Meet Matty Frank

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Matty Frank. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Matty below.

Hi Matty, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

My work ethic absolutely comes from my mom. Seeing her raise my brother and I, often as a single parent, working tirelessly beyond her work hours at her job, in addition to being as involved in our school activities, academics, and field trips as possible, while ALSO planning and taking us on amazing vacations and other fun excursions with our family whenever she could, I’m always amazed at how much she was able and continues to be able to keep up with. Getting continuous positive reinforcement from her for my academic and extracurricular successes, while encouraging me to always explore my interests made me very goal oriented. I also believe this gave me a large capacity for the amount of interests I can balance and goals I want to juggle in my head at once, at times even worrying my mom with the amount of activities I was involved in! But rather than merely chasing the satisfaction of adding another accomplishment to the list, my upbringing has made me driven by the desire for the enrichment that comes from completing, say, an artistic endeavor. As hard as I, my mom, and my family have worked in our lives, we didn’t grow up with nor do we currently live with money, so I think I’ve been able to separate some of the idea of work ethic guaranteeing the traditional American idea of “success”, i.e. wealth, awards, recognition for accomplishments. While those things are of course lovely and things I do strive toward, what’s most important to me is often satisfying myself with the work I’ve done. As any creative person will say, I am my most difficult critic to please, and I’m thankful to have been instilled with this work ethic my whole life in order to have a chance of accomplishing that!

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I write, record, and produce original songs and instrumentals, with the goal being to be able to sustain myself with the music I write in any form, be it performing, composing soundtracks for all kinds of media, selling albums etc.

A big goal of mine is to compose a video game OST; I listened to video game soundtracks well before I started listening to pop music or anything most people listen to day to day, and that, along with movie and TV soundtracks, has really shaped the sound of my instrumental compositions as well as my work as a pop/folk singer-songwriter. I believe I have a sound that is completely accessible with reference points, but that is still completely unique and difficult for listeners to categorize, myself included. At my live shows, whether I’m playing solo or with my wonderful band, I love to introduce elements into the set that are not often as seen or heard in live music, including looping, omnichord, and clarinet, all of which make it in my recorded music as well.

I’m excited to be sharing sounds like this in my first ever album, which I’m hoping to share late summer or early fall of 2024! I’ve been working on it for about 2 years and I’m thrilled with how it came together. I’ve gotten to collaborate with several marvelous musicians I met since moving to Durham in 2022 and am so excited to feature so much of their work on this album. Entitled Dooda, it’s all about the consequences of straying from and betraying the natural world, while also celebrating what its given us and what our relationship with it could be. I’ve done a lot of world building for it, with much time and thought put into how the songs interact (plenty of motifs and self references throughout!), as well as developing cohesive visuals and merchandise, along with my first ever music video for one of the singles, Moth! This song and three other singles are available to listen to on all streaming platforms already, and if you really want to support what I’m doing, you can buy these and any of my music on my bandcamp!

Another big message from Dooda is about the importance of community, so I’m grateful and stoked to be able to share the collaborative work I’ve made with my new musical community in the triangle!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Being as self reliant as I can has absolutely gotten me where I am today. While collaboration is of course essential to making music, I never like to be in a place where I am dependent on the whims or calendar of someone else. Furthermore, recording music can be one of the most expensive art forms there is if you are unable to do most of the work yourself, which can be a huge barrier and source of discouragement for new artists or folks who are interested in getting started. Learning how to record myself well and investing in a couple good pieces of essential gear has allowed me to record a lot more music than I could have if I had to pay for studio time and an engineer. This has also allowed me to work on my own time without worrying about having to pay for additional recording hours, thus resulting in higher quality work overall. Finally, I think a lot of creative people think that you’re not supposed to say that you’re good at what you do or promote yourself too much, that it somehow makes what you’re doing less legitimate. However, I think it’s very important to really know that what you’re making is worthy of recognition if that is one of your goals for your work. If you can’t see it being successful, why should anyone else? One of my favorite poets, Chen Chen, once tweeted that not promoting your work is in fact the more cocky thing to do because you are assuming that it is so amazing that people will automatically flock to it. And while it may be amazing, it’s just the reality of most creative fields that there are many many other artists pursuing what you are, so you have to put some work into making yourself heard, or at least believe that your work is worthy of it.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

I’m currently trying to reach out to record labels and label services companies to get some help with marketing, promotion, and distribution. Being one person who works full time, it’s nearly impossible to get my music heard by the amount of people I think it’s deserving of on my own. While I would do as much of the work as I could to promote my album if I end up self releasing, having the help of a label or label services team would allow me to focus on continuing to build the world of the album through additional visuals, social media content, new merch, and even more music.

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