The name Matt Farley might not be familiar but his work certainly is. With over 24,000 songwriting credits under his belt it’s hard not to have encountered his work in some capacity. Maybe you stumbled across the song he wrote about your favorite celebrity as Papa Razzi and the Photogs, or the song he did about your home town. Here, you’ve likely only scratched the surface of his output. In addition to the dozens of projects devoted to jokey songs about names, cities, and more, he also has a vast discography of what he calls “No Jokes Albums”. These are records with more collaborators and care put into the songwriting, while still retaining Farley’s trademark charm.
Farley started releasing music in the early 2000s with his college friend Tom Scalzo under the name Moes Haven. Alongside his musical career Farley also makes films with his friend Charlie Roxburgh, including Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You and Magic Spot. The films have enjoyed growing popularity in online movie circles. There’s always something going on in the world of Matt Farley.
For the past eight summers Farley has held an annual Motern Extravaganza, a weekend of festivities geared toward his passionate fanbase. It includes a film screening on Friday, a five hour concert Saturday night, and closes with a fan meetup in Massachusetts on Sunday morning. Ahead of the Friday night screening, KRUI’s Harry Westergaard with Jack Carpenter sat down with Matt for a quick interview.
Harry Westergaard: This might seem a little tangential, but I’ve been listening to the early Beach Boys records again and it’s been reminding me a lot of Moes Haven because they’re these-
Matt Farley: Novelty songs?
HW: Yeah, they’re these novelty songs that are a minute and a half but they’re also about just everyday things. I guess from that I was curious what some of your inspirations were growing up musically.
MF: Well starting off with the Beach Boys, my favorite Beach Boys album is Beach Boys Love You which is really out there and wild. Specifically this song called “Johnny Carson” where they just sing about how great Johnny Carson is and basically I took that template times 3,000 celebrities to the point where I’ve sung about every celebrity.
HW: The lyrics to “Johnny Carson” aren’t that different from your typical Papa Razzi song.
MF: I know! Absolutely! I was like Brian Wilson is a genius so I’m going to up him 3,000 but unfortunately I was most inspired by what most people consider to be his worst material. You know, people don’t like Love You, so that was perhaps a bad idea, but it’s also funny to take the least respected Beach Boys album and to base your entire career on that.
HW: Or “Lenny Bruce” by Bob Dylan.
MF: Bob Dylan’s “Lenny Bruce”! Yeah! I love middle school or even sub-middle school level poetry sung by rock legends about pop culture icons.
HW: You even get sub-middle school level lyrics on some of the non-celebrity songs on those records, like “Watered-Down Love” on Shot of Love.
MF: So Good! But the thing is, I don’t know what Dylan was thinking when he wrote “Watered-Down Love”. I think he was just thinking, “I’m just writing a song and who cares,” for the most part and “Watered-Down Love” is great honestly.
HW: In retrospect we’ve gotten a lot of the fruits of Dylan’s creativity that he may not have released with the bootleg series and stuff, but I love that your approach has always been to just release it all. There are Moes Haven bootlegs, but for the most part you’ve just put everything out there.
MF: Since Moes Haven I’d say 99.9% of anything I’ve ever recorded has been released. Even from the Moes Haven days, it’s probably 500 unreleased tracks still.
HW: Is that from the year when you recorded every day?
MF: Yeah, and a lot of that stuff even by my standards I’m like, “Sorry I can’t release that to the world.”
HW: For some of our readers who aren’t as versed on Matt Farley lore could you tell us about the Moes Haven project where you recorded an album every month of the year?
MF: Tom and I were always about, prolificity. Is that a word? Well, it is now. We were very into being prolific and we were also very into one upping each other with ideas. We’d done the 24 hour album in 2002. No explanation needed, it’s a 24 hour album. Then a few years later I was talking to Pete, the bass player and actor who has collaborated with us forever about how Tom and I come up with ideas, and then I was like, “You know we might do an album a day.” Then I was like “Uh oh, whoops, that’s a good idea.” Then I immediately called Tom and he was in. So then for ‘06, we made 30 minutes of music every day and we’d released the best songs from each month on an album named after that month.
