popwreckoning

With a band name derived from Chopin and songs inspired by the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Cameron Matthews is more than your average guy with a guitar. Though his true musical origins are a bit more humble than some of the biographies circulating on his web sites, the result is fairly epic: intelligent and refreshing songwriting from his band, Bear Ceuse.

Below, Matthews dishes on the challenges of being a rising Midwest musician and he describes the shape of indie rock music in a city known for its rappers. Read on.

Bethany, PopWreckoning: How are you today?
Cameron Matthews, Bear Ceuse: I’m good. It looks like you have a Kansas City number.
B: Yes. I’m in Lawrence, Kan.
CM: Cool. I like Kansas City and Lawrence very, very much. It’s my second home.
B: I have to admit that I don’t know St. Louis as well as I could living this close.
CM: Eh, there’s not much here.

B: Let’s start at the beginning. I was trying to do some research on you online, but there are mainly these “epic” background stories (in one story he went on a man journey in the wilderness in another EMTs saved him form the brink of death). What’s the true story?
CM: The true story?
B: Yeah. How did you really get involved with music? I’m assuming you are, in fact, from a small Missouri town and the flood of 93 probably did effect you.

CM: I am from Washington, Missouri, which is a town of about 13,000 people. I feel like the town was built around a Walmart and then people from outer laying towns just sort of started coming in and it got a little bigger. It’s still pretty small. There’s two high schools. I went to the Catholic school. I didn’t really get into music seriously until I got into college. I was very serious in high school, but I was a very different artist then. I wouldn’t classify myself as an artist then.
B: Like marching band stuff?
CM: I…I don’t even want to tell you my influences back then. It just makes me look bad, I swear. I was in a band that played around town a lot and played a lot of cover songs. We did a couple of really terrible originals. Basically, my motivation was to get paid and to show people that this is my job and this is what I do. I sort of got burned out on it after about two years. Once there were eight people in my band, I realized I was doing the wrong thing. I started focusing more on songwriting senior year of high school. I didn’t really want to go to college. I wanted to move to Nashville and pursue a career in music, but I”m really glad I didn’t do that because I didn’t know a goddamn thing. So I went to SLU. I graduated in three years. I work in a pizza place now. That’s my background story, sort of.

B: While at SLU, you entered an MTV competition.
CM: Yes.
B: And you won.
CM: Yes. When I was a freshman I entered the MTVU Best Music on Campus Competition and I got a call from this guy named Jeff at MTVU and he didn’t tell me I had won. He just wanted to know more information about me and he made me very nervous. I had never played that big of a show before. A week later, I found out that I had won. They flew me down to Austin and I opened for the Shins and a couple other bands. It was pretty awesome and pretty incredible.
B: Has that helped out with your music and launch your career? I know you’ve done a lot of college circuit showcases.
CM: Yeah. It, on a resume, musically, when trying to talk to people, it helps. But after I played the show, I didn’t play again for awhile. I sort of had a…not a writer’s block, but I went in a completely different direction. When I played that show, I played songs that I don’t even recognize anymore, but that I don’t even identify with anymore. I’m glad that happened that early in my career because I know I’m at a very different place right now and I’m at a different part of my life. I was kind of lost after I did the show because I had gone from playing little coffee shops a couple times a month to playing this giant showcase with the Shins. I didn’t know where to go then. After that I was a little upset because I felt like I had bolted myself too much in one direction and I wasn’t playing another show like that where I was playing with 5,000 people sitting in front of me. I just started focusing on school and I was doing the music thing, but decided to sort of take a break for awhile. By the time I was a junior…er a sophomore, actually, I started writing a new album and that summer we recorded it. The summer after we recorded that first EP, Bear Ceuse, that’s when I changed my name, etc, etc.

