The Rise and Fall of Matt Litter

Chapter 11: Ramble On

"It's not that bad, I mean, you need to practice a bit better the finger movement, but it's not that bad..."

"Not that bad?" I ask, looking up at Demian. He's staring at me from a side, as I try (and fail miserably) to play the piano. "I sound like a kid pressing random keys!" I complain, and Demian just laughs. I swear he's trying to teach me, and I swear I'm trying to learn, I'm trying really hard to learn, but it's hard... it's really hard.

Demian is kind when it comes to that. He's patient, he's got a certain tact when it comes to saying things, and he always makes sure to have a smile on his face. That's nice, he's nice... he's great. Yet, that doesn't prevent me from being the worst piano player in existence, besides the slowest learner.

When I was fourteen years old, I decided I wanted to learn how to play bass after Alma explained to me how it sounded. She was listening to New Order on the radio, and they had this really cool bass line in the song Blue Monday that sounds pretty cool. She was like 'can you hear the bass? Doesn't it sound great?', and I was wishing I could say yes, but I couldn't. I couldn't tell apart the bass guitar from the electric guitar, so I just tried really hard to listen... and nothing. Alma just laughed, and a few days later she gave me a mixtape that had the best bass lines ever, or at least according to her. After that, I became obsessed with learning how to listen to the bass guitar in basically every song I heard, which made me realize I wanted to learn how to play that instrument. I remember Alma laughing and telling me she could teach me guitar if I wanted to, but I was stubborn and I made pretty clear I wouldn't learn any other instrument unless it was I already knew how to play bass guitar first.

I saved my work money for about a year, and then I finally bought a bass guitar for myself, and that was probably the coolest thing I've ever done. It took me to Demian, after all, not to mention the Doves... so it was money well spent.

I learned to play the acoustic guitar when I was seventeen, thanks to Tom. He taught me himself for a few months that year, and then, when I moved to New York, I did it with both my own bass guitar and my own acoustic one.

Now it's been almost six years since I moved here, and only now I dared to learn how to play the piano. Not that I really cared about it at first, but since we've got one in our living room, I figured it was time to learn. Not that I'm like Freddy, who basically can play every instrument ever, and I mean every single one, it's just I'm extremely curious regarding how playing the piano must be like...

We've got, for now, three songs that feature a piano melody during this new album. It's been two years since we finished our sophomore tour, by the way. Two-thousand and twelve is a real year now, and we spent its entire summer in Greece, writing the new album... sounds strange, doesn't it? Well, I know, but Greece is just something else. We rented this antique home in the field, the way only big musicians have ever done, and wrote the entire thing there, as well as we recorded a total of twenty-five songs. We did it on our own, of course, and now that we came back, we're recording them in LA.

It's not being an amazing experience to be honest, or at least not as amazing as it used to be. We were younger and dumber back in the day, I'm not gonna lie. When we started recording our first record I wasn't even twenty, and I was pushing twenty-two with the second one, so... it's been about two years since then. And yeah, we're taking more time now, and we've taken a lot of time to be relaxed and to write at our own speed, and it's barely November now and we don't expect the record to be ready until the next month or so, but... it's still stressful.

This is gonna sound extremely wrong, but do you know what's the worst part about recording this entire record? The fact everyone's asking for their bit of spotlight when it comes to writing. And it's not that I complain (except that maybe I do a little bit), but you see... there's been only a few things I've always been good at, and writing is one of them. When I was a kid I loved writing assignments because I could imagine an entirely different world and reality than the one I was living at the time, and I guess I also used to read a lot, so that helped. I can say the single worst things about my old man, and I do, but he had a big library at home that he had inherited from I don't know who, I think an uncle or something... and that formed me. Those books served me to learn and to escape, and books in general still do. So writing has been pretty much the same... it's been useful, it's been some sort of salvation, and I've been really good at it for as long as I can remember. When I was in high school, India used to love my writings, all of them. She also used to hate the fact I'd always put one hundred and twenty percent of my effort in that, and none in other things related to both that class and school in general, and I guess that's how I am with life actually. I work really hard on the things I care about, and right now, those things are music. And having to deal with others when it comes to the creative process of it, well... it's hard.