Nashville-based singer/songwriter Matt Lovell has announced the upcoming release of his debut album, Nobody Cries Today, out on June 5th. The video for the album’s soulful lead single “90 Proof,” which premiered via American Songwriter, was written during attempts to let go of a relationship that had ended. “I was also broke,” Lovell told American Songwriter. “I was what me and my friends laughingly call a ‘singer-songwaiter’ - employed by an upscale-ish burger restaurant in Nashville’s touristy Gulch neighborhood.” The song came to Lovell while he was working, and he ventured into the bathroom to record it on his phone. “I was in the middle of singing ‘I’ve been trying to lose your number, but my fingers won’t forget’ when one of my customers walked into the restaurant bathroom on me,” he recalled. “They probably still talk about their silly Nashville waiter singing in the bathroom.”
WATCH: “90 PROOF”
“Just one listen to Lovell’s voice as he delivers assertive but smooth blue eyed-soul during the song’s conflicted refrain (‘I got 90 proof / that I ain’t over you’) and that’s all the authentic connection the song needs,” said American Songwriter. “Lovell knows how to tap into a part of himself that can bring the emotions of ’90 Proof’ to the surface and doing so is all the more honorable, knowing the story he’s trying to tell, isn’t a made up screenplay; it’s one man being willing to revisit challenging parts of his life and do so with performative solemnity and grace.”
LISTEN: “90 PROOF”
All but one of the album’s songs were recorded in 2016 - just months before Lovell nearly lost his life. On January 20, 2017, he was shot in the chest by a sixteen-year-old who attempted to steal his car. Miraculously, he lived. “This moment created a new center of gravity and re-ordered my understanding of everything I’ve experienced in this lifetime,” he explains. “Many people who experience an acute trauma go through somewhat of a euphoric period immediately after the incident occurs, and this was definitely my experience. The level of peace I felt was something I had never touched before. I wrote profusely, I gardened, I brought new life and vigor to my musical ventures, and I made peace with complicated friendships. More than anything, I found a level of great self-acceptance, and this created space for me to begin to learn how to live this life.”
This era ended with the abrupt onset PTSD, causing the most difficult time Lovell had ever faced. He began to question everything, and struggled to find a way to articulate the horrors he was experiencing. Now, on the other side of recovery, Lovell is excited to sing these songs again for anyone who will listen. “In these years of writing and recording, I have gathered quite a wild palette of paints,” he says. “In a way, Nobody Cries Today has actually been my teacher. As I have written these songs, each of them has been like a tiny rowboat to get me from one day to the next. They have witnessed me in the years that I was in the throes of trying to find acceptance for myself and for the world I’m living in. As a gay man of southern origin, this proved to be a tall order. These songs have also helped me to explore things like zest for life, discontent, hunger, truth, and hope,” he continues. “Nobody Cries Today contains every bit of earnestness, desire, and love that I have to give.”