B: Where does the name Bear Ceuse come from?
CM: Berceuse is a French word for a night song or a lullaby. I thought it was funny. My girlfriend was flipping through one of her cello books and it was Chopin. Actually, a couple of different classical composers had different berceuse. It’s actually a style or a type of song. So I split the French word into two English words – ceuse being not English at all, but bear is. I thought it would be funny to make it my band’s name.
B: It fits well with the epic faux biography you have up on your site with the going into the wilderness with fish. It’s a better story then my guesses. I looked it up and all I could find was a small French town named Ceuse and I figured you did some study abroad.
CM: I’ve never studied abroad. I left the country only a few times and they were all when I was very young and don’t remember it. I barely know any French. I thought it was ironic. The people that know me think it is funny. I’m a goofball. I like to pretend certain things, but I”ll tell people like you the truth.

B: Thanks for the truth. You were an English major in college. Does that play into your songwriting process?
CM: It did for awhile. I was very focused on writing about literature for a long time and it still plays heavily in a couple different influences. I think that poetry, itself, is almost a higher art than music. Music, right now, can get bogged down by all these different types of aesthetics and poetry is very stripped down. Whenever you write a good poem, you know it. Whenever you read a good poem, you know it. There’s no hiding in poetry. I practiced and practiced poetry for a long and I became a student of poetry. I started with the beats with Kerouac and Ginsberg. I didn’t really like Ginsberg, but I liked William Carlos Williams. I started with exercises like that. I liked Ezra Pound and older stuff like John Dunne. I started compiling lots of poems by different people and studying them on my own and trying to relay them to songwriting. I think sonically that the sound of poems are very important. That’s the part I think I am good at. The words, the lyrics, of a poem, I’ll be working on my entire life. So yes, being an English major influenced me heavily.

B: So what are you working on right now? I know you’ve done several EPs. Some of which are still up for free download. Any plans for a full-length or tour plans?
CM: Currently, my bass player, Chris, he does all our recording. Anything that I’ve done in the past two or three years of good quality, he’s done. He just moved into a new house and we’re putting up sheet rock to sound proof a room in his house and start recording again. I don’t have any plans to record a full-length right now just because my first solo album that I did is 15 songs and it is all over the place. I realized what a band idea that was several months after I released it and I don’t think that a full-length is as important as it used to be. I’ll probably do a 9 or 10 song maximum from now on for albums because each song is supposed to convey an idea and each album is supposed to convey an overall idea and I’m just not good at that. I’m just not good at focusing, so the shorter amount on EPs that I release, anywhere from three to nine songs, I should be pretty good at honing in on what an EP is all about. That’s going to be model for awhile.

B: How about touring plans?
CM: We just played in New York at Arlene’s grocery and it went really well. We’ll probably start going to Chicago and Kansas City and Louisville and maybe Omaha within the next couple of months. We want to get out there and we just have enough money to go certain places once or twice a month. I don’t have a tour schedule or anything, but we will be making it to Kansas City and those other cities I just mentioned within the next couple of months.

B: I’m kind of dunce when it comes to St. Louis music. I know Nelly and now I know you are from there. What is considered more of the indie scene there? What are the indie venues?
CM: Ok. Here’s the thing about St. Louis music, and keep half of this…when I talk about “old people” keep it off the record because not everybody agrees with me on this, but if it sounds good, go ahead and use it. There’s a scene in town called the Chippewa Chapel crowd.  They’re all 35-60 years old. Maybe some of them are older. They sort of have a dominance over the town. They’ve been here for a very long time, they know everyone in local radio, they know everyone at the RFT–the Riverfront Times–who also own the Pitch in Kansas City. They’re both owned by the Village Voice. They have this little monopoly going on where they their own fanbase and they release their own records. Not all the records are good. It is hard to break into an “indie” scene in St. Louis because it doesn’t really exist for my age group. I’m 21 and when you are in a smaller town where there’s an older scene already established, you can’t break into it. There’s no possible way. There’s this weird competition between bands here to play venues. Indie venues include the Firebird, the Biliken club at SlU, Off Broadway, the Pageant which is like your guys’ Granada. Cicero’s is indie, but it’s not very cool. There’s a place called LEMP Art Center. It’s very different than any venue you could go to in St. Louis or anywhere in general. It’s kind of the birthplace of noise music. It’s kind of a sanctuary for indie rock and indie folk or anything weird that comes from all over the United States. It is a very little place and they sell nothing but tickets to the show. Sometimes very few people are there and sometimes the whole place is packed. It’s just this room where you go in and you play with one lamp on and it is incredible. I play my best shows there when I play acoustic. That’s the scene that I consider here. I could name drop a few artists?

