Matthew Connor shines a light on those lost with ‘Disappearances’
The Boston songwriter and composer releases a cinematic new album of alt-country noir-pop storytelling on Friday, October 21
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Haunting singles ‘Lose This Number’ and ‘Don’t Wait Up’ are now streaming
Watch the ‘Lose This Number’ video on YouTube
Photo Credit: Anthony Grassetti
BOSTON, MA [October 21, 2022] – When a person goes missing they leave behind a shadow, one that drifts in and out of the lives of those who are forced to carry on with a sudden void. Their stories are sometimes reported on, and sometimes ignored entirely. But each person who mysteriously disappears—whether by crime, by accident, or by self-measure—elicits two sides of a story: their own tragic tale, and the shaken lives of those who remain. For Matthew Connor, weaving these stories together forms the heartbeat of his new album Disappearances, set for release on Friday, October 21.
Across 10 haunting tracks, the evocative Boston songwriter and composer crafts a snapshot of American life told through a series of stories, all involving fictionalized cases of people who one day suddenly went missing. Led by recent singles “Lose This Number” and “Don’t Wait Up,” Disappearances marks Connor’s first new music since 2020’s “This World” single, and first extended release since 2016’s critically-acclaimed Night After Night EP.
“I hope people get lost in it, so to speak,” Connor says. “I imagined the album like one of those red string boards: characters and events and words and phrases drift in and out of various songs; things connect in unexpected ways.”
Connor began writing Disappearances in 2017, shortly after the presidential election, as an air of uneasy tension hung like a pall over the country. Inspired by real-life news events in his hometown of Boston and abroad, the stories relayed across the album are soundtracked in cinematic fashion, taking the 21st-century crooner’s unmistakable baritone voice and casting it upon a sound of Americana, from a slight Southern twang as a nod to his Alabama birthplace to the noir-pop lounge act that echoes his Northeastern residence. But the stories here on Disappearances are born out of Anywhere U.S.A.; reflected against the mundane nature of daily life, they’re of you and me, the neighbor across the street, the stranger in the supermarket. They’re a friend’s child who doesn’t come home from school, or a familiar face no longer seen across the bar. Disappearances is an album of realizations that come far too late to do anything about what just transpired.
“On a surface level, every song tells the story of someone who has disappeared, but from there I wanted to examine the idea of disappearance on an almost metaphysical level,” Connor notes. “A lot of the songs have to do with the impermanence and unreliability of memory and identity, and about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world.”
Though a solo songwriting project by nature, Disappearances boasts a deep masthead of contributors. It was co-produced by Connor and Jeremy Page (Czarface & Ghostface Killah, That Handsome Devil, Kendra Morris), with drums by Andy Bauer (Twin Shadow, Eli "Paperboy" Reed), pedal steel by Karen Sarkisian, and additional guitar work by Lexi Havlin. September single “Don’t Wait Up,” an atmospheric dream-folk composition about the aftermath of a high school girl’s disappearance, features Will Stratton on guitar and Blake Cowan (Wickerbird) on backing vocals. Five songs feature a string quintet, conducted by Connor himself at Hive Mind Recording in Brooklyn.
August’s “Lose This Number” was the first single from the LP, a vividly theatrical tale where electronic beats danced with alt-country flair, and set a tone for the album to come by cultivating a mood of mystery and unease. It suggested a larger, grander work was soon on the way, a storyteller’s album drawn out in chapters, in sharp contrast with our age of the single and society’s dwindling attention economy.
“I always think and write in terms of albums,” Connor admits. “I knew what the concept would be immediately, and as I was writing each song I was thinking of where it would be positioned on the tracklist. I really think of the album as one big work. Storytelling is extremely important to me, but so is ambiguity. My stories don’t always have a beginning, a middle, or – especially – an end. I like to think of each song as a snapshot: there are some vivid details, but also the suggestion of things happening just outside the frame.”
Disappearances begins with the alt-country stomp of “Heat Lightning,” an enchanting and inviting composition that opens a dramatic depth of songwriting unfit for the TikTok age, and closes with the Midwestern hymnal farewell of “All My Sisters.” In between, tracks like “Jennifer” and “Sawdust Trail” shine under a blacklight balladry, an eerie specter hovering overhead as the storyline continues to unfold, introducing characters that resurface elsewhere on the record through Connor’s knack for Lynchian world-building. Connor says the tracks on Disappearances came together quickly, the lyrics taking shape first, with the album crystallizing within a few short months. “I really was quite obsessed,” he notes.
