Interview + Photos By: Emma Hintz
Graphic By: Josh Reynes
Emma: We’ll start this interview off with a little introduction for the readers at home, who are you, how would you describe your overall sound
Matty Marz: Hi my name is Matty Marz, I am currently making what I like to call “Angel pop” so it’s big, anthemic, euphoric, very dance oriented. I’m a writer, producer, artist, dancer, I do a little bit of everything.
Emma: How long have you been in New York, are you from here?
Matty: I was born and raised in New York, my roots are Italian and Irish so two opposite ends of New York people, we migrated from Brooklyn and I grew up on Long Island, but i’ve been all around the city, i’ve had so many different jobs around the city and I feel like i’ve done a bit of everything and seen all the sprinkles of each community and each little burrow.
Emma: So how do you think growing up and living here in New York has influenced you as an artist?
Matty: I think New York was always sort of this, cultural hub and it still is in a lot of different ways, I think growing up I viewed the city as the “Emerald City” from the Wizard of Oz because any time I would come to the city I was always starstruck by all the buildings and the energy. I worked in fashion for a little bit, and I did nightclubs so I think all of that fed my ideas about artistry, it made me think oh I have to be my own person and I have to have my own identity, I feel like it really makes you figure out who you are and just run with it.
Emma: So you have a new single coming out on April 12th, can you talk a little bit about that?
Matty: Yes so I am so excited its called Lacazette and originally it was not for me, my friends and I were working on pitch music for another artist and I was like yeah that’s just have fun and see what happens and he played me this beat and I was just writing, having fun with it because I was like this song isn’t for me I don't need to think too hard about it. So i wrote this song like, really quickly like definitely within 30 to 45 minutes, and we pitched the song and that one got passed on but I just felt like the identity of it relied so heavily on what I do and my friend was like you’re crazy on this you have to put it out, and then I took it and I co-produced it and added a couple of things and now it’s one of my favorite songs i’ve ever made.
Emma: I was listening to it earlier and loving it, I can imagine it playing at the club it’s just so much fun
Matty: It’s very radio, it's very top down in the car
Emma: It’s going to bring the warm weather to New York
Matty: I’m manifesting it, I feel like its very much a manifestation song and I feel that a lot of my music has themes of self identity and picking yourself up and being your own number one fan and this song is very much the pinnacle of that, it's like i’m a bad bitch, I will take over everything, I will win, I will shoot every score.
Emma: So you were just saying you feel like self identity is a big part of your music, where would you say that comes from, what was the starting point, how did that start translating into your music?
Matty: I think my artistry came in many different ways, I grew up doing musical theater and I was like five when I started so that was my first exposure to performing, and I think from there I began to start to find my identity, I’ve always been a queer person and pop music is so essential to the queer community and I think that helped a lot with figuring out what I wanted and then as I started to produce and write I realized I had so much to say and I had so much that I had been inspired by weather it be artists or art or film. When I was really young I wanted to be a composer and I was in it, I wanted to work in the Orchestra so i studied jazz and opera so i think it’s helped me grow into something totally different and so unique and now I’m on this journey of being a blossoming trans woman and I just hit 8 months a few weeks ago and thats been the most informing thing of my life and I feel like its gonna directly compete with how I think about my art and music, it's all very in tandem.
Emma: I feel like all of these different things that you’ve experienced through life and all the different areas of music that you’ve studied like classical and jazz, it really brings a different dimension to your music that a lot of people don’t have because not everyone dreams of being a composer.
Matty: I was so serious about it too, and then Just Dance by Lady Gaga came out when I was like 10 or 11 and I was like actually, I kind of wanna do that.
Emma: That’s so funny you say that because I was just talking about how when she came out it was like, a revolution, everyone remembers where they were.
Matty: Everyone was like, we have to be weird. Also being from New York I knew so many people from the fashion world that I was in that knew her or had exposure to her and I had friends of friends who would perform with her at a jazz club, and I think that electricity of New York being directly fed into her artistry was huge for me as a child, I thought to myself “I could do that”
Emma: So what would you say your goal is for the future, are you wanting to go on tour or focus more on producing and making your own music?
Matty: I eventually do want to go on tour, I think that's the big thing I want to tackle. Since signing with Heather and having management and a team with people who are really putting the focus and the discipline on an actual routine and keeping structure in everything like, you can’t be talented without structure or organization because you will go nowhere, so I think the next level is this project i’m working on that will be coming out later in the summer, its really groundbreaking on several different levels and I think it's going to reach a lot of people. Obviously we all want a viral moment, but I think my situation of where I'm at will be so different, even in my own life, say, a year from now so I'm really excited to see what that looks like. But yes I want to go on tour, I want to play big shows, I played a show at Baby’s all Right a few weeks ago and we had 275 people there and I thought to myself I need more of this, there needs to be 2000 people and then 200,000 people.
