Q & A // Matt DeMello on Confetti in a Coalmine Reissue

What have you been reading lately?

Right now? The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin. I’m an absolute newcomer and this is extremely my shit, as the kids say.

Also Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. It’s sort of my anchor in these colossally stupid news cycles. Been hacking away at Ron Chernow’s Grant biography for the better part of the last year.

Went to Grant’s tomb last year in New York with Avalon by Roxy Music as the soundtrack. High quality experience.

But first and foremost, in revisiting Confetti in a Coalmine what are we the listeners going to discover in a new reissue?

So in all versions of the deluxe discs, we start things with “Happy Birthday to a Tom-a-saurus Rex“, a big B-Side for the original album. I tell everyone I don’t have favorite songs in my own material except the named birthday songs for my nieces and nephews.

In my emo bands from high school, we covered “Power Rangers” all the time as a gag. This is that, mixed with the old Captain Zoom 45′ my mom had for my 5th birthday. Very much a formative music experience. Tried to impart that to my nephew.

My goddaughter got her birthday song on the original album, and her sister’s song (also her dad’s favorite) “You May Be Isla, But You’re No Isla” from the Uncle Matt and Auntie Jen project will be on the streaming version of the deluxe reissue.

Then there’s arguably the most popular recording I’ve ever made, which is a B-Side for SkyTwoHigh’s last album, which is this sort of ambient concept album soundtracking an anime noir. It’s called “Failure by Design” and sort of the idea was Miami Vice meets 80s Dylan.

A few of the lines are hammy but I got to really explore my voice. I kept doing this like hammed-up Michael McDonald but Sky really pushed me to take it seriously and deliver a vocal that didn’t undermine the backing track. I’m glad they did.

I’m most curious about your choice of covers – things like the Velvets, Zappa, and Replacements…

I’m not sure I’d list these artists as active listening necessarily during the creation of the album, so much as they were all things I was recording for friends as gifts or in between takes with the various players on the album. They just so happen to be a lot of artists that are just in constant rotation in my listening anyway, with a few exceptions.

Other than that, I definitely think the Replacements are a good foil for Frank Zappa, and I always know I’m playing with the right people if they have a predilection for both.

They say, if you’re extroverted no one ever knows if you’re truly introverted. The same goes for sort of the phantom idea of “skill” or fluency in music theory, I find, especially in writers who treat guitar based music like rock as an international highway for other genres.

Zappa’s place as a maximalist needs not another word from me nor anyone else. But I think it’s unfortunate for everyone that wants him for the complexity, his staggering devotion to minimal, “cheap” genres like doo-wop get overlooked. I can think of at least 20 White Stripes songs more “complicated” than “Black Napkins“.

On the reverse side, the Replacements had that kind of idiot savant led by Westerberg’s songwriting with an uncommon midwestern ear for guitar voicings, and Bobby Stinson’s undying need to be in a prog rock band. Though, Westerberg would never be a Mother of Invention under the auspices of “rock and roll is in the mistakes.”

The same goes for Alex Chilton of Big Star, though he was definitely a louder Frank fan.

And I think the backing band on the Confetti album, the Significant Looks, were really talented at striking that same balance. Keeping Dookie-guitar tones and glammy backing vocals as this unpretentious glue that kept all the approaches from taking themselves too seriously. That much you hear all over Confetti.

Then there’s a few songs by artists who either that I need to insist on an association so the audience really gets it – maybe, LCD Soundsystem? Plus other tracks that were more or less put on as a dare, like the Sublime cover, which was supposed to be for a Bee Sides Cassettes ska compilation a few years ago. I guess that’s still coming out? I’m sorry I beat them.

Certainly sounds like a massive undertaking.

I think I was saving a lot of this stuff for some odds-and-sods packages like the Jennifer’s Appendix series we’ve been doing on Bandcamp since about 2015. But I heard the new reissue of SZA’s SOS and couldn’t resist. All of these recordings sort of made a kind of Bowie’s Pin-Ups that went right alongside the material, showing the spirit behind the work along the way.

It also seemed like a good time to really honor my Bandcamp follower audience, which is really the audience I feel closest to as time goes on. And they really get the lions’ share of these releases, especially if they sprung for the entire discography already.

Either way, you have to constantly be recording and storing what you do. Between live and streaming performances there’s really no excuse.

I’m not quite there yet, especially in performing on a sparing basis for my day job and to keep the set really fresh, but I think there’s a jam-band style Patreon model here that should be fleshed out once the discography is really robust.

But it felt like the right time to give Confetti a rebirth. We were still coming out of pandemic in 2022 and the live scene really wasn’t there again yet, for obvious and good reasons. There was just so much – like this visual album – I was holding on to at the time to trickle out in promotion. Months turned to years after the reissues for my debut album and solo tour after.

A few months of depression following the 2024 election, and here we are.

Where and when can we see you performing the material from reissues live?

I’m still playing with backing tracks as I have through pandemic. I did play with a limited ensemble in November 2023 to celebrate the Abbey Road tribute album that the Looks finished before pandemic and the Cassandra Abandoned Christmas album from mid-pandemic, which never got a proper release show when it came out.

That’s where you hear the “Peaches En Regalia” from the Bandcamp B-Sides. The guns in that ‘Dead Space Trio’ band, (Max Kutner on bass and James Paul Nadien on drums) are some of the best in the city with really no hyperbole. They’re also – uh, haha – a pretty penny, for obvious reasons.

But I think the backing tracks format really locked-in for me at a cool store front show I did here in Peekskill with St. Lenox and Franz Nickolay of the Hold Steady in February 2024. Ever since, I’ve been trying to do this sparingly and really focus on the vocal performance.

I’ll be performing material from the original album, deluxe editions, plus a few upcoming singles complete with backing tracks at the release show for Confetti Deluxe Edition at Unruly Collective for this year’s Face The Music Festival on Saturday, July 12th

For that show, I’ll be sitting in on keys with Brookyln jam quartet Ace Bandage. We’re joined by Boston’s Daphneblueunderworld, NYC’s Real Clothes, and my fellow Rhode Islanders the Quahogs.

Somehow, the title Confetti in a Coalmine set off the endless loop of “Canary in a Coalmine” playing in my head. I’m sure this is a complete coincidence.

I suppose another name might have been “Expert in a Dying Field” but that is already a vastly superior album by the Beths.

Perhaps feeling like you picked the wrong vocation in a self-sacrificial way is a recurring theme in modern middle and DIY class indie rock. And for Sting’s brain being in a band called the Police!

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