Another Promotional CD I found for Matt Nathanson thanks to Discogs is a “Sampler” CD for his 2003 album ‘Beneath These Fireworks’. That album was Matt’s major label debut album on Universal Records, but it wasn’t his first CD by any means. The CD was a 3 song sampler for his upcoming album and was sent around to the Radio DJs, I am assuming. The cover for the Promo is the same as the album cover, the only difference is instead of saying “Beneath These Fireworks”, it says “Sampler”.
The first song and actually the first single is “Sad Songs”. The song feels like it could be the Goo Goo Dolls. The chorus is so catchy and it has a great hook. His delivery of the lines is confident and earnest. For a song called “Sad Songs”, the music is more upbeat and gives us a great dichotomy in styles.
In my quest for Matt Nathanson music I don’t have, I found another E.P. in my hunts. This one is called ‘Plus’ and was a promotional CD and released on October 14, 2003 which is the same date as his 2003 album ‘Beneath the Fireworks’. That album is the one I feel where Matt was finding his voice as both a singer and a songwriter. It is from this point on that his writing develop and went to another level. The stories were so much better and his vocals were hitting on another level. This is also around the time I started to discover his music and it would suck me in.
There were 3 songs on this album and all were recorded live and done acoustically. Two of the songs were off the album ‘Beneath the Fireworks’ and was from his debut album ‘Please’ from 1993 which was a collection of songs he wrote in high school and college. Lets go through the songs, shall we.
The first song is “Lucky Boy” which was off the album ‘Beneath the Fireworks’ but originally was off his 1999 album ‘Still Waiting for Spring’. It was recorded live on August 20, 2003 at Ned’s Studio. Now I don’t know who Ned is but apparently he has a studio. The song was written by Matt Nathanson and Mark Weinberg and is done acoustically like I mentioned earlier. It features Matt Fish on Cello which is a really cool acoustic element to add. The song is about a friendship where the boy wanted more and was always there for her to comfort her at every turn. She treated him like a rug and walked all over him. He feels it is a cruel world, but he was still lucky to be with her and in her presence despite it never going anywhere he wanted it to go.
2 Loud 2 Old Music 