Matt Borghi

Songs, soundscapes, and improvisations for deep listening.

Tag: songs

Matt Borghi - The Reach

New Song Release – The Reach

October 11, 2026 / / 0 Comments

The Reach

Matt Borghi - The Reach

Release date: 10/11/2026

The story behind the song:

The Reach is an interesting tune for me. I originally wrote the lyrics separate from the music as I was laying in bed watching lightning from a distant summer storm and listening to the distant thunder. As is often the case with the bits I write just before I fall asleep, I wrote down the lines and set them aside and drifted into the land of nod. Several hours later, I was awakened with a start as a giant bolt of lightning flashed very nearby followed by an immediate and continuous visceral cracking of a large hundred-year old maple tree falling… and falling… and falling… a continuous, deep cracking that seemed to last for minutes. In my sleepy adrenalized state, I was sure that the tree was going to come through the roof. Before my feet could hit the floor, the power was out and the pitch of night was consumed by a deluge of rain. Daylight came. Damage was assessed. A symphony of chainsaws and generators played in the morning sunlight; a common morning program following a grand Michigan summer storm. Power was restored rather quickly and as I retreated to my studio, I recalled the words I had written the night before and put them to a guitar piece that came to me almost as soon as I sat down. You never know when the muse is going to strike. I recorded it immediately; this is that recording.

The Reach – Lyrics

Night rains move across the darkness.
Lightning illuminates the treetops above
Shades of grey move slowly across the dark sky.
With an imperfect stillness I know your love

It’s a lonesome sound, moving on.
It’s a lonesome feeling, moving away.
Rain slows and distant thunder rolls
I’ve reached the end of this day. 

Silhouettes of trees frame the western sky.
A distant freight train blows its horn.
I lay here thinking about tomorrow and yesterday
And all the todays before I was born

It’s a lonesome sound, moving on.
It’s a lonesome feeling, moving away.
Rain slows and distant thunder rolls
I’ve reached the end of this day. 

It’s a lonesome sound, moving on.
It’s a lonesome feeling, moving away.
Rain slows and distant thunder rolls
I’ve reached the end of this day.

 

Songs… An Invitation to Deep Listening

July 21, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been quite inspired with the songwriting aspect of my work for the last couple weeks. Towards a Western Sky, while a bit of a sleeper amongst my soundscape work, was a pivotal release for me in many ways, something that I’ve been reflecting on recently. 

When I started making ambient and soundscapes 30 years ago I came at things as a singer/songwriter/guitar player. As I explored soundscapes and moved to computers, synthesizers and sound processing I would often wonder: What if I could bring about these sound worlds, these portals to deep listening with a basic augmentation to my singer/songwriter guitar set up. I explored this in parallel to my soundscape work for years and pursued many experiments to try and make it work.

I got close a few times.

Mostly it never worked until one day when I realized that it wasn’t about songs and songwriting as much as it was about textures of the guitar, voice, words, rhythm, nuance, timbre and color. The sonic palette is much more rudimentary, guitar, voice, words vs. the wide stereo of synthesized soundscapes, kind of like comparing a black and white photo to a high resolution color photo; different perhaps, but the essence is the same.

As I work on the new songs, I encourage my listeners to forget about “songs”, as the pervasive ear worms that invade our thoughts or become sonic bookmarks of our lives and rather think of them as sonic vignettes on the other side of the spectrum from the longform soundscape. Each of them is an invitation to deep listening. Start here: https://mattborghi.bandcamp.com/album/toward-the-western-sky

Matt Borghi Toward the Western Sky

Matt Borghi – Toward the Western Sky Release Announcement

December 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Matt Borghi Toward the Western Sky

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. 

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