Posted at 6:00 p.m.
Mat Vezio will always remember the morning of the year 2000 when he was washing the toilets at the Giorgio restaurant in Laval. “I had my walkman and Jorane presented her album 16mm in a radio interview. It really impressed me,” he says.
“That’s when I started to let myself go by playing with sounds. »
At that time, Mat Vezio had already mastered the drums and his brother was recording his poems set to music, but he did not aspire to a career as a musician.
A few years later, Mat Vezio lived in Paris – a very significant period of his life. He had a small job as a sailor on a river boat when he received from a boss – who wanted to apologize for an episode of fury – an album that was to inspire him still today: Either/Or of the late Elliott Smith.
Upon his return to Montreal, Mat Vezio got serious about music. As a drummer or multi-instrumentalist, he has accompanied a host of artists, including Mille Monarques, L’Indice, Feathership, Laura Sauvage and Dany Placard.
I calculated that I recorded more than 60 albums as a drummer. But at some point, it wasn’t enough to express myself.
Mat Vezio
Mat Vezio then rented Navet Confit’s studio to see the potential of his own songs and he experienced a kind of catharsis.
His solo career then took off: under contract with Simone Records, he entrusted his friend Antoine Corriveau with the production of his first album, Before the death of the picked flowerswhich achieved critical acclaim when it was released in 2017.
According to Vezio, his first album was more rock, while the second, Guardrail – directed by Navet Confit – was more charming, with string arrangements by Guido Del Fabbro. “ bruise sky color is like a balance between the two”, indicates the one who signs the realization of his third opus.
Sing his melodies
The link with Jorane? Mat Vezio creates his melodies in a kind of vocal wanderings.
“I am an autodidact. When I write a song, I play two or three chords in a loop and I let go of my melody in a kind of invented language, he explains. It is afterwards that I put text on this phonetics. »
Unlike Jorane, Mat Vezio never dared to reveal his singing without words. However, he does it for the first time, but in a subtle way, on a song from his new album – the lightest of the lot – recorded with his friend Antoine Corriveau.
This instinctive way of composing no doubt explains Mat Vezio’s melodic flair, his uninhibited arrangements (strings, electro, piano) and the reason why he excels in the genre whose name he appropriated after launching it in quip: deep folk.
Before the pandemic, his pen also attracted the attention of a great French singer whose name we must keep silent. Their collaboration did not succeed, but Mat Vezio found that the three songs he had proposed to the star could constitute the theme of his third album.
“I had written a lot on the plane and there was the theme of bird migration,” he explains.
Calm his rage
Mat Vezio is interested in the loss of landmarks, the back and forth of memories and the need to settle down. In the song Molise – with exquisite new wave arrangements –, Mat Vezio evokes his immigrant grandparents who left him too soon and the lost link with his Italian origins.
On the guitar and voice piece albert, where Mat Vezio could go on the microphone for a Stéphane Lafleur, he is instead addressing his son. “If I ever leave faster than expected, hug your anger,” he sings to her.
Mat Vezio had the image of the “bruise sky color” while writing a novel – still in progress – in which he approaches the theme of domestic violence through the eyes of a child.
Mat Vezio has not experienced anything like this, but he saw the violence too closely – and with post-traumatic sequelae – when he foolishly wanted to recover the phone that two people had stolen from his friend.
Lost Rivera quiet eight-minute electro volcano in which rapper Fab (Random Recipe) shines, evokes the feeling of wanting to get out of an untenable situation with a thirst for revenge (in this case a rape in the song).
If deep folk by Mat Vezio sometimes comes from a certain rage and a dark side, know that hope is on the horizon in his songs.
Matt Vezio has the voice of a bird which feels free after flapping its wings, and which lands instinctively letting itself be carried away by the melody.
Mat Vezio is due to fly this Saturday to Belgium where he is to give shows. We wish him a good flight.