HW: That’s impressive.
MF: No one was listening too, I should say. Still not many people are listening, but no one was listening back then.
HW: It’s impressive how well some of those records hang together, especially March and December.
Jack Carpenter: I know you’re saying no one was listening at the time, so I was wondering where would you find motivation to keep doing it. Is it just for the love of the game?
MF: It was for the love of the game and the potentially delusional belief that someone will listen someday. I was just like, “This is good. I’m sure it’s good. We gotta keep doing this and it’s my duty to keep making it, and get it to as many people as possible because it is good.” So, despite the incredible lack of popularity I still had the confidence. We have a song that Tom wrote where the line is, “If the world doesn’t seem to care about our plans, give them time and they will understand,” and that has been our motto ever since because we still aren’t in the zeitgeist, yet!
HW: Just wait when Evil Puddle comes out…
MF: It’ll change everything!
HW: If you’re doing a project that ambitious too you have to think that even if nobody is paying attention when you’re making it, someone will be like, “Wow! They recorded 30 minutes of music every day and released an album for each month!”
MF: If you see a documentary about a scene, like Austin in the 1980s, or anywhere in any era. If you actually lived there during that time you’d be like that’s just a few people doing a thing, but you add the passage of time to it and it becomes revered by people and so I was like, “Why not us?” So I’m trying to make it seem like it was an exciting to be in Manchester, New Hampshire in 2006. It wasn’t but for the sake of promotion I’m going to pretend it was.
HW: We need a documentary with you, Pete and Tom as talking heads like the Elephant 6 thing that came out.
MF: Well, we’re making it right now! (Note: Matt is referring to the person recording coverage of our interview, who has been lingering around the festival gathering material for an upcoming film.)
HW: I was reading the Motern on Motern book, and in Tom’s interview he talks about how at least on his end there was an experimental energy to those early Moes Haven records. I’m thinking of the sound collage or electronic songs, there’s some of that on Explorations in Madness.
MF: Yes especially early on, like you said, Explorations in Madness, with a song like “Welcome to Hell” or “1984”. We definitely had a Pink Floyd vibe early on but as we went forward we leaned more toward folk it seems.
HW: I like “Break It on March of the Aliens”, a really electronic inspired song. I feel like people think that being as prolific as you are, and being experimental are mutually exclusive, especially when you are doing such silly songs.
MF: It’s quite the opposite because being prolific frees you to do as many wacky or strange or bizarre or out there things as you want because if it doesn’t work out, we’re gonna write another song in an hour. It frees you up to go wild. Same with the movies too. We ask, “What if we made a whole movie where Farley talks in a weird voice as Boston Johnny.” Now we know.
HW: In recent years, at least on social media, you’ve started differentiating between Joke and No Joke songs, but listening to those Moes Haven records you’re doing both things often in a single song or an album. I’m curious when you came up with that distinction.
MF: Early on with Tom, we couldn’t stop writing joke songs. Slowly over the course of the years that we wrote songs together I think we got to the point where you couldn’t tell anymore. It’s kinda funny but it’s also kinda deep. Or it’s kinda deep but it has a few funny lines. That was the dream, to create this work of art where you can listen to it once and laugh or listen to it another time and cry. Then I had a major regression when I started doing pure novelty songs like the Toilet Bowl Cleaners and whatnot. Moes Haven kinda stopped around ‘07, ‘08. We only had one album after that.
So it was total regression, but a conscious one. I was just like, “Well people seem to like “Shut Up Your Monkey” so I’m just gonna give the people what they want.” Then 20,000 songs later we started doing the No Jokes songs again. So, I think Big Heist, Finklestinks, Brennan McFarley, and Projection From the Side dabble in the same waters as the best Moes Haven stuff does. It’s poetic and serious but also has some of that Tom Waits type weirdness that we like. I just get written off a lot as a hack and a spammer, so I just need to explain to people that there’s more to me. I was like, “Look there’s No Jokes songs.” Don’t be afraid, a man can write something vulgar and then a masterpiece work of poetry.