That obsession was inspired partly by what he was reading in the news. “I can’t remember the exact moment I knew what the theme would be, but it was early in 2017, when there was this really paranoid, fearful mood in the air,” Connor says. “I remember reading a news story about five gay men who had disappeared in the same neighborhood in Toronto; four of the five were people of color, and of course the police maintained there was nothing to worry about. Soon after, I started learning about desaparecidos, migrants who go missing crossing the border into this country, mostly thanks to a Border Patrol policy known as ‘chase and scatter’. I was really haunted by this idea of the stories that don’t get told, the people whose fates get ignored.”
And thus Disappearances began to take shape, shining a light on the common themes around those stories, and in turn, how the light shining back at us hurts more than our eyes: it challenges who we are, as people, and forces us to leave our comfort zones. So when Connor welcomes us to this world, we’re greeted with not only a stark reality of what happened to that person we knew, but also how it will affect us for the rest of our lives.
Media Contact: Please direct all press inquiries to Matthew Connor at mc@matthewconnor.net or Michael Marotta at michael@publisist.co.
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‘Disappearances’ album artwork:
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‘Disappearances’ production credits:
Written by Matthew Connor
Produced by Matthew Connor & Jeremy Page
Mixed by Jeremy Page
Mastered by Kevin Blackler at Blackler Mastering
Matthew Connor: Vocals, guitars, keys, clarinet, samples & programming
Jeremy Page: Guitars, bass, keys, additional drums & percussion
Andy Bauer: Drums, vibraphone
Lexi Havlin: Lead guitar
Karen Sarkisian: Pedal steel
Will Stratton: Acoustic guitar on “Don’t Wait Up”
Blake Cowan (Wickerbird): Backing vocals on “Don’t Wait Up”
Strings arranged and conducted by Matthew Connor
Strings recorded and engineered by Vince Chiarito at Hive Mind Recording
Violins: Jonathan Block, Megan Hilands, Tina Clara Lee
Violas: Lesley Hogg, Beth Holub
“Desaparecido” choir: Andy Bauer, Geena Davis, Kendra Morris, Joe Stratton
Cover photo by Karla Clute
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Matthew Connor short bio:
Matthew Connor is a crooner for the 21st century, writing heart-wrenching songs that combine the windswept ideals of classic American balladry with stark depictions of modern-day alienation. The Boston-based Connor has a haunting voice that conjures ghosts of past heartbreaks, and he pairs it with spectral guitars that recall country tearjerkers and alt-pop brooding. _Maura Johnston
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Disappearances bio, by Brad Nelson:
Places of disappearance are pervaded by a sense of mystery and melancholy. Think of moonlight shivering over stalks of wheat. Trees in the forest cross hatching into new unreadable black metal band logos. Floorboards in an old house weeping in the most abandoned keys. This is the kind of scenery that Matthew Connor’s new album, Disappearances, plants itself in, the realm where one can cross over from the missing to the gone. Every song on the record is a story of someone parting the curtain of reality and slipping behind it; some of the disappeared are runaways, some have been taken, some have been swallowed up by darkness without evidence or explanation, but each missing person opens up a mystical emptiness in the place they’ve left behind and in the people who still live there.
“Someone’s disappeared again / and now they’re dragging the reservoir,” Connor sings on the opener “Heat Lightning”; his Scott Walker-esque baritone thrums against the steady heartbeat of a bass drum and a guitar ruminating somewhere between country and old rock and roll but never fully giving into either. Connor plays in the shadows of both genres throughout the record – think Chris Isaak if he really disappeared into the BlackLodge just like his character in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. In fact, Connor’s work on Disappearances is more than a little Lynchian, particularly in the mode of Peaks and Mulholland Dr.; his songs thrill and despair at the impossibility of knowing someone completely, the missing pieces in our images of other people,especially since those images are subject to constant erosion. “He was gone before the memories finished forming / I’ve forgotten if his eyes were gray or green” goes a lyric in “Sawdust Trail,” the narrator attempting to pin down the last remaining details of a phantomic lover that rises from a lake.
