Cris Cohen: To start with... follow-up questions I wish I had asked the first time.
Matt Scannell of Vertical Horizon: I like this segment. This is a good segment.
Cris Cohen: You said in our first conversation that you learned a lot from Jerry Seinfeld. One of the examples you gave was going to the writing pad every single day and making that a habit. It’s not often that a musician will cite a comedian as someone that they’ve learned from. Besides the daily writing habit, what other stuff did you learn from Seinfeld?
Matt Scannell: It’s a great question. I am not necessarily the best public speaker. You give me a microphone and a song to sing, I can do that. But the space in between the songs is not necessarily my forte.
I found, particularly with Seinfeld, listening to him talk about his craft and the things he needs to do to keep his craft moving forward, I liked the cadence of how he would explain things. Obviously, he’s hilarious. But I found there was a way that he described the art of stand-up comedy that had through lines to what we do. We should all be learning from the greats, right? In any field, when someone truly excels, there are ways that people in all of the other fields can benefit by studying what they’ve done.
I feel like I have urged myself to slow down a little bit, not just run off at the mouth and say exactly whatever came to my mind in that moment. But also, I really struggled with learning how to be a front man for our band. If you go back—and I do not encourage it—but if you go back and look at some of the earlier videos of us playing live, you’ll see me very much a work in progress.
I sort of was trying to be the tough guy. “Rock and roll! Expletive, expletive, expletive!” And it’s not who I am.
Listening to someone like Jerry talk about his craft encouraged me—within my own much smaller, but to me, equally important, little world—to be more myself and be comfortable in my own skin. And also be confident that I can engage with people, with an audience, by more or less just being an authentic version of myself. I don’t need to be trying on a character when I walk on stage. I don’t have to be putting on a costume. It’s actually much better for me to just walk myself on stage. But that was a pretty big revelation.
At the same time, I need to also give credit to Geddy Lee from Rush. Because what I realized, as I was studying some of these people in other fields, was that it was kind of right there in front of me the whole time. Rush is my favorite band. And those guys were always hyper-authentic to themselves. They weren’t trying to be anything that they weren’t. When you would hear Geddy talk on the microphone during their live shows, you didn’t feel like you were watching a caricature of somebody.