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.
