Jonah Matranga, Songs From Sacramento, Vol. 1: Songs I Hope My Mom Will Like

Okay, so I feel like I’m trespassing. Historically, “The Jonah Matranga Guy” here at SCR has always been Mel House — he’s the one who’s reviewed nearly every single thing Matranga’s done up to this point, from Far onward through The Volunteers, and these days he’s even playing in Matranga’s backing band — so I feel a bit like the pretender to the Throne of Jonah Fandom, as it were. (Don’t worry, Mel — you’re welcome to review the new There’s A Lot In Here CD/DVD set, if you want; that one’s all you…)

One basic fact first: this isn’t a new release. Songs From Sacramento, Vol. 1: Songs I Hope My Mom Will Like was first released way back in 1994 on cassette, recorded during Matranga’s time with pseudo-metal band Far for his mom, who he says “missed my softer acoustic stuff.” I’m glad there’s a note, actually, because if I had been handed this CD with no label or context, I would’ve assumed it was something he recorded himself, just hanging out in his San Francisco bedroom with Are Too, the much-beloved (and now-retired) R2D2 drum machine/sampler. It’s pretty remarkable that this fits so well within his “Onelinedrawing” oeuvre, considering that the material’s really more “proto-Onelinedrawing” in terms of when it was put to tape.

Another funny thing about Songs From Sacramento: I know some of these songs. There’re a few covers, sure — versions of Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee” and the Sugarcubes’ “Birthday,” as well as a bleak, foreboding cover of Prince’s “The Cross” — but the rest are all Matranga’s (and they’re generally a lot more interesting than the covers, in my opinion). Turns out, though, that I have heard some of ’em before: the beautiful, haunting, Bob Mould-like “Welcome Wearing Out” appeared in somewhat electrified form as “Leper Song” on Thriller, the solitary full-length by Matranga’s shortlived band with Texas Is The Reason guy Norm Arenas (and here it’s the absolute high point of the disc, so I can see why he repurposed the song); slow, swaying “Six, Suns and Cows” became “Sixes” for 2002’s Visitor; and “Candle Song,” a soft, almost bluesy folk track, also popped up almost unaltered in Visitor.

(The same goes, apparently, for the second “volume” of the Songs From Sacramento set, the re-release of Jonah’s One-Line Drawing, which I unfortunately have yet to hear but which includes early versions of “14-41,” “The Big Parade,” and “Yr Letter,” all three of which have appeared on subsequent releases by Matranga’s various “projects.”)

The rest of the CD’s only available on this release (or on the original cassette), as far as I can tell. There’s “Littleness,” all fingerpicked and delicate like Nick Drake’s more minimal moments, and “Anima (For America),” which is a bit on the repetitive side but still nicely melancholy and folky, with a cool falsetto part at the end. “Springtime” is looser than the rest, more flowing and countryish, and the lyrics seem to obliquely hint forward to “Lukewarm,” another of the New End Original tracks.

“Loud Mom” and “S.H.P.,” the two oddballs of the album, come close to the end — the former’s an affecting a cappella song/poem about the ways that love and embarrassment dovetail when it comes to your parents, and it showcases nicely the belting style he pretty much abandoned after his Far days, while the latter gets quiet and personal in almost a James Taylor folk vein. Stacked up next to some of Matranga’s other releases, I’ll admit that Songs From Sacramento is currently far from my favorite, but it’s growing on me with each listen — it’s just a lot more intimate and personal than some of his more recent stuff, and I’m a sucker for the louder sing-along songs.

I feel like I should qualify my praises, by the way, by noting that Matranga’s appeal, at least to me, is as much about him as a person as it is about the music. He’s such a genuinely sweet, smart, unpretentious guy that listening to him sing or speak makes me want to give the guy a big hug and invite him over for a big long dinnertime conversation with the family.

At shows, he has a habit of stopping mid-song to drop intensely personal bits of information, explain some obscure bit of background, or dissect the nature of art and rock stardom (or lack thereof), all of which would normally have my cynical rock-critic self rolling my eyes and checking my watch. If it were anybody else, that is. Because of who Matranga is and how open he makes himself to his audience, I can’t help but admire the get-it-all-out-there approach he takes to what he does. It’s a cliché within the music business (and the art world in general) that “it’s all about the music, man,” but over the years he’s demonstrated that he really, truly does do it all for love of the music.

I mean, what the hell else could it be that drives him? He could have easily ridden the “emo” train into post-Far stardom within the indie community, at the very least, but he chose not to. He asks only what people can afford for his CDs, T-shirts, and shows, criss-crossing the country to play to strangers in foreign cities for relatively little money; simple logic would dictate that if his primary goal was about selling lots of records and becoming a star, well, he’s going about it in a really dumb way. Take all that out of the equation, then, and what’s left? Holy shit — what if this guy really is “all about the music”? Sincerity is extremely hard to fake well; it smells to high heaven, and Matranga’s about as far from that as you can get. He’s The Real Deal.

Speaking of Real Deal-ness, this album’s noteworthy for marking the first time that Matranga’s scrapped the “Onelinedrawing” moniker he’s gone under since his Far days. Apparently he got tired of all the “emo” tags associated with the name, so him going just as himself is an attempt at starting clean, with no preconceptions of what his music “should” sound like. Which is good, because all that easy pigeonholing does a great disservice to Matranga’s sheer talent as a songwriter and drive as a confirmed DIY-style artist. He’s not some emo guy gone folk, but rather the opposite — an immensely gifted folk/pop songwriter, singer, and guitarist who just happened to be in a loud-yet-emotive band for a while near the start of his career. I mean, c’mon — just because Neil Young used to be in Buffalo Springfield, does that mean, “oh, he’s just some old folkie, not a real rocker”? Uh-uh.

Granted, the Neil Young analogy might be a bit of a stretch, but looking back over Matranga’s career so far, the breadth of everything he’s done is pretty amazing. As he puts it on his Website: “15 years, 4 band names, 6 full-lengths, 5 EPs, a few splits, several comps, 100+ songs, 1000+ shows.” He’s been a rocker, he’s experimented with drum loops and samplers, he’s done the sensitive-folk thing, he’s done the “Nü-Metal” thing — and, most importantly, he’s been good at all of it.

All of which says that what Matranga is at heart, underneath the distortion or the synthesized drum beats, or the “Godfather of Emo” label, or whatever, is an excellent songwriter of the Can-Do-Anything variety. He pulls in influences from everything from Sinead O’Connor (one of his idols) to straight-up punk rock, turns them inside out and makes them into his own immediately recognizable thing. How many other people can say that they’ve done that consistently and brilliantly for a decade and a half?