Matt Hales
Matt Hales
Aqualung
"Music can be an amazingly potent thing," says Matt Hales, aka Aqualung. "When I sing into the microphone in the studio, I'm whispering my secrets in people's ears. When it connects, it can be so powerful. It's still a remarkable process to me."
Matt began writing songs at the age of four and won a music scholarship at 16, and soon saw his classical symphony Life Cycle performed by a 60–piece orchestra. He later achieved a modicum of U.K. notoriety with a pair of British rock combos, Ruth and The 45's, but eventually grew weary of band life. Hales began recording as Aqualung in 2002, and achieved some unexpected early success when his demo of the song "Strange and Beautiful" appeared in a Volkswagen TV commercial and immediately struck a chord with listeners. That fluke occurrence turned Aqualung from a modest lo–fi bedroom recording project into a successful major–label act.
His first two U.K. albums, Aqualung and Still Life were combined to create Aqualung's first U.S. release Strange and Beautiful, which became a substantial stateside hit.
Meanwhile, Matt demonstrated the flexibility of his songcraft by presenting his music in a variety of live formats, from solo piano performances to gigs with a four–piece band to concerts with a 17–person ensemble. The conflicting emotions generated by his unexpected mainstream success were reflected in 2007's Memory Man, a densely packed, largely electronic meditation on the disconnection and dislocation that he was feeling at the time. Those emotions left the lifelong musician and songwriter unsure of whether he wanted to continue as a recording artist.
"I felt like I was completely done, and like I had to stop. So I came home and hung out with my family and got busy producing and writing for other people, and had a think about what I might do next. But then I started to write some songs, and I eventually came back to realizing how much I would miss it if I gave it up. I realized that I just had to find a way to carry on, but on my own terms."
Eventually, Matt and his brother Ben began cutting unfussed, stripped–down recordings in his home studio, with little thought of releasing them to the public. The almost–accidental nature of 2008's Words and Music's birth cycle is consistent with the unpremeditated manner in which Aqualung first came into being, and Matt was happy to be returning to his D.I.Y. roots.
His songs have been used in multiple television shows such as Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, The O.C., Grey's Anatomy, Scrubs, CSI: Miami, Cold Case, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Skins, and Brothers and Sisters.
Matt's newly released Magnetic North is his first album of all new material since he relocated from England to sunny Los Angeles. He wrote the 12 songs with his usual collaborators — his wife and his brother, Ben, but also worked with a few special co-writers, including Scottish band Blue Nile's legendary Paul Buchanan (on "36 Hours"). "If you want to know why I make the music I do, it has a lot to do with Blue Nile," Matt says. "The fact that we've become friends is a magical thing."
Matt Hales Official Website