I’ve been thinking about Matthew Sweet for the first time in a long time recently. For those unfamiliar with him — and, to be brutally honest, I’m not sure why anyone should be that familiar with him these days — he was a leading light of the Power Pop movement in the 1990s, with a nigh-unbeatable string of albums that were laden with hooks, riffs and his unfortunately nasal voice, and at the time, I was very much a fan.
From Girlfriend through, say, Blue Sky on Mars — that’s 1991 through 1997 for those of you keeping track of how time actually works — Sweet was one of the guiding lights of my musical tastes. It was the Britpop era, and in many ways, Sweet was the U.S. version of that, borrowing just as liberally from the 1960s British pop scene as an Oasis or a Menswear, and then choosing to do slightly other things with the fruits of his thievery, which also included American influences like Buffalo Springfield or the Beach Boys.
Despite how much his tastes and intent echoed the then-dominant music trends, there was something about Matthew Sweet’s output that felt “uncool” at a time when I actually cared about such things. I remember friends making fun of me for being into him, and me feeling a very stupid sense of shame as a result. (I was young, I didn’t know any better.) This didn’t actually make me like his music any less; it just made me listen to it on my own, far from judging ears.
Sweet didn’t stop making music after Blue Sky on Mars; he even had an album out a couple years later, called In Reverse. It’s simply that something had changed in that intervening period; maybe it was him, maybe me, or perhaps a mix of both, but I was bored of that album and what felt like his shift towards mid-tempo mediocrity. I tried to get into it over and over again, but my tastes had moved on to stranger things — 1997, when Blue Sky on Mars came out, was also the year I got into Super Furry Animals, David Holmes and Primal Scream, and followed their influences outwards — so, by 1999, I wanted more than what sounded increasingly like the Eagles.
Now, more than two decades later, I find myself wanting to revisit all of the stuff I loved before, and the stuff I didn’t back then, to see if my own aging process has softened my opinions, or if I’ll be disappointed by my younger self. Just how strong a drug is nostalgia, anyway…?