Matt Hammon

Making good on lessons learned from years playing drums with the likes of Bob Mould, Verbow, The Damnwells and his early stints as a founding member of Mineral, The Gloria Record, and The Rebecca West, indie rock veteran Matt Hammon is finally set to release his own music into the world.
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“All those years I was working as a journeyman musician I was amassing volumes of my own material, much of it directly influenced by whom I was working with at the time”, recalls Hammon, who, at 43 years of age, has settled on his 10 favorite from his catalog of songs and recorded them anew for his debut effort entitled “Silver Suitcase”. "Some of them are ancient to me, as if I was covering them. Others are so new they have never been performed live. It's a sort of anthology, I guess, in a very legitimate sense of the word."
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Fusing a wide range of influences from late 80's / early 90’s post-punk, European arena rock, and music from the American heartland, Silver Suitcase is truly a solo album; written, arranged, performed and mixed entirely by Matt Hammon himself, in a converted one-car garage behind his Houston home. Drums and lead vocals were recorded in a few friend's home studios in Houston.
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From the lyrical perspective, the 10-song autobiographical set tells the story of a wanderer and dreamer, whose restless and adventurous nature caused the unraveling of his own sense of identity, home, family and personal well-being. His only constant seemed to be a banged-up silver suitcase purchased for a few bucks in a street bazaar in northern Thailand somewhere along the way. Imagery of his numerous adopted American home-towns provides the backdrop to the intimate, reflective lyrics throughout the album.
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“The crazy thing to me is how I tried to make this record three times before I finally just accepted who I was as an artist and what the music of my heart truly sounded like.” The results are in - Silver Suitcase is an album of dense, ferocious, intensely melodic rock and roll songs, with layers of thick electric guitars, angelic guitar and synth counterpoints, busy bass work, and Matt’s signature pounding the drums into submission. “By the third round of recording I was so deep into the process and had become so attached to my own "scratch" tracks that I finally just committed to it all, which negated the need to bring anyone else into the process." The live presentation is equally impactful in the full rock band setting or as a powerfully engaging solo acoustic act.