Matt Dusk

Finding the Best

A few hours before taking the stage in front of a sold-out crowd at the attractive Enwave Theatre in Toronto, Matt Dusk relaxed for a few minutes outside the venue. Stiff drink in hand, the thirty-one year old crooner offered his thoughts on the making of his third album, Good News, which debuted in Canada in October 2009.

Dusk came up with an interesting strategy for determining what songs to record. He sought out tunes from around the world that had been number one hits in national contexts yet never emerged internationally. Betting that good songs know no boundaries, the Toronto native uncovered an eclectic mix and arranged the material to match his distinctive style. A definite high point is the gentle break-up number ‘It’s Not That Easy’, originally a chart-topper in the U.K in 2006 for R&B artist Lemar. Adding a shot of adrenalin to the back half of the album is the lively ‘Don’t Hate On Me’, a successful single in 2007 for Swedish singer Vincent Pontare.

Another standout is the sweet-natured title track, which opens the collection and introduces the themes of love and loss that permeate the whole album.



After finishing high school, Dusk appeared to be heading down a conventional path. He studied economics for one year at York University, and considered leaving school to take his place in the packaging business run by his father. His mother urged him to finish his education. Passionate about performance, Dusk shifted into the music program at York. Along the way he studied under Canadian jazz piano legend Oscar Peterson, and eventually graduated with an honours degree in music in 2002.

In concert the laidback entertainer endeared himself to the audience, speaking fondly of his hometown. He sprinkled the set with wry, self-deprecating humour, jokingly apologizing to those ‘who thought they were coming to see Michael Bublé tonight!’ The set showcased a superb mix of songs from Good News and his older releases. An early highlight was ‘Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad’, a melancholy number penned by Bono and The Edge that Dusk first recorded for his 2004 debut album Two Shots. As an encore he dusted off ‘My Way’, a true standard written by Ottawa-born Paul Anka and made an unforgettable classic by Frank Sinatra.



In the following interview, Dusk talks about Good News, songwriting, and the art of connecting emotionally to a piece of music. He offers some background information on one of his most recent projects: performing songs for the new television series Call Me Fitz, a profane dark comedy starring Jason Priestley as a morally bankrupt car salesman. Filmed in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, the show is produced by The Movie Network and Movie Central and is set to air in fall 2010.

Catch Matt Dusk in concert July 17, 2010 at the Uptown Waterloo Jazz Festival, and at the Downtown Oakville Jazz Festival on August 8, 2010.

CI: One of the most interesting aspects of what you are doing is the international flavour of it all. For Good News you went on a search for songs far and wide, and looking at the upcoming concert dates, you will be all over the world. As you were searching for songs in different countries, are there one or two on the record that stand out because you had to take a particularly strange path to find them? How about ‘It’s Not That Easy’?

MD: Well, getting back to the first point about searching for songs, I came from a jazz world. I was educated in jazz music through my teenage and university years, and I guess through my twenties. I started off in classical, but when you’re a kid singing choir music, when you start in classical music at thirteen, do you think you like that music? No, you want to fall into what your peers listen to. So I started listening to pop and a lot of house music, electronic music. I still listen to it today. I still enjoy it, but if someone asks you if you like steak or if you like cake, well, it depends on the moment. Throughout my journey musically I discovered jazz. What do you discover in old music? You discover the best of the old music.

Starting with the standards that have been around for forty years, I did that for ten years. I enjoyed it, and I still love singing them. Then I said, ‘why don’t we take an old-school approach to finding music with modern technology?’ You have to understand that, back in the forties and fifties, it was a publisher’s world. Cole Porter would come out with a song, sixty people would record it in the first year, and over time another sixty people would record it. One version would reign supreme, depending on who you talked to.

I said, ‘why can’t we do that in the modern-day world where there are great songwriters everywhere? Let’s find some songs that were number one hits in other countries but never broke out of that region. Let’s record them for my record, or translate them and record them for someone else’s record’. For example, on my last record, the title was Back In Town. That was an Italian song that got some press but never reached any sort of chart success. We took it, the songwriters and myself, we re-wrote it, and it became a number one hit. Same thing with ‘It’s Not That Easy’: great song, a number one hit in the U.K. by an artist named Lemar, but it was released in 2006 and never really broke out of there. So I said, ‘why can’t we add a crooning flavour to an R&B track?’ That’s kind of how that song came together. When I heard it, my reference is always people; I would always play tracks for people and say ‘how does that make you feel?’ People say ‘good’ or ‘I don’t like it’ or ‘groovy’ – that song, it just got me in the groove.

CI: Have you found, as you play overseas, that this has been a nice thing to work with as a base, having these songs from different places? As you play in different countries, do you pick up the audience that heard the original song?

MD: Do you know what? Honestly, the way that they position me as an artist – and this is a thing that all artists face, painters, sculptors, musicians – media portrays you in a certain way. You fall into the pigeonhole that media portrays. For example, in Europe they would say ‘neo-Sinatra’, so a new kind of Sinatra. I don’t think that Sinatra would ever sing ‘It’s Not That Easy’, but they say ‘okay, this is a watered-down version of something that we can grab onto’. Most of the people that come to the shows have never heard these songs, so they just say ‘wow, I really like the tunes’. That shows you how a good song can translate through different genres.

CI: As you go about finding a song, learning a song, interpreting it and making it your own, I am interested in that process. Back in January I did an interview with Nikki Yanofsky, the young Montréal jazz singer. She tells this funny story in her lives performances, before singing ‘At Last’, the old Etta James song, noting that the emotions in that song are a little beyond her years, so she would actually think of her feelings for her dog. She would sort of trick herself into the feelings. When you are singing a song written by someone else, do you ever find that maybe you like the song but do not identify with certain lyrics? Do you have to come up with some mental tricks to get yourself genuinely connected to a song?