B: Yeah. It would be cool to hear some of the younger artists’ names.
CM: There’s this girl here named Amanda Kofron who is one the best singers I’ve ever heard and maybe one of the best singers in this entire town. I can’t spell it, but she’s great. A folk-rustic sounding. We have a St. Louisian in Kansas City now named Matt Dill. Have you heard of him?
B: I don’t think I have.
CM: Matt Dill is one of the best artists I’ve ever heard. He got a bunch of St. Louis artists together and he booked at a little gelattoria that we all used to play at and then I took his job when he moved to Kansas City. We have a handful of people that will play the same shows here. Matt plays folk combined with experimental noise music. It’s so cool. His newest album called Lila Rasa, I’ve never really heard anything like it: the mixture is so cool. He’s on a collective label out of Chicago with another a Kansas City kid, Doby Watson. Have you heard of Doby?
B: No. Maybe I know more of the Lawrence kids.
CM: Manipulator Alligator? There’s a couple of them. They’re all really good. I love the Kansas City scene. I go there all the time because my girlfriend’s family is there. Kansas City’s cool. I’d love to do Lawrence more, but it is very difficult to play Lawrence. It looks like you need a label to play there for the venues I’ve looked up.
B: The clubs all have promoters they go through for booking.
CM: They’re real serious. I like that, but they’re not really taking a gamble on bands. They want to know for sure that they can bring out a crowd. Oh have you heard of the Radical Sons?
B: Yeah.
CM: Ben Goldstein plays with them and is from here. They live in New York now. My cousin, Nick, is the guitar player for the Radical Sons. Nick plays on the new Bear Ceuse EP, too. He’s all over that thing and is very good. Another band is Via Dove. Another is Art Majors. Also check out a very good friend of mine named Raphael Maurice, you can find him attached to the Bear Ceuse MySpace. He is a mixture of the Replacements, My Morning Jacket and Band of Horses and his own thing. He’s in a band called Miles of Wire that was popular in St. Louis a few years ago. He’s like the smartest person I’ve ever met and his music is phenomenal. So that’s the St. Louis scene.

B: Awesome. I have a lot of music to check out and catch up on. Well, let’s wrap it up here. Great answers. Thanks so much.
CM: Thank you.

Warning: Mayday Parade and The Dangerous Summer are two of my favorite bands. This story is about Mayday Parade’s headlining tour with opener *drum roll* The Dangerous Summer. I will try my best to remain unbiased. Keyword: “try.” That might explain why I drove eight hours round trip to see this show. To be completely honest though, the lineup was full of fun, upbeat bands that kept the crowd jumping and singing the whole night: City Lights, The Dangerous Summer, There for Tomorrow and Mayday Parade.

Openers City Lights had a short but solid set with songs reminiscent of fellow pop-punkers Every Avenue.

Next up was The Dangerous Summer, who’s 45 minute set was the standout performance of my night. In my opinion, The Dangerous Summer is one of the most underrated bands in the music industry today. They have some big shoes to fill, being compared to the likes of Jimmy Eat World and The Starting Line, and they fill them extremely well. The roughness of lead singer AJ Perdomo’s voice gives this epic band just enough edge to stand out from the crowd. With a strong debut EP entitled If You Could Only Keep Me Alive, the boys of The Dangerous Summer give listeners a fresh new sound that cause them to fall in love with music again. Their lyrics are so easily relatable that it’s easy to identify with each song individually. I still listen to at least one song from that EP everyday.

Needless to say, I was extremely excited to see them live for the first time and they did not disappoint. They are one of those bands that sound exactly the same live as they do on their albums. Unfortunately, the band stayed away from older territory and mainly stuck to songs from their newest release Where I Want to Be. It would have been nice to hear a few songs from the band’s beginning, but with a set list full of strong, catchy songs such as “Weathered,” title track “Where I Want To Be,” and my personal favorite “Northern Lights,” The Dangerous Summer got the crowd ready for the final two heavy hitters of the night, There for Tomorrow and Mayday Parade.