The real keeps bending into the surreal in this way over the course of Disappearances, people wandering so far from home and so deeply into themselves that they no longer recognize the world around them. Bridges and codas open like trap doors in the songs. The percussion can sound like some stumbling through a field crunching dead leaves underfoot, or like a riding crop sounding in the distance. It can also crackle like an old record, or rather like a sample of an old record you might hear creaking its way through a Portishead song; on“Lose This Number,” the first single from the record, such a drum figure stutters through the track and pulses against thick spiderwebs of guitar, as Connor’s voice sings of the loneliness and the feelings of disappearance that accompany a friend’s betrayal: “When they come for me / and they’re going to come / don’t you come running to my aid.”
Connor’s keen observations of the ghostly trails people leave behind is what binds the songs on Disappearances together, even when the arrangements are crisp and spangled as a Nudie suit, as they are on “Desaparecido,” a legitimate country ballad that builds and builds until it’s suddenly a political song for Linda Ronstadt to sing, complete with choir. But the album is also capable of the stillness of a garden at night, beauty shrouded and complicated by the dark. “Driftwood” is one of the most gorgeous moments on the album for this very reason, the pale light of Connor’s falsetto sinking into a coursing riverbed of strings and guitar, his narrator wanting to be fully aware of the moment before their disappearance – or possibly even their death – “I want to see it coming / I want to look it in the eye / I want to know what hit me / I want to blow a kiss goodbye.” After Connor stops singing, the strings and guitars coil into a vortex that the song disappears down. And just like that, it’s gone.
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Matthew Connor press photo:
Photo Credit: Anthony Grassetti
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Media praise for Matthew Connor:
The music of Matthew Connor has been featured in AllMusic, Bistro Awards, Cambridge Day, Country Queer, Enigma Online, Flaunt Magazine, Glamour, Kaltblut, Music Box Pete, NYLON, Out Magazine, PopMatters, Songwriting Magazine, Sound of Boston, The Bad Copy, Turn Up The Volume, Vanyaland, and other fine publications and outlets.
The music of Matthew Connor can be heard on Banks Radio Australia, Bay State Rock, Everything You Know Is Wrong on Salem State Radio, Good Music Radio, Indie Radio YFM, Lonely Oak Radio, Mark Skin Radio (Original Music Showcase, Christian’s Cosmic Corner, Marc’s Alt-Rock Playground), Monie’s New Music Radio UK, Sunshine Music iRadio, and other fine radio shows and stations.
“It may take a couple minutes to feel acclimated in Connor’s new single, but it’s well worth hanging in: the Massachusetts-based artist has crafted an absolute stunner. Taking a chamber-folk approach to a story about what happens when loved ones go missing, he croons the tune entirely in falsetto, resulting in a chilling, gothic spin that’s deeply affecting.” _Country Queer on ‘Don’t Wait Up’
“‘Night After Night,’ the latest from Boston-based singer Matthew Connor, combines a lighter rhythm than you might spend the night dancing to, but just the right tempo to settle your mind after a night out. Connor’s soft voice paired with the floating rhythm could easily make its way into any lounge where people sip wine on velvet couches instead of pounding shots on a cracked leather barstool.” _Out Magazine
“Connor has decided to take his music in a new direction — darker, deeper, and more raw.” _Flaunt Magazine
"[‘Lose This Number’] is so hauntingly profound in terms of how divided everything has become across America in the past six years… It's beautiful, eerie, it's just haunting. I'm just so in love with this song and the way it's arranged and delivered." _Carmelita of Bay State Rock
“His throaty croon guides us through this dark interpersonal terrain in a near-surreal haze, underscoring the horror as we slowly realize, '…the call is coming from within the house'.” _Country Queer on ‘Lose This Number’
“The song has an ominous backdrop, but if you listen intently enough you'll fall for Matthew's deep and booming voice that echoes through all of the mellow instrumentation abound to create a truly relaxing and unique experience... it shows off a new breed of singer-songwriter that has the ability to draw people in from all different musical backgrounds, and have them marvel over the talent that they're encountering. An impressive track that deserves a thorough listening.” _Music Box Pete
“If you listen to Matthew Connor‘s latest album, a cinematic masterpiece, you’ll hear a clean, well-produced mix of instrumentals that accompany his voice. It’s no surprise he composes soundtracks for films. ‘Midnight Blue’ is an eerie, immersive experience. It feels like walking into the haunted house of an opera singer cast away from the choir for being just a bit too daring and subversive.” _Sound of Boston
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Press Contact: michael@publisist.co or mc@matthewconnor.net
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