MD: Of course! The world of movies is based upon actors who pull on experiences that are related but not exact to their character. I don’t think that Marlon Brando was a single man beating his wife in A Streetcar Named Desire. I think we all pull upon experiences and find this smorgasbord potluck of emotion to portray what the song is trying to communicate. Take Cole Porter, for example; if you are going to sing a song really by Cole Porter, you have to be married and gay, and be in love with your horse! I can’t relate to a man like that. I’ve never ridden a horse!

It’s one of those things that always upsets me, how a lot of journalists discount someone who is young because of their age, and they say ‘well, how do you know about life?’ I’ll tell you, I’ve sung songs throughout my years, and yes, as you get older you do pull on experiences that make them more yours, but who am I to discount someone who is sixteen? My teacher, when I was going to school – his name was Bob Fenton. He was a piano player throughout the heyday of jazz. Anything that was associated with misbehaving, he was a part of it! Played with everyone from Chet Baker, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims – go down the list. He said ‘fuck ‘em!’ Yeah, you’re a singer, part of it is acting; get over it! We’re not here to change the world. We’re here to tell a story!’ So do I pull on emotions? Yeah. Even tonight is going to be interesting because it’s my hometown. I feel like I’m in my bathroom!


Matt Dusk performed to a full house at the Enwave Theatre in Toronto, Ontario on April 16, 2010. Photo Credit: David Irvine Photography

CI: Who is in the audience tonight that will make this show a little different than the usual show?

MD: A lot of people that I know I don’t have to impress. I know because it’s such a small venue, and from the fact that we’re sold out, you’re going to get a lot of people who are fans who are just happy to be there. I like to compare music to wine because you never judge it for what it’s not. Why would you compare a 2008 Woodbridge Robert Mondavi Merlot to a Pétrus 1989? They’re never going to compare! You never judge something for what it’s not. You judge it for what it is. So hey, I’m not saying I’m Frank Sinatra. I am an artist here portraying a song. If you enjoy it, awesome, if not, there are a million other people you can listen to.

CI: You mentioned earlier your education in music. You were at York University in economics, and after your first year you made the switch to music. I am always interested by these life decisions. In that year, maybe the summer between those two years, what was going through your mind?

MD: Well, I was going to leave York to go and work for my dad full time. He owns a packaging company. He offered me a very, very good salary – at nineteen, making six figures! I thought ‘okay, who doesn’t want to make that kind of money!’ It’s a great business. My mother, who was VP of York, said ‘listen, once you go to work, you never come back. That’s life. You don’t have the chance to grow and to enjoy yourself’. So I said ‘okay, I’ll give it a shot’.

And I enjoy sitting under a tree rather than being by a machine! That was the decision. I knew that, worse comes to worse, I get my degree and I go to work for my dad, but at least I have four years to grow as an artist and as a person. Remember, when you go to school, it’s not so much what you learn. …

CI: Tell me a little bit about the composition of the band backing you up these days. What is it set up to emphasize in your sound?

MD: I try to break it down to the basic element, which is the song. Get a rhythm section, piano, bass, drums, a horn, some percussion, some synth patches, because I think a song should be able to break down to piano and vocal. When I was choosing the songs on this record, it was ‘okay, can I be at a party and do all these songs?’ Sure, you might shorten them from four minutes down to ninety seconds. Again, in the jazz world, if you ever see a Tony Bennett show, I think he does fifty songs in sixty minutes! So the band composition just basically supports the song, but at the end of the day, if anything ever happens to the percussionist or something, we can still break it down. And that’s happened!

CI: I was interested to see that you are lending your talent to the upcoming Jason Priestley television series, Call Me Fitz. How did that opportunity come about for you?

MD: The producers of the show and E1 Entertainment said they had this idea. The music of the fifties and sixties, the crooning music, was very machismo, very manly. You hear Sinatra, you know it’s a guy; it’s got a swagger, a swing to it. Their character was kind of this cocky guy. He thought he was Frank Sinatra. So they said ‘well, if we could incorporate the music of that to play along with the character, that would be perfect’. In the end, they came to me and asked ‘would you like to be a part of it’. I said that I loved the idea of the show. I like Jason Priestley from 90210, you know, I grew up in that era. My girlfriend is so jealous! …

What happened was that they asked if I would like to be part of it. I said absolutely, it would be a great opportunity. It didn’t pay anything – because I actually believe in the show – and hopefully it will become a great success. If not, it’s a feather in the cap, right? That’s called life.



CI: You share songwriting credit on a number of tracks on Good News. How is the songwriting coming? How comfortable are you with it as you do more?

MD: Well, I wrote forty songs for this record with different people, but when you’re competing with number one hits, you’re sort of competing with the best. I never want to position myself against the best, but when you need a certain flavour, your mind, I think, understands what you want more than you could explain to any songwriter. On the Fitz show, I wrote a couple of songs. I knew what they were looking for and went right to the source, and said ‘do you like this?’ They said ‘we love it’. Perfect, write a lyric, just write it.

When you are putting out an artistic record every two or three years, a new record, you are faced with being against seven number one hits. How do you add something in? That’s why, out of forty songs, I think there are three co-writes on this, and out of fifteen on the international version, I have six co-writes. But I only do it because I can’t tell people what I want! If I asked you the question, tell me what it feels like to be happy, no one can explain the definition of being happy. You feel jovial. Well, what does it mean to feel jovial? You don’t know, but you laugh, you smile, and you feel lucky, right? So with this, especially the songwriting process, it’s tough. You’re always being compared to the best.

Date of Interview: 04/16/2010
Location: Enwave Theatre, Toronto, ON
Link: www.mattdusk.com