Matt Wilson is addicted to making music. Since his start at St. Louis Park Middle School, music has been a fixation, nearly compulsive. He said, “I don’t feel like it’s a virtue. I think I’d probably be a better person, better family member if I were less obsessed, but I just can’t stop.”

He began as a drummer. He described, “It was just so exciting. The drums matched my energy.” Excitement was fueled by newfound popularity: “I was a nerd, and all of a sudden people noticed me as a drummer.” Friendly competition with his older brother, Dan Wilson, fueled his obsession. “[Dan] started getting into jazz-rock fusion… It was very challenging and fun to try to keep up with that kind of music.” 

Choosing colleges, he chose music, following his brother to Harvard. He said, “I went out there to be with Dan so that we could have a band together.” Choosing the least intensive major, English, gave Matt the most time to spend on music. At Harvard, he discovered his true passion: songwriting. “The discipline of writing songs, the art of it, completely swept me away.”

Songwriting made him restless with forthcoming ideas and opportunities. In his junior year, he dropped out of Harvard. He said, “I loved the people that I met and was enjoying learning, but I was dying just to be a musician.” So he became. 

He returned to the mid-1980s Minneapolis music scene, infatuated with high-flyer acts like Prince, Soul Asylum, and The Replacements. He gravitated back to a musical hotspot. To pursue his passion, he gave up comfort: himself, drummer Elaine Harris, and bassist John Munson lived together in a small part of a Victorian house on Franklin Avenue. Cramped, they chased musical mastery. The band Trip Shakespeare was born. 

In 1986, Dan visited from a nascent architecture career in San Francisco. As Matt described, “Pretty soon we were just singing together.” Enthralled by Dan’s potential on a demo of “Applehead Man,” Matt tried to lure Dan into the band.  Matt said, “The minute he joined, all of a sudden we became this rock band… we took off in popularity. It was night and day.” Local rock fame began. 

For the debut and sophomore albums, “Applehead Man” and “Are You Shakespearienced?,” flow captured their collective imagination: “It was all about just getting in the studio and trying to capture the energy from playing together.” Even the songwriting was collaborative in imagination. Matt said, “I would have some lyrics and bring them to Dan  and… he’d come back the next day with something full-flowered and beautiful.”

Soon after their second album, A&M Records signed the band for a two-album contract: two chances to make it big. On the band’s first A&M album, their focus strayed, bending to the label’s whim instead of focusing on their musical intuition. “Across the Universe” fell short. 

On the second record, Matt and the band reverted to form: “We weren’t checking a box [for the label], we were like creating in the studio, expanding on stuff that interested us.” 

However, trouble simmered underneath the surface. The brothers’ paradigms contrasted. Matt felt like Dan “was controlling the process a lot.” Matt explained the duo as “two guys that cared a lot about music, a lot of strong opinions about how it should be,… [and] different visions.” The band reached a crescendo. When A&M Records dropped them, they broke up. 

Despite disbandment, both brothers remained consumed with making music. Dan and bassist Munson formed Semisonic, releasing the international hit chart-topping “Closing Time,” alongside a multitude of successes. 

Matt went on a reformational journey. He said, “I needed to rebuild my approach to music,” wanting to “generate from my interior, what I was really feeling and my true ambitions… insecurities and… worries.” Ultimately, he restructured his musical form, focusing on true emotion as his nucleus: “[I want to] bring a tear to your eye… That’s really the grail for me.” 

Driven by his constant musical passion, he has worked with Munson and others in The Flops and The Twilight Hours, working for the love of it. In 2020, Matt released his most recent album. As Matt narrated, “When I Was a Writer” unpacks “my worries and concerns for the period of the last 15 years.”

The songwriting process for the album was intricate. Matt narrated, “It’s so carefully tuned and adjusted to be more like I like it, then it becomes a really particular thing.” Over the course of years, he labored over every note, every syllable. His personal music taste dictates: “even though they’re all different, they’re all going through this one filter of this one person.”

Matt’s love letter to music never stops. Now, in a renovated basement bathroom converted to a recording studio, he works obsessively on a new double-tracked album. “I don’t know why it is so important to me. There’s no practical reason.” For Matt, people change, relationships evolve; however, “Music hasn’t decreased in its centrality.” It exists as an organ, breathing life into his body.