Matt Farley has cracked a code. Almost 10 years after his double album of offbeat and irrepressibly upbeat songs about Pennsylvania cities and towns first dropped, Farley — aka The Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns — remains a streaming and songwriting juggernaut, churning out oodles of instant not-so-classics, performing an ode to defunct Pizza Huts on Jimmy Fallon, and earning the unlikeliest of Wall Street Journal profiles.
He’s infiltrated the Kardashian Power Center, and, more central to the money he makes from all this, he’s now been discovered by TikTok.
PA Local caught up with Matt to talk about his Pennsylvania opus, its lyrics inspired by Wikipedia entries. We also covered why he's mad at Philadelphia this week, when quantity can lead to quality, and the case for not overthinking things so much.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
PA Local: Pennsylvania has something like 2,500 municipalities. Why stop at 93?
Farley: At the time, the distribution [system] I used was two CDs worth of music. And that's how many songs fit on two CDs.
PA Local: That’s a pretty good reason.
Farley: I guess I'll have to come back and do a sequel.
PA Local: Did I read that you live in Massachusetts?
Farley: Yeah. North of Boston.
PA Local: Have you been to Pennsylvania before?
Farley: For sure. Um, I went to Centralia to see the smoke coming out of the ground. That was exciting. And Pittsburgh had some just, like, good vibes. And I don't like Philadelphia right now because they're up three games to two over the Celtics. (Update.)
PA Local: Why no Centralia song?
Farley: Just because their population was so low. I'm pretty strict. I just go by population. I start with the most populated place and work my way down until I fill up an album.
PA Local: I have a couple of Between Two Ferns-style questions I’d like to ask.
Farley: Go for it.
PA Local: You wrote a song called “Allentown Good Song.” Why not “Allentown Great Song”?
Farley: I don’t know. Billy Joel wrote a great Allentown song. I mean, come on. Who am I to claim to have written the great Allentown song?
PA Local: When you said “York is a City (Good Nice),” what did you mean by that?
Farley: <Laughs> That's poetry. No further explanation needed.
PA Local: Have you ever done a negative song about a city?
Farley: No. Because, I mean, why write a negative anthem? It's just fun to be like blindly celebratory of every city I'm singing about. And there's a cumulative effect to the comedy where you're like, ‘He just sang about how great Pittsburgh is and now he's singing about how great Scranton is.’ You can have a bingo card while you're listening. ‘Is he gonna mention the library?’ There are several songs where you can hear me laughing. If the singer were a character, he's a little bit out of his mind. But I don't think I'm making any deeper points about anything. It's more like, ‘Wouldn't it be funny if some guy wrote an anthem for 3,000 American cities?’ I thought that would be funny. And so I spent a decade doing it.
PA Local: How many states are left?
Farley: I've done 46. New Mexico, Wyoming, Mississippi, and West Virginia are the last four. And I plan to finish that by July.
PA Local: So this won't be like the Sufjan Stevens project.
Farley: I'm envious. He still gets way more attention than me and he's only done two states. He's obviously a great musician and whatnot, but — a few months back I Googled albums about states and there’s his big face that pops up. You can’t find me anywhere.
PA Local: So you’re gonna see this through.
Farley: Yes, but wouldn’t it be funny if I just didn't do the 50th state?
PA Local: Maybe not for that state.
Farley: I agree. From the four states I haven't done yet, I've seen comments from people expressing their sadness about that.
PA Local: Quick pivot, but I’ve written about Pennsylvania enough to know that people here are quick to let you know if you’ve gotten something wrong about Pennsylvania. How many fact-checks have you received?
Farley: Well, there's a river called, like, the Skull-kee-ville River? You know what I'm talking about?
PA Local: Yes, the Schuylkill.
Farley: I have definitely mispronounced that in multiple songs and it’s been pointed out to me. I think it adds to the fun: ‘He wrote an anthem and he doesn’t even know how to pronounce it!’
PA Local: If I were to give you a town, like St. Marys, that you haven't done yet, and a few prompts, could you write me a verse and a chorus?
Farley: Yes, but I have a big concert in a week and I have tons of preparation to do.
PA Local: What's the show?
Farley: Once a year I have an extravaganza. I rented out a function room in a hotel and me and my friends are going to be performing for five and a half hours.
PA Local: Which of your Pennsylvania songs is your favorite?
Farley: I don't know. I haven't listened to that album in a long time, so I wouldn't — Oh, I know, Philadelphia! <Starts singing loudly> PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA. That one has a good bassline. Now I’m remembering.
PA Local: What’s stopping me from writing a thousand songs a year?
Farley: In college, a friend and I would spend the weekend in a dorm room just recording song after song. And we definitely got to the realization that the more we create, the more likely we are to create something good.
You’re not a good judge of your work while you’re working on it. If you get too self-critical and give up because you think it's bad, you never know, because oftentimes the song I think is good is the one nobody likes. Then the one I rattled off in 10 minutes as a joke is the one that people respond to, so my duty is to just follow up on every idea, no matter how ridiculous.
—Colin Deppen, Spotlight PA
Read more, via Paste Magazine: The Mad Genius of Magic Spot, Motern Media, and Matt Farley. |
