Scott Matthews
Passing Stranger

THE REVIEW

The moon asks to stay
long enough to allow
the clouds to make me fly away

Maybe I'm just a fool who deceives himself. And the memory often takes me to that slice of paradise swallowed by the murky waters of the Mississippi. I've sought those emotions in the most disparate places and sounds, between momentary highs and bitter disappointments, never truly finding them. But sometimes I came so close that I almost managed to grasp them. This is the case with this passing stranger, Scott Matthews, not to be confused with the almost namesake Australian singer-songwriter lacking the final “s”.

A bare guitar as a travel companion and a vocal timbre with the warmth of a hug. His singing that stirs and climbs on elusive melodies, elusive. Compositions as fleeting as daydreams, revealing the microcosm of the soul and telling the sweetness of suffering.

It’s that placid rural folk that gets under your skin, because it lives of simplicity without ever being banal. And it struggles between electro-acoustic minimalism and elegant arrangements, sometimes seasoned by the timbral games of tabla, sometimes by the delicate evolutions of wind instruments. Harmonies continuously balancing between light and shadow, between celestial arpeggios and unconventional tunings. It’s music that moves at the rhythm of the soul, that knows how to tarnish itself with the muddiest blues only to then give in to exotic temptations.

And we find ourselves wrapped by stretches of green, far from the urban headache, contemplating the sky and questioning the passage of time. Suspended in an unsteady balance of emotions. Sometimes you only feel at ease in the memory of the past, forgetting that happiness never looks back. Maybe what we're searching for is closer than we think. And it awaits us elsewhere.

You can say the sun is shining if you really want to
I see the moon and it looks so clear to me
You can take the road that leads to the stars
I'll take the road to understand myself