Every week, the Milwaukee Music Premiere sponsored by Density Studios connects the city’s artists with our listening audience. If you’re an artist with a track you’d like us to debut exclusively on Radio Milwaukee, head over to our Music Submission page to learn how.
A stray picture of a past memory on your phone conjures up a number of thoughts that race in your head. But the most present tends to be the people in that photo who are the memories.
In Matty Timmons new single, “No Country,” he questions why society has turned relationships into a few one-off moments.
Raised in rural Indiana, Timmons moved to Milwaukee in 2018 and has been part of several musical projects in the local indie scene. His debut solo single and subsequent songs emerged from a pensive season of writing in which Timmons explored his personal motivations for life and the relationships developed out of it.
“Everywhere I go, I carry a camera roll full of people I barely know anymore," he said, “not because of some dramatic fallout, but because time, distance and the artificial nature of online connection slowly pulled us apart.”
Discovering the fickle nature of human relationships brought Timmons to the conclusion that technology’s promises of connectivity among people was actually a lie. Instead, self-indulgent ivory towers have now been built thanks to social media, with relationships built on transactions and not genuine love.
“No Country” acts as an individual response to that technological disconnection, backed by a refined pop-rock soundscape. With a smooth sonic structure, the single captures the loss Timmons feels looking back at memories that don’t really matter anymore.
It opens with an elegant synth-like melody that fades into the background as the staples of a pop-rock song audibly move up front. A rhythmic acoustic guitar, bass and strong drums set a clean pace for the vocals and melodic guitar to follow. The electric guitar weaves in and out of the mix, mirroring the stray pictures on a forgotten photo album.
We used to talk our **** for hours, let things get outta hand
Crushing double margaritas until we couldn’t stand
Stay high all night to feel alive
But now we’re ghosts, and I don’t understand
And I hate it we’re making tiny little castles to hide away
Building and breaking the house of cards we lived in every day
No, we’ve got no country to call home
We live in towers on our own
For Timmons, life itself moves too fast thanks to social media reducing human connection to sharing posts. The need that arises from cultivating a relationship face-to-face falls into the background and slowly withers away until, unknowingly, it becomes years since you’ve seen certain faces.
If we’re falling out my friend
I just wanna know where we went wrong
I just wanna know where things went wrong
Communication more easily falters these days, as all it takes to end a relationship is to just not respond for a couple days, which in turn drives an incessant nail into your head that’ll make you wince over and over again. It’s in this feeling Timmons wants the listener to sit in when listening to “No Country,” for it’s a feeling that rarely ever goes away — leaving you to forever wonder: Why did things fizzle for seemingly no reason?
You can catch Matty Timmons live at Anodyne in Bay View on March 7 and listen to “No Country” anytime using the player at the top of the page, as well as throughout today on 88Nine (6:30, 10:30 a.m.; 2:30, 6:30 p.m.).
Jonathan Joseph is a Milwaukee-based multimedia freelance journalist who specializes in art and culture writing (and all things Milwaukee), with work appearing on Radio Milwaukee and in Milwaukee Magazine. Contact him via email or find him on LinkedIn.