Post 9 … Everybody’s Got Something to...

Well, since I have been babbling on this blog, I thought itmight be a good idea to let you know who I am.

My name is Matt. I was born on October 12, 1982, in Youngstown, Ohio, and lived in its suburb, Austintown, until 2002. My father worked (still does) in a steel mill, my mom has MS and was a stay-at-home mother to my older brother and me. My maternal grandparents lived nearby and were a huge part of my early life. My mother goes to church most Sundays; my father went on
Easter and Christmas when he wasn’t working, and I stopped altogether when I was about fourteen, because it never made sense to me.

I am and have always been overweight. I like sports but was never any good at them; I may be the slowest runner you will ever meet because I am duck-footed. I have been wearing glasses since I was fourteen due to a slight case of myopia. I was a bit of a pyromaniac as a child; however, I always made sure to have water in the vicinity so that my fires wouldn’t spread where I had not intended. I was smart, the school wanted me to skip the 3rd grade, I was in gifted classes, took AP courses in high school. I had enough friends so that I wasn’t bored as a youngster and enough that I never was home as a teen.

Music has always been the number one love of my life. It started with oldies and pop for me, but then my brother got into metal, which made me get into metal. At eight and older I was a huge fan of Ozzy and Maiden to start off, then moved onto Megadeth and Pantera. I saved my allowance for months so I could buy a CD player, amplifier and Speakers at the age of nine.

When I was in my early teens, it was Nirvana, Snoop Dogg, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, STP, etc. Then I got OK Computer for my 15th birthday and everything changed. Although I was still into metal and hard rock, it changed my outlook on what I was looking for in music. No longer was I looking for someone to identify with, I was looking for something I hadn’t heard before or for something to be done better than I had ever heard it being done before.

I played bass in a band for four years in high school that sounded sometimes like Tool and sometimes like The Deftones. It was fun, but by the end we were worn out and our musical tastes changed in different ways, as teen tastes often do, and it seemed like time to call it quits. At the end of this I was very much into bands that were all over the map, like Glassjaw, Radiohead, Rival Schools, UNKLE, Weezer, Tori Amos, Dillinger Escape Plan, and At the Drive In.

I went to college for a year at a branch of Kent State while living at home, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I decided I wanted to be an engineer and also to move out of Youngstown, so I moved to Columbus to go to OSU. Throughout college, my musical tastes moved more indie, to bands like Cursive and Mars Volta, …Trail of Dead, BRMC, etc.

Currently I have been out of school and in the work force for 3+ years. I am happily married with two furry-canine children: Penny and Lucy. This is a list of bands of which I have 20 songs or more by on my iPod, so you can get an idea of what I like (there will be some abbreviation): Alice in Chains, AYWKUBTTOD, Arcade Fire, At the Drive In, Bat for Lashes, The Beastie Boys, The Beatles (obviously), Between the Burried and Me, Black Keys, Bjork, BRMC, Blur, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, Cave in, Chiodos, The Cure, Cursive, CSS, Curtis Mayfield, Deathcab, Deftones, Dillinger Escape Plan, Drowning Man, Dolly Parton, Elbow, Elliot Smith, Faith No More, Failure, Flaming Lips, Fleet Foxes, FOTC, GlassJaw, Godspeed, Grizzly Bear, Head Automatica, Iron Maiden, Jenny Lewis, John Vanderslice, Johny Cash, Lil Wyne, Led Zep, M83, Mars Volta, Michael Jackson, Minus the Bear, Mogwai, NERD, NIN, Nirvana, Notorious BIG, Outkast, Pink Floyd, Portishead, Primus, QOTSA, RATM, RHCP, The Roots, Sigur Ros, Smashing Pumpkins, Streets, Sufjan Stevens, Sunny Day Real estate, Supper Furry Animials, Tegan & Sara, Thursday, Tool, Tori Amos, TVOTR, UNKLE, Weezer.

If there is anything else you would like to know … ask.