Rail slide to folk song
Skater bags board and focuses on making it as a singer/songwriter
Jen Zoratti



Matt Epp has come a long way from living out of his car and hawking double-doubles at Tim Hortons.

In four short years the Winnipeg-based singer/songwriter has learned how to play music — and he’s already on his second album.

Unveiled to the masses on Sept. 3, Love in Such Strong Words, the follow-up to Epp’s 2005 acoustic debut You’ll Find Me Alone, is a bluesy, folksy ode to the Prairies and some of its finest players.

Epp wanted to make a disc that shows what an acoustic album can achieve sonically — but that can be a bit of a lofty goal when you’re just one guy with one guitar. To remedy the problem Epp solicited the help of some friends — people such as folk visionary Dan Frechette, The Duhks’ honey-voiced singer Jessee Havey, Waking Eyes Matt Peters and Rusty Matyas, Rene Campbell and Rob Mitchell of The Attics, Kristjanna Oleson, Daniel Roy, Gilles Fournier, and Ron Halldorson, to name a few.

The result is a beautifully realized folk album with a voice that’s as gritty as a gravel farm road but also soars like the sky above it. The songs are brilliantly textured with a Dylan-esque folk sensibility, and Epp lets his influences shine through while maintaining his own sound.

Bored with the board

Though the local cites Ron Sexsmith and Neil Young as influences, the prolific Frechette probably had the greatest effect on Epp. It was Frechette, after all, who made the one-time skater want to trade in his board for a Gibson.

“Dan was the first guy I saw in Winnipeg that really blew my mind,” Epp says over coffee and cigarettes on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. “He really opened my mind.

“Seeing Dan also coincided with when I became a Christian, and it was so new in my life and I was so passionate about it. It was kind of the same with music — and I was blown away by how much better you can describe and express yourself with it.”

The slightly scruffy Epp looks every part the folksinger, but his black skate shoes give away his past. In October 2003 he released Love Life, a pro-skateboarding DVD, but after the success of that project Epp decided to call it quits.

“My skateboarding swan song was the DVD I made,” he says. “After that, it just wasn’t fulfilling anymore.”

I have to know how to play a guitar?

Skateboarder to folksinger doesn’t really seem like a natural progression, but the change wasn’t totally random. Although Epp launched his professional music career four years ago, it turns out he wasn’t exempt from the experience of being in a shitty garage band with a brutal name.

“Actually, I started my first band with (Waking Eyes drummer) Steve Senkiw in Steinbach,”Epp laughs. “We were called Order to Go. Steve would drum and my job was ‘guitar player,’ even though I didn’t know how to play.”

Epp, now 25, eventually did learn how to play the guitar and write songs, but he says he’s still a work in progress.

“I really look up to the storytelling musicians,” Epp says, “but I don’t feel that I’m very good at it. I just usually want to get a feeling across. If you look at the songs on the album, this one may have been written in two parts over a year, this one might have been written in 15 minutes, this one was for my grandpa. They don’t really come that easy — but when they do, it’s fast.

“I started playing music less than four years ago,” Epp adds. “That’s why some of my stuff seems like the formats are all over the place. I’m totally learning and I don’t think I’ve written my best songs yet. But I also think that my naiveté about the business kind of adds to the purity of it.”

Our conversation takes a tangent that’s usually only reserved for intense, glasses-wearing music snobs: second albums and why people seem to always like ‘the old stuff.’

“You know, you hear so many people’s debut records, and that’s when I think they really mean it, when it’s really pure,” Epp says. “Steve Bell and I were having breakfast one day and we were talking about second records. He was talking about his and how he was proud of its artistic elements, but then he had all these fans who hated it.

“My second record is getting closer to the music that I want to make. But it will always be honest to me.”

Maybe it is naiveté that makes for Epp’s starry-eyed idealism about making music, but that’s not such a bad thing.

Give his stuff a listen and you’ll get it. He’s a pretty truthful guy.

“I’m pretty naked in my songs, I think,” Epp says. “I’m so much exposing what’s in my heart that I need to mask it in poetry because it starts to get pretty spooky.”

Balloons are hot

Love in Such Strong Words isn’t exactly the bleeding-heart show Epp makes it out to be. He’s a funny guy, and personal music tends to reflect all sides of a personality.

“I just wrote a song about balloon fetishes,” he says. “In the song I own it and say, ‘Yeah, I get off on balloons,’ but it really came from reading about them. It’s going to be the last song of the night and it’s going to be so good.”

OK, penning a song about a creepy sexual fetish is one thing, but the idea reflects something bigger. Although writing songs isn’t what you’d call a new art form, Epp marvels at how each songwriter manages to find his or her place — and voice — in a world that really exists on 12 notes.

“It’s still new and different for everyone even though there’s really nothing new about it,” Epp says. “I mean, we probably have enough songs. I don’t need to be here. But music was kind of put on me and I feel like it was something I was supposed to do. And the best thing to do is be obedient and do it.”