By Blake Maddux

The alternative rock/power pop singer-songwriter and musician was slowed down during the Covid years — but now he is back.

On September 16, 2017, I saw Tommy Keene and Matthew Sweet (click for my Arts Fuse interviews). This would be my last concert for a while, as my wife gave birth to our twins three days later.

Sadly, it would be the last time that I ever would see Tommy Keene, who died on November 22 of that year.

Needless to say, I and all who were there — on stage or in the crowd — have some emotions about that show.

Now, six-and-a-half years after that unforgettable night, Matthew Sweet is back on the road. He doesn’t have any new songs to show off, but a July 4, 1993, concert at Chicago’s Grant Park was recently unearthed and is available for streaming.

But who needs new material when one already has all of the perennially fresh stuff that he does?

What follows is excerpted from the phone interview that he and I recently did ahead of his April 15 gig at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre with Abe Partridge (Doors at 6:30 p.m./show at 7:30 p.m $27-$37). One surprise that he revealed was that his usual drummer, Ric Menck (click for my 2019 Somerville Times interview), couldn’t tour this February or April, so Debbie Peterson of The Bangles will be keeping the beat on these dates.

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The Arts Fuse: Did anything specific prompt you to make the return to touring after the past five years that included the intervening pandemic?

Matthew Sweet: I had some health issues during the Covid years. That was kind of slowing me down. Plus, my manager, Russell [Carter] manages Indigo Girls, and they tried to tour as quickly after the pandemic as they could. And I watched as someone would get Covid and they’d have to cancel everything and have to reschedule. I was also just worried that it might, you know, kill me or something. At any rate, I meant to be touring about a year ago, and was just slow to get it together. And there are more people trying to tour now than I ever remember. So we decided to wait until spring.

But in January, I went to a songwriting festival in Florida, also run by my manager, called 30A. That was really my birth by fire of playing and singing for the first time in so long. It was a huge relief to know that I could do it before getting the band together and going out.

AF: What prompted the release of the 1993 Grant Park concert?

MS: I wasn’t really that involved in it. My manager Russell and Adrian Carter, who plays acoustic guitar in my band and sings some extra high notes, kinda knew about that concert. They finally found the guy who had the truck and recorded it, so they were able to get the actual, real recording.

It’s kind of an interesting show to put out because it’s an interesting group that we had in the band at that time. Will Rigby from The dB’s is a really interesting left-handed drummer. Richard Lloyd was with us on that tour, so it was great that he was at that show. And it was a really big show that was just kind of overwhelmingly huge, the amount of people. [Sweet, Rigby, and Lloyd all appear on The Salt Collective’s 2023 release Life, which I wrote about here.]

And then the newspaper had a headline that was “The Pope, The Bulls, and Matthew Sweet.” I was theoretically raised Catholic, so being able to show my mom me and the Pope in the same headline was really great. [Pope John Paul II had apparently been in Chicago around the time of the show, but I cannot seem to be able to confirm that or find details.]

AF: The setlist includes nine selections from Altered Beast, which was released nine days later on July 13. What was it like to play so many songs that hadn’t been heard yet? Was the audience’s response reassuring?

MS: That’s crazy because I would never do that now. I have no memory of that. I had no idea whether people would like Altered Beast or not, and I thought very little about making it palatable. We knew it was coming out, so we probably learned the songs because of that. And it was probably just incidental that we were playing them at that show. I wouldn’t usually try to put a whole lot of a new album in a set because as a fan, I like to hear what I want to hear. But at that time, I was known for only one album, so I had to round out the set.

AF: In our 2017 interview, I “asked” you, “Fill in the blank: I wish that I were half the singer-songwriter that _________ is.” Your answer was John Lennon. How did you choose his “Crippled Inside” as one of the songs that you covered during this live performance?

MS: I’m bipolar, my mother was severely bipolar and not treated, and I went a long time before I got treated for it. Altered Beast is such a reflection of being bipolar, but I hadn’t really come to terms with my bipolar problems.

“Crippled Inside” is a song about how we all might have things inside us that don’t even show but that cripple us. So it’s interesting to me having this conversation about it, because [performing that song] also is kind of a huge flag about my bipolarness.

Later in the touring for Altered Beast, I started to have these sort of mini-nervous breakdowns based around flying. I just developed a super severe fear of flying. So we decided that I wasn’t going to fly at all for a while. Starting right then, I went for eight years without flying. Then they got me to get on a plane with Brian Wilson from L.A. to go to New York for a Letterman show for a tribute to Brian at Radio City Music Hall. I said sure, because I looked at it like I would be the Big Bopper with Buddy Holly if something goes wrong with the plane. And that’s worth dying for, to have Brian Wilson’s name next to mine!

AF: How is the new material coming along?

MS: New material is coming along well. I haven’t started doing any recording, which is kind of different for me. I decided to wait until I had all the songs done before I record. I’m sure by the end of the year, I’ll have plenty to make an album, and then it won’t take that long because it will kind of all be done already.

It’s possible that it could all be done this year, but it all depends on what happens with the tour. We had these really good sold-out shows last month, and that begat more good offers and bookings elsewhere, and now we’re doing a longer tour in April that takes us to the Northeast. We’re supposed to go toward the South later in the summer, so I’m just assume that we’ll tour into the fall, but I don’t really know. If we don’t, then I’ll probably work on the record then.

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Blake Maddux is a freelance journalist who regularly contributes to the Arts Fuse, Somerville Times, and Beverly Citizen. He has also written for DigBoston, the ARTery, Lynn Happens, the Providence Journal, The Onion’s A.V. Club, and the Columbus Dispatch. A native Ohioan, he moved to Boston in 2002 and currently lives with his wife and six-year-old twins — Elliot Samuel and Xander Jackson — in Salem, MA.