Announcing my new ‘songs’ recording, Towards the Western Sky. It’s naked and stripped down; there are no big ambient textures or dense guitar drones supporting the melody or a voice buried somewhere in the mix, rather this recording is a folk recording, the songs taken down to their most basic essence: Guitar and voice. Get it here on Bandcamp for free/name your price.
I’ve recorded and released some of these songs before, but I had always wanted to do stripped down ‘folk’ versions of the tunes. Until now, and probably now, too, I’ve lacked the confidence to put these songs out there in that way, whether as the singer or the songwriter, probably both, I hid behind big production burying the tunes.
As I’m sure you’ve gathered, this is a very different recording, one that I’ve tried to record a hundred times over the course of the last twenty years, beginning around 2003. Hell, if I’m honest, I began making this recording with my first recording session and my first studio-recorded song in 1994, but I wasn’t very good and the song wasn’t very good either, but it was a start and through ten thousand start-stops, a lifetime, here I am releasing a recording that serves as a snapshot of my songwriting work, a collection that’s well into the hundreds at this point.
Folk songs are known for covering some dark territory, the yearning of the human spirit, the struggle of the human condition and everything in between. I’ve alluded to these subjects in abstract and poetic longform titles, but here they’re delivered by me without pretense and with a rawness that oftentimes has been too precious to for me to share; there’s a darkness, always just beyond on the edges – with these recordings, I try to tame it.
There are light moments in this recording, too, because after all, life is a balance and I’ve tried to embody that balance in this recording. To be sure, this isn’t an ambient or a drone recording, some of the songs on ‘Toward the Western Sky’ are thirty years old and some, barely thirty days old, but they all have something about them that begged inclusion in this humble collection of songs from a middle-aged Michigan songwriter fumbling towards self-actualization through song and story. Again, you can get it here on Bandcamp for free/name your price.
I hope you enjoy it!
-Matt
Mini bio –
Matt Borghi is a Michigan-based singer/songwriter fumbling towards self-actualization through sound, story and song. Matt is also a founding member of The Deadly String Band, an East Lansing-based Grateful Dead and Dead-adjacent cover band who approach the the music as an acoustic old time string band covering the whole of the Grateful Dead’s song catalog as well as their influences, including tunes from the old time blues, folk and bluegrass songbook.