Emma: And you’ll get there, Baby’s is a perfect starting venue because first of all it's one of my favorite venues ever, but second of all I've seen so many artists start there and then move up to the bigger venues.
Matty: No yeah I saw Dua Lipa there when I was a sophomore in high school and it was like her debut show it was like 2014, so to be on that stage years later was so cool
Emma: Now she’s literally headlining Lollapalooza and is one of the biggest artists in the world, so yeah you’ll get there.
Matty: And once your foot is in the door you can run through it
Emma: Can you name some other artists you feel you pull inspiration from, I know you mentioned Lady Gaga but are there some other artists you can name?
Matty: Music is so important to me and I feel like its a huge part of my everyday life and how I compartmentalize things and an artist who has changed my life in the past especially with her debut project is Sza, I love Sza and Ctrl came out at a time where I was so lonely and I needed something and I feel like it spoke to my soul, and more recently I would say Ethel Cain, I just think Hayden is so incredibly talented and wonderful and her project and everything that is the subtext of it really helped me unearth my identity, because once you see something you can’t unsee it, and it's like okay now I have to go down this path because it's actually who i've always been under the surface. So she’s someone huge that I really look up to but there’s so many other people, the OG’s are like Prince, Miriah Carrey, Etta James, there’s also just so many queer artists who are out there killing it, I think in the next 6 years we are going to see the 2020’s defined as the queer artist takeover because I think that’s what was missing and has been missing because queer culture is in everything and has been in everything for decades and decades, so I think we are going to see the queer superstars really come together, and we kind of already are seeing that.
Emma: Besides the single, what else can readers expect from you in the near future?
Matty: I think the next thing would be the project, it’s called a “Moment With You” and it’s based off the lead single I released last year, and so at the time when I was releasing the single I didn’t know that it would be a project I thought it would be more of a one off, and then I realized I had all of these songs that kind of all tie in together, they’re all euphoric and uplifting and I really started to understand what the project is and kind of was. I’m really excited for it, there’s just so many highlights from it like “EPILL'' which I released last month. I feel like I've wanted to make a song like that for years and just haven’t gotten the chance to. I also have a really special song called “Sing me to Sleep” that’s going to be the closer, I produced and wrote it alone, it’s like 5 minutes, and it's a mixture of so many genres. It started out as a song about suicide and it blossomed into this song about what I would imagine being in the presence of god would feel like, it starts as this post punk song with this crazy guitar riff, and in the middle theres a drop and you feel like you’re floating and then it comes down and it gets really quiet, and I am just so excited for it.
Emma: Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into producing?
Matty: I’ve met people that have no technical training but who are incredible at what they do, and i’ve met people with the most training in the world who just don’t know how to produce, I think music making is really cool because a lot of it is just based on a feeling, I kind of fall in the middle where I feel like I have a black background in training I can read music, I can play enough where I can get my point across, I started when I was about 12 or 13 and I was really interested in remixing things so I was using a production software called Qbase which is kind of old school I don’t know if its as prominent as it once was but it was like, the worst thing ever. It was so hard to use and I was killing myself trying to use it, so I released a little DJ project of these songs that I remixed and like mashed together and some of them got a good couple thousand streams on soundcloud, I think one even broke 12 thousand, but I was just 13 and having fun not really thinking much about it. So this kind of goes into how I got my name, Matty Marz I feel like is two different entities and Matty was a nickname I had when I was growing up at first it was people making fun of me because they were like “You’re feminine” but it kind of turned into just who I was, like it just fit and made sense. Marz came about because one of my favorite movies of all time is “Mars Attacks!” and I feel like it was just campy and fun and everything I wanted to be so when I named the EP of all of the remixes I named it Marz Attaxs and people really liked the name so when it came time to pick a stage name Matty Marz just felt right. I just feel like the name is so important, if it’s a good name it should give people a good idea of what they are getting themselves into.
Emma: How would you say that working in the fashion industry plays into your artistry?
Matty: I think fashion is really everything, I got to work for Patricia Fields who’s an iconic New York designer, she had a store in the Bowery and in the 70’s she would dress drag queens but she’s most known for styling Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada and her store in the Bowery had all of these eccentric one of a kind pieces from different smaller designers that she would house, being in that space informed so much of my identity in fashion, being able to put on things that felt like a protection was very important to me.
Emma: Getting on stage in the perfect outfit can change everything.
Matty: Literally! It’s crazy, it helps you be that thing that you need to be on stage because it's not really you, music creation and performing are two completely different things. You have to be pouring your heart out in your bedroom as you make the shit, and once you get on stage you have to be a very calculated version of what you are trying to articulate as an artist.
Emma: Well, do you have any last words for the readers at home?
Matty: Expect A Moment With You this summer, and I will be taking airways over soon and then I'll be taking over the world.
Presave Lacazette out April 12th
Find Matty Marz on Instagram here.
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