and trying to
work on [the album], and now
it’s done I’m just washing some
cups!”B
ack in l.a., matt
Corby is standing on-
stage, lit only by a faint
white backlight. Dressed uni-
formly in black, he begins
the show alone, hypnotical-
ly building the acapella vocal
loops of opener “Monday”. One
of the key songs on Telluric,
earlier in the afternoon he re-
ferred to it as a “purging...
this is where I’m at as a person”.
Featuring the lyrics “No bible
no more/I don’t know faith like
I did before/I gave it enough/I
saw the fallen white doors”, the
song addresses in part his leav-
ing the church at the age of 17.
Raised in a religious house-
hold, when the congregation
he joined post-Idol started to
exploit his image, alarm bells
started to ring: “At that point I
was like, fuck you guys.”
Disillusioned, he start-
ed asking questions of him-self and his beliefs, and came
to the conclusion that “I’ve
been duped”. Suddenly his
world opened up. Though
conscious of not wanting to
“bash” religion (“I don’t want
to take it away from anyone,
it’s just not really my thing”),
he does admit that “when
you’re brought up in that kind
of Christian environment it’s
like everything exterior to the
church is the devil. And so you
can’t engage with reality, you
can’t be inquisitive and you
can’t get to the bottom of why
we do this. It was a real turn-
ing point in my life.”
By the time he was 20 he
was reading books on philoso-
phy and neuro science, the lat-
ter because he wanted to know
how the brain functions, partly
because of his experiences with
depression and anxiety. “Peo-
ple have said I have depres-
sion before, especially when I
was younger,” he of ers. “Peo-
ple were like, you should real-
ly go see someone. But I just
thought, no, I’m pretty sure
the human brain is capable of
so much more than what I’mbeing told I’m capable of. When
people say you need help it’s
like, do I? With what? And if
you could just tell me what I
need help with, couldn’t I just
go and work on it myself?”
His search for self led him to
spiritual authors such as Eck-
hart Tolle, and to experiment-
ing with magic mushrooms:
“You take mushrooms and then
you go, I have no problems,” he
explains. “I am an ant walking
around this planet in a speck
in the middle of nowhere. And
that’s the truth, it’s all we are.”
“I think he’s put time and
effort into finding who he is
in the world,” ref lects Dann
Hume. “Which is not some-
thing everyone has to do, but
for where he was at he had to
do it, and I think he got a lot
out of it.”
When Corby walks of stage
at the Teragram Ballroom a lit-
tle over an hour after the show
began, he does so to cries of
“Corby! Corby!” After a few
minutes it becomes clear there
will be no encore – possibly be-
cause bassist T-Bone is throw-
ing up out the back, the victimof a nasty bit of food poisoning- so the crowd slowly fi lters out
past the merch stand and into
the cool L.A. evening. One fan,
Abbey Ramsey, 20, fi rst heard
of Corby via YouTube, and says
she burst into tears tonight
during “Runaway”. “For four
years I’ve been following him,”
she gushes, “and I was actual-
ly thinking about going to Aus-
tralia to see him live, because
his music helped me through
such an intense time of my life
that I just had to see him.”
Nearby, Jill Johnson is
clutching a signed seven-inch
single of “Monday”, which
Corby asked his tour manag-
er to give her after seeing her
in the front row singing every
word. She didn’t get to meet
him, but you sense this ges-
ture alone will be enough to
make the return journey to
Utah seem a little easier. Be-
fore she leaves, she has a mes-
sage she wants me to pass on:
“Tell Matt that what he does is
important.”
I do. And fi nally, and with-
out qualifi cation, Matt Corby
smiles.
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104MATT CORBY[Cont. from 55]