HW: I’m curious because I know the timeline of Moes Haven and some of the later no jokes songs, but what was the first music you made that was purely comedic in that Toilet Bowl Cleaners vein.
MF: I think it was the first Papa Razzi and the Photogs album called Dream Girls from ‘07 and also that year I did a Boston Red Sox album called Go Red Sox! Those were the first two where I dipped my toe into the theory of if I made a bunch of them I could make a living doing music. They were successful enough that I just started doing them hardcore a couple months later.
HW: We were talking before we started about how easy it is to play a bunch of your songs on the radio because you record under a bunch of different names. What thought process led to releasing all this stuff as The Toilet Bowl Cleaners, Papa Razzi, etcetera? When I’m explaining your work to people I can’t just say “Look up Matt Farley! He did all this stuff!”
MF: Yeah, you’ve gotta sit them down for 90 minutes. I think it’s funny for one. Tom and I before we became Moes Haven would have a different band name every album because we thought it was hilarious. So there was that. Then I thought I’m making so many songs, that people won’t necessarily be looking for the same thing. It was a way of separating it to classify everything. I think it’s a fun scavenger hunt for people when they realize that “Oh my god the Birthday guy is the Animal guy is the Cities guy…”
JC: The same piercing eyes on every cover.
HW: As you go on, some of the personalities, like Caniko Tucci and The Very Nice Interesting Singer Man, have storylines developed over the albums.
MF: The backstories of the artists is not something that I was consciously thinking of, but as I was doing more and more albums as The Very Nice Interesting Singer Man I noticed he started to get more aggressive, so that by the time Common Phrases came out half the time he was yelling about having to punch people, and I thought it was funny that the jolly novelty song guy had some edge to him. So, I did a whole honest straightforward album under that name and I had a blast with it. Using different band names, it makes things more complicated but for anyone who is digging deep enough it’s gonna be pretty delightful.
HW: I also think that around the time these storylines start to spring out is when the No Jokes records make a return. You can kind of see this progression in The Very Nice Interesting Singer Man’s discography.
MF: I know, for sure! Keep Being Awesome is a great no jokes album, but it’s also a weird comedic thing which I’m super proud of. It’s gonna be eight years old and almost nobody knows about it, and it’s a really great thing for people to discover eventually.
HW: I love The Big Heist, I’ve been listening to them a lot on the way up here and in the week preceding this. I can see from the month project with Moes Haven an interest in these ambitious long form projects that’s continued in The Big Heist with MO75 and last summer’s the 50. I noticed you’re always drawn to these and I’m curious why.
MF: Why do people like chocolate more than vanilla? I don’t know, it’s just in my instinct to do that. One way for sure that it’s helpful is if I say that I wanna write a great song and I just plan to write one song, it’s a lot of pressure. If instead I say I’m gonna write 50 songs then there’s no pressure. Just write what comes out and deal with it later. Then I go back and I’m like, “I don’t even remember writing this, this is good.” For me that’s how it works, I get quality from quantity.
HW: I was also curious how different making these Big Heist records is from making Moes Haven, because Moes Haven was just you and Tom, but the Big Heist is a full fledged band.
MF: Tom and I, sometimes we’d bother to overdub to give it a fuller sound, but a lot of the time what you’re hearing is acoustic guitar, piano and vocals, if that. I love that sound and it’s good, but it’s also good to do other stuff. Now it’s like this is a real band, and what’s cool is that usually I would dub the bass with a synth bass, but now I’m handing it over to Pete, and he’s coming up with bass ideas that would’ve never occurred to me and that I like better than what would’ve occurred to me. Also, having a real drum set, it doesn’t compare to just me hitting the keyboard with some cheesy drum sounds. It’s wonderful, though it’s way more work.
HW: Especially if you’re all living in different places and have day jobs.
MF: Yes, and we’re bothering to get things right in ways that we had done a lot looser in the Moes Haven days. So, it’s a little bit tedious at times but it also just gives us something to do, and we’re super happy with what’s come of it. I think we’re writing stuff that’s as interesting as anything we wrote 20 years ago.