This might be a little hasty of me to say, but the crowd seemed to have been the most amped to hear There for Tomorrow over any of the other bands on the lineup. The energy in the room immediately exploded when they hit the stage. Playing favorites “Pages” and “Remember When,” the crowd energy was measurably heightened. The highlight of their set was a cover of “Ice Box,” originally performed by Omarion. It was such a great cover with all of their personal elements incorporated perfectly. Easily compared to My Chemical Romance’s style, There for Tomorrow took the audience through a whirlwind of rock with a hint of punk mixed in to prep the crowd for Mayday Parade to take the stage.

When Mayday started their set, the energy of lead singer Derek Sanders immediately matched the explosive energy of the crowd. It was hard not to dance and sing along with the band. Their set list included songs from each part of their musical history including “Jamie All Over,” “Kids In Love,” and always the crowd preferred ode to heartbreak, “Miserable at Best.” What really surprised me was that they played “You Be The Anchor…” To me that song has always been Mayday’s version of Something Corporate’s “Konstantine” because it has always been revered as an epic song, but never got the outward exposure. Hearing that was definitely the highlight of the night for me.

It was great to hear that Mayday had kept the same style and vibe that they had always had in the past. They delivered a great set of pop-punk, catchy tunes that has proven to remain constant over the years. I remember reading an interview Mayday did awhile back about the production of their newest full length album, Anywhere but Here. The one thing that stuck out to me the most was their statement that this album would not really be too different than their highly popular full length debut, A Lesson in Romantics. I was extremely excited about this, as I am a huge fan of that album. I was a little worried that with the departure of Jason Lancaster the band’s style would change as well. For anyone that has listened to Anywhere But Here, it is apparent that the band still has the same fun/catchy/pop-punk sound. For once, a band held true to the music they love to play and didn’t get caught up in all the politics of fame. I have never really understood why a band feels that they need to change their image/sound on every album. Why try and fix something that isn’t broken, right? Mayday displayed their talent on A Lesson in Romantics and continue to do so on Anywhere But Here.

With such a diverse and solid group of bands on this tour, the crowd enjoyed a night of catchy, dance-worthy music. It was definitely one of my favorite shows of 2009 and I can’t wait to see what these awesome bands have in store for 2010.

Growing up on the western side of the great state of Missouri, I developed a bit of Midwest snobbery in which I assumed it was a fact that Kansas City was the only good thing in Missouri and the rest of the state was irrelevant. So as my music passion mixed with this prejudice, I fell in love with up and coming artists from Kansas City and even Lawrence, while neglecting St. Louis’ music scene. I even assumed that St. Louis only produced rap and hip hop artists, thus fueling my neglect of the city’s music. What a mistake that was!

I learned my lesson when Bear Ceuse came across my inbox. Bear Ceuse is Cameron Matthews, a St. Louis kid that recently won MTVU’s Best Music on Campus, and two friends on guitar and drums. It is shoegazey, but not so overly fuzzed out that his lyrics are completely lost. Matthews has a bit of a twang, but not that overly vibrato twang of country artists, but the kind of twang that gives a guy like Jim James his air of mysteriousness. I’d start out with a song like “American Wit” to get a sense of his vocal stylings.

Though Bear Ceuse is a young artist group, the music shows a lyrical and constructional maturity. At times he seems as if this is the male answer to Camera Obscura, but chorus crescendos in tunes such as “Vodka Day Parade” prove them to be more bold than the carefully restrained Glasgow group. Instrumentally, the guitars waver from intensely loud riffs to slowly plucked accompaniment that lets each note resonate until it fades to silence.

The best part about Bear Ceuse is that you don’t have to take my word that the group is good. You can check them out risk-free by downloading their EP from their site for free. You just have to sign up for their mailing list.

Bear Ceuse: website | myspace

After rescheduling and a shuffling of the original lineup (Weezer, Taking Back Sunday and Chester French out, The Academy Is… and Fall Out Boy in) Blink-182 took the stage on a chilly evening in St. Louis to thousands of screaming fans and filled the evening with their catalogue of hits and humor.

Blink-182: website | myspace