Matt Hansen usually begins his mornings at home in Los Angeles. He goes outside and enjoys nature (he loves to surf), and he might even try his luck at a puzzle. Maybe he’ll think about journaling but decide against it. “I tried to do the journal thing,” he reveals to Melodic Magazine over a Zoom call. “But the problem was, I couldn’t read my own handwriting.”
Calling in from home, Hansen has had plenty on his mind these days with his debut album Orchid set to release May 15. Lately, he’s been splitting time between the studio and gearing up for his Summerfest performance this spring.
Revisiting journaling seems like the logical step to try and slow things down, but for Hansen, it’s hardly a priority. Instead, he’s spent the past four years spilling moments of his life experience into his music, steadily and slowly, and a bit of lyrical vulnerability calling the journey “weirdly therapeutic.”
That exact vulnerability of documenting his everyday life is part of what’s made his music resonate so widely. He has surpassed the billion stream mark on Spotify, with his album’s lead single “SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN” sitting comfortably at 5.5 million streams. Not to mention his Instagram or TikTok, which is frequently home to videos of Hansen showcasing his powerful vocals while outdoors. An avid lover of the wilderness and national parks, his song “yellowstone (holding you)” has earned 43.9 million streams on Spotify alone.
Hansen has always had a passion and appreciation for music. His musical endeavors began as covers of his favorite songs, and has turned into something he can call his very own. Using a record-label internship experience to help him further his independent career, the transition from being known for his cover artistry to independent musician took a year and a half.
His desire to be known for his own music, rather than just covers, is something that has motivated him to keep going. “[While interning at a record label,] I basically learned how they work. What the label’s looking for and what they’re trying to do. I got to see ‘how the sausage was made,'” Hansen shares. “At the end of the day, what I kind of noticed early on in all the label conversations was they want me to do the same thing that I want to do for myself.”
This pushed Hansen to double down on his independence. “The hardest part about this has been being able to go outside of my creative brain,” he explains. “Go outside of ‘Matt Hansen the artist’ and the creative part and the songwriting…and be like an A & R of the Matt Hanson label, right? ‘How do we promote this?’ ‘How do we do that?’ That is a part of the job now.”
Still, it’s a responsibility he doesn’t take lightly. “You have to know your project in and out. And you have to be the marketing specialist. Otherwise, no one’s gonna understand what you’re trying to say,” he says.
In the same way his journal once felt unusable because he couldn’t read it back, if the message isn’t accessible, the story won’t land. “I know my project very well, and I know how to make my music, and I know how to market it,” Hansen says.
When writing music, Matt Hansen is often drawn to sounds before lyrics (with a little help from his morningtime habit of spinning ambient Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins records), he starts with a feeling first. But his sonic world is shaped by a wide range of influences. Bon Iver’s sonic atmosphere, Fleetwood Mac and Coldplay’s melodies, the lyrical intimacy of Lizzy McAlpine and Holly Humberstone all serve as reference points. “A lot of my emotion comes from sound, rather than lyrics. I have always been drawn to sounds more than words,” he shares. “I’m always making the chords and making the vibe and making how it feels first. And then, based off of that, I get a very specific feeling, and I’m like, ‘I know what this song is about.'”
“I don’t tend to write poetry first or have that story ready,” he adds. “I can recognize those feelings a little bit better through the music…”
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