(Originally published in The Rutgers Review, April 2009)
Most of the world was first exposed to Matt Sharp as the energetic bassist for the highly influential power-pop group Weezer. His falsetto harmonies and melodic bass-lines contributed a large portion of the band’s personality. Subsequently, his departure in 1998 has since been a major topic of discussion by the band’s long-time fans who notice the loss of Sharp the way an amputee feels a phantom limb.
But, if my conversation with Matt Sharp is any indicator, this is more than he’d want to hear about himself, at least as an individual.
“It’s not a situation where it’s one person, or even a small group of people. It’s really a whole large group of people that are helping in so many ways that are involved with all of these different aspects of the whole Songs About Time idea,” he says, discussing the origins of the new project. “It’s just very multi-layered and there are so many great creative people that we know and talk to. And we were talking about some of the general ideas about how we’re thinking about approaching things. And then just from having these great conversations, you would walk away going, ‘Now I’m thinking about it in a slightly different way.’”
The emphasis on community in The Rentals becomes increasingly palpable when you look at their previous releases and their constant evolution throughout their 14-year life-span. While Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo took a leave of absence from the group to attend Harvard University and undergo corrective surgery for the difference in height of his legs, Sharp continued to play music, releasing the first Rentals record Return of the Rentals in 1995.
Critically acclaimed for wearing the influence of new wave acts of the late ’70s on their sleeves (Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber even praised their revival of Moog synthesizers!), allmusic.com defines the record as, “a real benchmark of carefree pop from the ’90s and shouldn’t be forgotten anytime soon.” Despite its critical acceptance, Return… still faced the stigma of being a Weezer side-project. Despite the irresistible hooks and fuzzy guitar tones, the biggest similarity between Return… and Weezer’s Blue Album is Wilson’s meat-and-potatoes based ethos behind his minimalist drum-set — a style lost with the addition of Kevin March on their sophomore effort.
After officially removing himself from the Weezer-machine in 1998, Sharp relocated to Barcelona, Spain and began to focus on what would become The Rental’s follow-up — the undersold and terribly underappreciated Seven More Minutes.
“I know at that time, I was trying to do something that had such a sense of celebration of that place; that captured that thing. I don’t know if I was close or not close or anything. On all of these albums I always have this feeling after the fact that the images somehow conveyed more of what I wanted to convey than the music did.
“And that has a lot to do with why Songs About Time is so centered around the photography and around the films. Because, I know in the end it just might be possible that it’s those things that we might get right. Or that the feeling we’re trying to convey might be better conveyed through that.”
As part of the Songs About Time project, the band has pledged to post a new photograph for every day on the calendar in 2009, and every Tuesday, a new film – shot and edited throughout the week – is featured.
“The thing that’s most personal for me, about the whole experience of Songs About Time, is that we do what we’re telling people were going to do. That when you come to the site on Tuesdays, there will be a new film, and when you go to the photo-diary, there will be a new photograph every day. And, every day, I’m shooting a roll of 35mm film and we’re storing those rolls of film away, so when the limited edition version of this project is released, those first 365 people that have supported us, we’re sending them one of these rolls of film.”
I’m not trying to credit anybody here with creating a new genre of music (but, if I had to pick a name, I would call it… “meta-music”), but this notion has about as many layers as a Charlie Kaufman screenplay, and is what distinguishes the Songs About Time project from most other musical releases. The record, released in three “chapters” throughout the year (the first to be released on April 7), works along with the supplementary material, as a primary source of the evolution of the songs about time over time. And then the 365 most enthusiastic fans get a piece of that process; a frame of time encapsulated in a roll of film.
And what triggered the most personal aspect of this project? “The idea about these 365 rolls of film. That idea was Jamie Blake’s. And I told her about that desire to connect with our audience in a really personalized way. I wanted to do something where it really was more of a thing that just happens between two people. And it was her idea to do that, and I really thought that did something that was just very interesting to me.”
But like Mr. Sharp said, “It’s not just one person or a small group of people.”
“The Filmmakers and the photographers and the musicians that are involved and all of the people that are working on this… We don’t exactly know where we’re going, and we’re discovering it together. And, essentially with our audience,” he emphasizes before adding, “We’re figuring it out as they’re figuring it out,” with a laugh.
It’s this approach which makes Songs About Time a perfect synecdoche for the affect of external pressures on one’s creative output over time: Everything that happens in the studio is a potential influence over the creative process.
“That is one of the great things about Songs About Time is the fact that the filmmakers influence what we’re doing musically. And that comes full-circle very quickly where the music influences the films, the films influence the music. Even the photography is influencing both the films and the music and they all sort of run concurrently.
“A friend of mine – when he first came to the site – he came to me and said, ‘Well, I don’t get it. It doesn’t even look like a music site. It looks like a film site.’ And that it looks like a photography site, and all of these different things.
“And, well…” he finishes, pausing introspectively, “That’s kind of the point.”
[Writers Note; April 4, 2010: After the completion of the project, I found an unexpected result of the record being released in three chapters to be that each chapter creates a series of bookends and allows me to reflect on how I changed throughout the year, in between chapters: A happy little accident.]
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