

And I told this whole story that I’d concocted in my head about what the record was about, and he sat there and after the interview he was like, ‘You’re full of shit. It wasn’t about that at all. You never said that once through the whole making of the record.’

And he made me realize that I reverse engineer meaning; I write songs in a very instinctive way, in a subliminal, subconscious way. I don’t mean necessarily other than let’s say ‘Flirt With Boredom’ or the idea of spring, which it doesn’t so much come through as like a deliberate act as it like permeates through my entire being for like long periods of time where I just, everything I think about is that. So the songs that come out of me necessarily have to be that, but it’s not intentional.

It’s just like you are what you eat. And so after the fact I have all these songs and I realize, ‘Oh. I guess I’m talking about this in all the songs.’ I didn’t realize I did that. I guess this has to do with blah-blah-blah, and I sort of reverse engineer meaning, and then I end up with something like ‘Flowers On A Molten Lawn’, which was a title that was a lyric in the record ‘We’re growing like flowers on a molten lawn’, from the song ‘End Scene’ that I’d written way, way, way before I even thought there was gonna be a record.

So the theme is more of an afterthought, it’s kind of the conclusion to several sessions of therapy and then you end up finding the answer. And the answer is the title.

Kane: That’s a good way to approach it too. It also doesn’t feel forced that way either. It’s very organic. It just naturally comes to you and works.

One last question: so the lyric in Sandy Cove – I know the subject of Sandy Cove is being taken out of context – but there’s a nice lyric where you’re talking about how there’s a difference between who you are and who you want to be.

Kane: Reflecting on your past where the version of yourself as you were coming into making music, that difference between who you were at that time and who you wanted to be looking back, compared to now, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about yourself at that point?

Matt: I think that I feel great. I feel really good about what I’m doing. I’m making a living making music, which is something to celebrate in and of itself. So if I could continue making the kind of living that I’m making now, I would consider my life to be a success. Whereas I think there might have been a period where we have all these arbitrary goals of success that come from where are comparison with others for the most part.

And that’s not a very healthy way to live your life. And so I try to shy away from that now, but in that particular context, I guess I was just trying to remind myself not to compare myself with my imagined self, but rather with my past self and did I improve on who I was yesterday? If so, then that’s a success. If I’m not who I thought I would be, but that who I thought I would be is like an idea that is compared to somebody else, then that idea is kind of irrelevant.

Not to say that you shouldn’t reach for random objectives. But the reality is that there are only so many Thom Yorke-s and so many Ben Howard-s and so many Justin Vernon-s. And if I were to be at that level of what I consider greatness, I would already be there. It’s something that is undeniable.

And there is a measure of the business aspect of things and being at the right place at the right time and knowing the right people. But there’s also undeniable greatness that if I were to possess that characteristic, I think that it would sort of manifest itself in my career in the same way. Whereas I consider that I have a measure of talent that is interesting enough to draw people and to move people, but it takes me to a place that I’m satisfied with and content with.

Nobody’s asked me that question yet.

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Like Flowers On A Molten Lawn Tour dates:

March 28, 2023 @ The Drake Hotel Underground, Toronto, ON TICKETS
March 30, 2023 @ Montréal Cabaret Lion d’or Lancement, QC : Like Flowers on a Molten Lawn  (SOLD OUT) 
May 4, 2023 @ Salle Désilets, Rivière-des-Prairies, QC TICKETS
May 5, 2023 @ Salle Albert-Dumouchel TICKETS
May 26, 2023 @ Salle Edwin-Belanger, Montmagny, QC TICKETS
May 27, 2023 @ Auditorium Massey-Vanier, Cowansville, QC TICKETS
May 28, 2023 @ La Carré 150, Victoriaville, QC TICKETS
May 31, 2023  @Rimouski Salle Desjardins-Telus TICKETS
June 1, 2020 @ Capitol Théâtre, Moncton, NB TICKETS
June 7, 2023 @ Salle Rolland-Brunelle, Joliette, QC TICKETS
June 8, 2023 @ Salle André-Mathieu, Laval, QC TICKETS
June 9, 2023 @ Théâtre Banque-Nationale, Chicoutimi, QC TICKETS
June 10, 2023 @ Théâtre Granada, Sherbrooke, QC TICKETS
June 22, 2023 @ Théâtre Desjardins, Lasalle, QC TICKETS
September 14, 2023 Brossard L’Étoile Banque Nationale, QC TICKETS