Photographer credit: Jeanette D. Moses
In 2014, Matt DeMello unleashed There’s No Place Like Nowhere, a gloriously chaotic concept album that defied convention and found itself in the peculiar position of being an educational case study in music production. A decade later, DeMello’s revisitation of this "broken concept album" brings a polished, more cohesive version to life without sacrificing its madcap spirit.
At its core, There’s No Place Like Nowhere chronicles the journey of a protagonist—a stand-in for DeMello himself—navigating love, addiction, family, and existential despair in New York City. Musically, it’s an ambitious tapestry, weaving together the theatrical flair of Gershwin with the prog-rock eccentricity of Genesis, all while tipping its hat to the experimental grandeur of Brian Wilson and Frank Zappa. The result? A genre-fluid odyssey as unpredictable as it is captivating.
We sat down with Matt to learn all about the re-recreation of the record, what it means to him and much, much more here at IGNITE.
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What inspired you to create the original There's No Place Like Nowhere, and how has your perspective on it changed over the past ten years?
People track a lot of isolation on that record, and there's a lot of truth to that. I've been listening to a lot of what I was getting exposed to back when I wrote No Place in 2011 when I started working for DIY music websites. I think finding artists like R. Stevie Moore and Robert Wyatt was just earth-shattering for me at that point. I used that entryway to push as far as I could down where the lines really started to blur between obnoxious prog wunderkind and cult singer-songwriter. I was also watching that documentary about the Toynbee Tiles artist ritualistically. I don't think at any point consciously pursuing being one of their ranks occurred to me as what I was doing at the time. I've just always been fascinated by harmless maniacs and want to chase them, music's a great way to do it.
Can you describe the process of revisiting and polishing this record for the 10th-anniversary edition? What were some challenges you faced?
No Place producer and engineer Alex Busi teaches at SAE now, and basically, the course he teaches is opening up all the 100+track ProTools files for various No Place songs and showing his students "what this asshole put me through." That asshole being me.
I think at the time we put it out, we kept describing the record as "mid-fi." It was clearly not mastered at one of the big Hollywood mastering plants, but it is not precisely a basement album either. Alex had already invested a few thousand in the version of NEWSPACE Audio that existed beneath the Chinese food joint in Huntington, where we did all the overdubs for No Place.
Probably the biggest argument between us for any given album is how much we lean into the "loudness wars" of mastering, and that's where we start to diverge in terms of sonic approach. That YouTube video I linked does an excellent job of explaining it, but that's all to say: albums are getting "louder" every year, and Alex feels absolutely no desire to keep playing into that dynamic.
Something I'm really proud of between the last two versions we did is at no point did we really consider the digital or streaming audience outside of what obviously should be geared to them. It's a little like how we all -- and myself included especially - obsess over the late '80s and '90s stereo CD reissues of golden age late '60s Beatles and Pet Sounds. But the fact of the matter is that the Beatles and Bob Dylan especially did not give much of a shit for the stereo mixes of their albums. They spent all their time mixing into the wee small hours of the morning over only mono.
Somewhat similar to us, we poured our attention into the masters you're only going to hear when buying a tape or vinyl reissue for the 10th anniversary. The digital master is very matter-of-fact; if you paid for a digital version or you're just streaming it, then you're getting a digital mix and a digital master. Both in 2014 and this year, we made a special secondary reel-to-reel master that you can hear on the vinyl of this reissue.
Not even if you download it from bandcamp, can you hear this master. It's only for the physical issues, and it's fine-tuned to those exact formats, cassette tape and vinyl record. That said, off the top of my head, I'll tell you about 85 percent of anyone who has bought the album probably only has a digital copy, and that's all fine with me. This anniversary remaster is for the heads anyway.
You mentioned being influenced by artists like Brian Wilson and Frank Zappa. How do their styles manifest in your music?
I think for No Place especially it was embracing the idea that there really should be no lines between composer and songwriter. Thinking of the job as one in the same is especially an invention of the 20th Century and a gift to the 21st, mostly thanks to them and them alone in the American canon for my money.
What do you hope a new generation of listeners will take away from this anniversary edition of your album?
I think there are definitely some folks who hopped on board with the friendlier cover material, whether that's the Abbey Road tributes we played for the 50th anniversary and put out on tape last year or the lullaby EP collections I make for my niblings with my wife. I like to work with many different audiences in silos. When the time is right I like introducing them to each other, and sometimes that's fun when it's a violent collision. I think No Place is a good even territory between the gentler listening you hear in the cover and lullaby records and the deep listening genres you hear on Cassandra Abandoned, along with some of the later, more Twitter-inspired material.
You mentioned working on a new album produced by Noexbeats. What can you share about that project and how it differs from your previous work?
We're still settling on the musical tone of it now in the tracks themselves. But I'm really excited to dive in, not being responsible as much for songwriting as I will be for lead melodies and lyrics. I think of it like the Smiths, and I'm Morrissey. Even when I was in emo bands in high school, I had only a handful of opportunities to be that kind of poet frontman. In the prototype tracks that we've done, returning to that role really elevates the material to this place I've never gone before with my solo material, where I'm typically responsible for the entire arrangement.
Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for the next ten years in your music career?
I actually have an obvious idea of what's easiest for me to do, especially now that my wife and I are settling down in Peekskill. They say the best way to make god laugh is to tell someone your plans, so I'll say this much: Count on hard left turns. Whenever I want. For as long as I can breathe.
As someone who has navigated the music industry for a decade, what advice would you give to emerging artists today?
Putting this in the unfortunate jargon or slang of the algorithm-driven world, I have three big lessons I've taken since I started playing virtual shows in pandemic.
The first is that the channel, not the media, is the message. Your channel is everything. Find where audiences are available FIRST, then do the writing. That's so rare now and definitely vacating anything that can be called suburban life in the developed world. Everything's pretty much going the way of America: corporations are eating the public commons through technology; you need to find communities in some strange combination of the internet and real life in ways that feel authentic. But to do that right, you want to focus on finding where communities and audiences are first, before you engage in the art. You want to understand the channels they're using to find new music they've never heard before, that shapes the best music coming from those channels the most. Everything flows down from that funnel. The first question you want to ask yourself when you find the channel is: Would I use this even if it doesn't help me? Would I go to shows at this venue even if I didn't know anyone playing because I know they have great bands I already love? Start there. Use the same criteria for whatever YouTube channel, Instagram page, or VR sex dungeon venue you come across.
At the same time, the second big lesson is: Don't get married to what the results look like. Today's Taylor Swift plays for tens of thousands of faces in stadiums full of cell phones. Stadiums full of lighters weren't even a thing when the Beatles were around. The next Taylor might play for millions of digits counted in an interactive playlist. You get the idea. They said, "The Beatles would never happen again" because they thought it had to be four white guys playing guitar, bass, and drums. Not a white girl who started in country. Don't be that stupid.
The third lesson is to take your time finding the channels that work for you but not get married to channels either. Always have an escape plan. Look at Twitter. What a tragedy.
Stream 'There's No Place Like Nowhere' in full on Bandcamp now: