Matthew Perryman Jones
By Matthew Beale
Photo by Harrison Hudson

"When I'm sitting with a guitar in a room, usually I'm coming to it, and I've already got something going on inside thought-wise...The song resonates with where you're at, and this kind of melody comes out."
So begins Matthew Perryman Jones' songwriting process, but after countless hours have been poured in, it culminates in organ splashes rolling out of a Leslie and strings slowly swelling to meet a refrain. Jones sings above it all with a mild and mellow tenor that bears no hint of the chaotic blend of ideas that began his journey to a song, and instead projects an inherent confidence into the melody and words. His 2006 release, Throwing Punches in the Dark, was well received in local magazines, and now Jones is looking to use his success as a stepping stone.
It wasn't Jones' intention to change both his songwriting style and expectations about music careers when he stopped widely performing four years ago. The decision was a purely pragmatic choice to build a home and marriage without the interruption of constant touring. When circumstances began to favor making a new recording, they also favored a reflection on his own songwriting: "I used to write with more philosophical and heady kind of thoughts crammed in, and I didn't want to do that. I felt like too often you can impose an ideal on a song that doesn't need to be there." Jones was soon introduced to producer and artist Neilson Hubbard, who was convinced there was a good start to an album after listening to about four full songs culled from Jones' demo tapes. So the two began fleshing out the rest of the melodic structures Jones had written with lyrics.
"[Hubbard] would sit there with a notepad and I would just start singing. It was kind of interesting because there wasn't any agenda songwriting-wise, like 'We're gonna write a song about this.' It was more sort of, what was the feeling of the song that was coming out," Jones snaps his fingers, "spontaneously? It didn't really have a direction yet." Despite the intentionally stream-of-consciousness writing process, the 10 songs on his 2006 release maintain reoccurring lyrical themes that complement the production's consistent tone. "When the record was done, the songs were written, I looked back and I found a lot of things; there were words that just kept coming up," says Jones. Even the album's title stemmed from one of those themes: "'In the dark' is a phrase that comes out a lot, probably in three songs," says Jones
Through the winter and spring, Jones and his management team have been shopping his album to several major labels, marking another change in Jones' approach. When he moved from Atlanta to Nashville in 1999, with typical expectations of cowboy boots and country music, he was committed to remaining musically independent and limiting the influence of others on his creations. But finding a management team and label are steps towards building a sustainable support structure around himself. "There's some element of trying to be smart about it," he explains. It's a long way from cutting his teeth at Eddie's Attic outside Atlanta.
Matthew Perryman Jones shares maybe more than he knows about himself in his songs. Writing in a moment and riffing on whatever the well of his mind pulls up spawns themes of a frustration at consumerism, a class consciousness, a respect for family and love, and a subtle Christian influence. He quotes author and poet Richard Wright on the album art for Throwing Punches in the Dark: "I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words." For an artist singing about what matters to his heart in a way that, he says, feels more honest than ever before, there could be no better album. For a singer/songwriter who works out lyrics by filtering whatever comes out in the moment, there could be no more apt quote.

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