What’s my deal, you ask?

Oh, hi there! My name is William Matheny and I write songs, perform them and play a bunch of different instruments (more than five, less than ten). I guess you could say that would make me a singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist although that seems like a weird thing to say about oneself.

Sometimes when I’m checking into a hotel and carrying a guitar case or I’m at a gathering with people I’ve only recently met, someone will ask me what kind of music I play. In those moments, I’ll usually say “americana” because A) it’s a short answer and that means we can move onto other topics, B) no one wants my TED talk about the concepts of genre and marketing, and C) they were probably just asking to be polite and don’t actually care that much.

Truthfully, I would consider myself more of a fellow traveller to the Americana movement as opposed to an actual, card-carrying party member. I much prefer the term “rock & roll” because of its populist, egalitarian and culturally diverse connotations and I like that it’s a really big umbrella that you can fit a whole lot of stuff under. Anyway, whatever you want to call it is probably fine with me, I just appreciate you listening.

If you’ve seen me before, you probably saw me by myself, fronting my wonderful band, playing bass for John R. Miller, or playing whatever is needed at a given moment in The Paranoid Style.

I was born in West Virginia and I still live there, although I spend the majority of my time on tour or in a recording studio somewhere. Between all of the ventures I mentioned above, I played about 150 shows across the United States and Canada last year. Some personal highlights of that would include opening tours for The Wallflowers, Lucero and American Aquarium. Had the privilege of playing music onstage at The Ryman Auditorium for a second time and at NPR’s Mountain Stage for what I think was the ninth time. Did some cool festivals too.

My most recent album That Grand, Old Feeling came out on my friend Tyler Childers’ Hickman Holler record label - it’s part of the Thirty Tigers family of brands. I’m always happy to hear like listening to it and I’m pleased to say that it’s been well received. In fact, here are…

Some Nice things people have said in the press:

and finally,

 A biography written by an honest-to-god journalist:

Let me tell you an anecdote about William Matheny. And no, this is not the 5:15 AM drive to the Albany Airport when we both were drinking Genesee beer and black coffee because we were both thinking correctly at that hour. More on that later. It was before I really knew William, but the moment when I knew that he was great. Envision: A punk rock club in Washington, DC, its inhabitants and paid customers. Who knows why and how he had been booked? A songwriter from Mannington, West Virginia stepping into the lair of upper-crust, judgment-packed DC punks with their Fugazi-leftover orthodoxies in their wildly provincial scene. He had fifteen minutes, a fender amp, a telecaster and no one interested in the audience. I live in DC and I would have fled. There was a 10,000% chance that the next band up was going to have a spiel about gentrification and then play “angular riffs.”  Billy -- I can call him that, you can’t -- played a solo set. He played loud. He played “Out For Revenge” and “29 Candles” and “Teenage Bones” and “My Grandfather Knew Stoney Cooper” and the other great songs which you may not have heard on his debut LP.  Over the course of that short set he first brought that crowd to heel and then brought the crowd around. By the end the applause was thick and the appreciation unmistakable. He did it in DC.  He can do it anywhere.

But let’s talk about the other thing with the beers and the coffee and Albany. You need to know that William Matheny and I have been through some things together. We’ve seen parts of the world that I was sure existed only in Elmore Leonard novels. When I needed to pull over on the Cross-Bronx Expressway to throw up in a plastic trash bag, he was my driver and bag provider. We made it to the Bowery Ballroom an hour later for soundcheck and everything went great. William Matheny is the lead guitarist in my band the Paranoid Style, in addition to his other obligations. William Matheny is a man that makes things happen.

William Matheny may be the best songwriter working, and is at a minimum one the best songwriters you might have never heard of. For those who haven’t had that good fortune, let's go, as Warner Wolfe used to say, to the videotape. Consider “Every Way To Lose,” the second track on That Grand, Old Feeling, which is like Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down A Dream” if it had been “Runnin’ Down A Nightmare.” Or the piano ballad “Down At The Hotel Canfield,” the greatest song about getting through a single night in a dicey dwelling since “Desperadoes Under The Eaves.” Reckon with the opening track, “Late Blooming Forever,” a hymn to hesitation and a meditation on what you give and what you lose when you finally achieve escape velocity. Or the title track, which I would have given a non-critical body part to have written: “I’ve been searching for that grand old feeling / The burning candle on the mantle of my soul.”

I couldn’t be more blown away by That Grand, Old Feeling, a wondrous collection of tunes which situates itself amongst the indelible tradition of roots-rock misfits like Guy Clark and Lowell George, with just enough Jackson Browne-craft and Springsteen-triumphalism to make the thing potentially huge. You can’t talk about Matheny without talking about West Virginia, although it is sometimes true that he would prefer not to discuss it. Matheny is from Mannington, population smaller than your average small town. Like most of the state, Mannington fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War and represented a crucial strategic stronghold as one of the stops on the B&O Railroad. The correct side, not that it helped all that much. They say history is written by the winners, but in spite of upholding the Union, history was not written by Mannington. Heavy industry: logging and coal. An oil boom in the 1910s. Comfortable lives and then the Great Depression. Bankers and foreclosures. History was written by Mannington and then history was written on Mannington. That grand old feeling, indeed.

And while he might not always want to talk about it, West Virginia is a central character in Matheny’s songs. From the dirty snow falling on the Coffindaffer Crosses by the road in the title track of his latest record, to the unhappy married lovers at the Elks Lodge and the tapes from the Go-Mart melting on the dashboard in “Bird of Youth,” the notion that the man can travel wide and far from Mannington, but Mannington never leaves the man is cast into bold relief. Like so many before him -- Elvis from Tupelo or the Mekons from Leeds -- he can check out any time he likes. But he can never et cetera, et cetera. Or as he once elegantly put it, “Moon over Mannington/ Moon over Spain/ Moon over happiness/ Moon over pain.”

Two things occur to you when you realize that your lead guitar player has made an incredible, self-evidently life-changing record. First of all you couldn't be more proud. Secondly you wonder: “Wait -- am I going to lose my lead guitar player?” Ronnie Wood once memorably titled his own solo collection: I Got My Own Album To Do. Fortunately, that turned out to only be half-true -- or at least not career-altering -- and soon enough Ronnie was re-ensconced into the “ancient art of weaving” alongside Keith and Mick. Will Billy and I weave together again? I know we will, but we both know things are likely to be materially different once the world experiences That Grand, Old Feeling. It’s like he sings on “Late Blooming Forever:”

“Oh dear friends and gentle hearts/ That I've known along the way/ I've been late blooming/ but I think it's gonna happen any day.”

It’s happened.

— Elizabeth Nelson

Ms. Nelson is the songwriter and front person for the Washington, DC based garage-punk band, The Paranoid Style. She is a regular contributor to Pitchfork, The New York Times Magazine, Oxford American and others. Most recently, her writing can be found in the liner notes of Columbia Records’ “The 1974 Live Recordings” by Bob Dylan & The Band.