Power Pop Legend Matthew Sweet Sells Out Shank Hall

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Power Pop legend Matthew Sweet, who performs February 13 at Shank Hall, has found another outlet for his creativity: cat paintings and bronzes. It’s probably not a surprise to longtime fans because cats have been an occasional theme for Sweet, including his last album, Catspaw, which featured a Star Trek-inspired album cover that featured a cat’s mouth with its fangs visible. In the past, Sweet’s also sold cartoon drawings at his shows of him with cats or guitars.

Last summer, Sweet decided to do some more drawings. “I really wanted to do it as a way to kind of get into the creative mode for making an album,” he says. “I remember I said to my wife, I’m going to make some drawings for a while and do that as a low-pressure way to get into the creative and get into my album.”

But then Sweet, who had also made pottery before, got really into his drawings. “I would draw the original sketch with pencil, and then go over those lines with black fountain pens of various gauges,” he says. “After I did that, I would erase the pencil and use colored ink. Kind of all around the world, there’s a really vibrant scene of ink and pens and drawing. The old technology that no one really needs now because we have the internet and computers, we don’t really use pens and papers and all that, so it has become more of an art thing than a necessity to anybody.”

Sweet says sales for his artwork “blew up a little bit” over the holiday season. He compared making the drawings and bronzes to making songs, especially when he first started, and not knowing how he made them or where they came from. “I love doing it,” he says. “It’s really very similar to me in feeling and everything to working on music. I kind of lose myself self in it. Lose my mind and get sort of spaced out and really cooled out.”

You can view and purchase his artwork at etsy.com/market/matthew_sweet.

Songwriters Festival

Sweet’s band for his current run of dates, which takes the Nebraska native through the Midwest, is Debi Peterson (drums), Paul Chastain (bass) and John Moreman (guitar). Helping him warm up for his brief tour after not performing live for a good while, Sweet participated in the 30A Songwriters Festival in the Florida Panhandle in January. The event, in its 15th year and started by Sweet’s manager, Russell Carter, featured more than 100 performers, including Elvis Costello, Robyn Hitchcock, Steve Earle and others. “So, I know I can play and sing,” he says,” because I played there. Now I’m less worried about the tour.”

Sweet also reconnected briefly with Shawn Mullins, his bandmate in the Thorns with Pete Droge, after they performed back-to-back. In previous years, Sweet says he has opened for Cheap Trick, and another time, he participated in an in-the-round with Tommy Stinson. Sweet says he and the former Replacement were both preteen bassists in bands around the same time in the early ‘80s. He shared a story from his past with Stinson on stage.“I knew a guy in Lincoln, who was like, (adopting a mocking voice) ‘There’s a kid up in Minneapolis who is just as young as you and can play just as good as you,’ or something like that. So, it always stuck in my head,” he says, laughing.

Sweet is working on the follow-up to Catspaw, an album that saw him handle nearly every aspect of the release from recording and mixing it to playing guitar, bass, and adding background vocals. He’s unsure if he will take that approach again. “It kind of depends on what I need, if I feel like I have things I can’t do,” he says. “It was really cool to do it all on my own, and much of my career people have been saying why don’t you do an album where you do everything, and I never felt comfortable enough to do it.

“When I did Catspaw, I was like I’m going to play everything myself, and it kind of made it fast to do and maybe a little more fun because I had more to do on it. I kind of goofed around a little on guitar. I don’t envision it being super similar to Catspaw, but I may do everything. I just don’t know.”

Just out last Friday was Sweet’s Live at Grant Park Chicago July 1993, a 17-track live album that finds Sweet on the road and in between the previous year’s Girlfriend and 1993’s Altered Beast. His stellar backing band included Richard Lloyd on lead guitar, Will Rigby on drums, and Tony Marsico on bass and background vocals. 

Sweet says he remembers the Fourth of July concert as the “greatest moment in my mother’s life” because of the Chicago Tribune’s very positive review of the concert, which began, “The pope, the Bulls, and now, Matthew Sweet,” listing those who had been able to successfully fill Grant Park.

“My mom was raised in one of these big Catholic families in a little town in Nebraska, so to see my name with the Pope was a big thing for her,” he says.

Matthew Sweet performs at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 13, Shank Hall; Abe Partridge is also playing. The show is sold out.