Matt Keating

New York-based singer/songwriter Matt Keating cultivated a modest cult following throughout the middle and later years of the 1990s. Despite steady activity, the understated artist never reached a broader listenership, leaving his buoyant Americana-inflected daydreams and power-pop releases eclipsed by those of kindred iconoclasts such as Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters, Elliott Smith, and Richard Buckner. More than ten years afterward he still draws limited recognition, though he persists in composing, tracking, and playing live.

Keating first took up piano and guitar during childhood in the Boston, MA, region. By the mid-'80s he earned his living exclusively as a pianist at a Boston club widely known as a Mafia-run establishment. He also collaborated with several area rock outfits, Circle Sky among them, before departing to pursue solo work. Relocating to New York City, he busked on street corners and subway platforms while appearing at open-mike nights. His demos eventually reached the Burbank-based Alias label, which offered him a recording contract. The resulting debut, Tell It to Yourself, arrived in 1993; Keating himself produced and engineered the sessions at Brooklyn's Fireproof Studios, a spacious facility housed in a converted 1870s firehouse.

He maintained Fireproof as his primary studio, issuing new material almost annually and steadily expanding his audience. The EP Satan Sings appeared in 1994, followed by the full-length sophomore effort Scaryarea in 1995. In 1996 he recorded the Candy Valentine EP, which introduced the original version of "That Kind of Girl" later covered by Mary Lou Lord. The more widely praised Killjoy surfaced in 1997. After an extended hiatus, Keating arranged in 2001 to release his next album, Tilt a Whirl, through Alan McGee's Poptones imprint while simultaneously issuing it domestically on his own label. The record emerged in 2003, prompting further sessions the next year that yielded Summer Tonight, released in 2006. Quixotic appeared two years afterward.