Photo courtesy of Scissor Tail Records
Begun in 2017, Matt Kivel’s eighth solo album, ‘Escape from L.A.,’ (Scissor Tail Records) is an ambitious autobiographical song cycle meticulously chronicling the first 33 years of his life within the City of Angels. This material underwent a prolonged, intensive period of revision and refinement across three distinct locations (LA, New York, and Austin). The album is distinguished by a renewed commitment to lyrical and vocal lucidity, transforming the tracks into vivid, self-contained narrative vignettes. The production is notably rich, featuring over 20 collaborators, including the deployment of a string section and pedal steel guitars, lending a sonic depth to the personal chronicles. The lyrical content juxtaposes monumental, shared cultural traumas and myths—such as freeway accidents, the Northridge earthquake, the mediated distant shock of 9/11, the superficiality of Hollywood celebrity, and the apocalyptic fantasy of a tsunami.
Kivel’s musical journey commenced within the indie rock scene as a member of the acclaimed band Princeton. A period of intensive national touring led to a decisive artistic and personal rupture. This transition yielded a series of subsequent solo albums characterized by a stark, unsettling minimalism that resonated strongly. Over the ensuing decade, Kivel’s work has been marked by a sustained, global collaborative approach, engaging with a diverse cohort of distinguished musicians including Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Alasdair Roberts, Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes), Jana Horn, and Satomimagae. His personal geography also shifted, moving from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, then briefly to New York City, before returning to establish roots in Austin. ‘Escape from L.A.’ emerges as a profoundly grounded and significant artistic statement from Kivel, scheduled for release on December 12 via Scissor Tail Records.
James Broscheid: Matt, congratulations on the upcoming release. ‘Escape from L.A.’ feels like such a massive undertaking—seven years in the making. Does finally releasing it feel like an exorcism of those 33 years in Los Angeles?
Matt Kivel: Thanks so much. It really does feel like a profound letting go. I think everyone has a complicated relationship with their hometown, but mine just happens to be this wild, unwieldy, iconic city that is known more for its tourists and transplants than it is for those who actually grew up there. I was raised in Santa Monica (which is part of L.A. County), and it’s basically a small beach town that grew and grew and grew. It brought together a mix of Hollywood people and people who had been there for generations. My family didn’t really fit into either camp and even though I think I had a very happy childhood I always felt a little off balance there. It wasn’t until I moved to Eagle Rock on the east side of LA in my early 20s that I found my footing in the city. I basically spent 28 years of my life between Santa Monica and the east side and so this album forced me to be really judicious in terms of the stories I selected. That’s one of the main reasons it took so long to make. I had to keep cutting and shaving it down and I was honestly overwhelmed by the amount of material I had at the time. I got lost somewhere along the way and eventually found the road back to the heart of the story which was tucked into these sort of very small moments in my life.
JB: You’ve described this album as a “bootleg as hell Blood on the Tracks.” Does that comparison refer more to the heartbreak and confessional nature of the lyrics, or the sonic quality of the “myriad alternate sequences” and rewrites you went through?
MK: (Laughs) That was probably not the most eloquent way of putting it. I was trying to communicate that there were different versions of the record that could have existed. The lyrics aren’t really heartbroken and they’re not really focused on romantic relationships. They kind of feel like they came from a dream or my subconscious. Everything I’m writing about is sort of half remembered and degraded by the failing of my own memory. But regarding the alternate versions, I just always liked how this lore existed around (Bob) Dylan records, especially ‘Blood On The Tracks’ (Columbia, 1975). Music people and record collectors especially, like me, always seem to be obsessed with the things that got lost in the recording process. The mystery album that never got finished. And I found it interesting that ‘Escape From L.A.’ had elements of that. My friends Adam Brisbin and Sean Mullins really kicked the recording process off by putting down some gorgeous bass and drum tracks. I merged these with earlier demos and then kind of went wild transforming the material in Austin at my friend Don Cento’s studio. That’s when dozens of people started showing up and we changed some of the keys and tempos, wiped tracks, rerecorded things, cut songs, and pretty soon the whole album had changed shape and turned into something else entirely. There were probably 10 to 15 songs that got cut out along the way and it went from being this wild multi-part concept album into something much more refined.
JB: You began writing this cycle in 2017. How did the songs evolve as you physically moved between Los Angeles, New York, and Austin? Did the distance from LA clarify the memories, or make them more mythical?
MK: The distance was probably the only reason that I could work on this material with any sort of clarity. Being in Austin and then New York gave me the ability to unplug myself from the LA mindset and take in all that had happened to me there as an observer. I could, kind of, be a journalist and report on everything. I think writing a song automatically makes things more mythical. One of the tunes here, “Kids” is about my brother and I hanging out at Highland Park Brewing one evening when I was in town visiting. It could’ve been any night. And we just had this long talk. Dodger Stadium was lit up on the hill behind us. And that was it. Somehow that becomes something big when it gets filtered into a song but you’ve probably had a thousand moments in your life just like it.
JB: The album juxtaposes massive public events (the Northridge Earthquake, 9/11, a mythical tsunami) with very intimate, private moments (a dying dog, the conversation with your brother you mentioned). How do you see the relationship between historic tragedy and personal grief in your songwriting?
MK: I found myself returning to this macro micro thing over and over on this record. To me, it’s very L.A. to feel the weight of big social events as much as your own little life drama. Like, I still take the Oscars very seriously even though none of the movies I like ever win (except “Parasite” – CJ Entertainment, 2019 – that was awesome!) and my family watches the Dodgers playoff games with a wild intensity and anything that happens in LA, especially if it’s sports or movies, just feels like it has a direct impact on your life and it’s a big deal. It doesn’t and it’s not but it feels like that. Northridge (1994) happened when I was a little kid and I remember it rattling my entire house and all kinds of things falling everywhere. But more than that, I remember this strange distant cousin named David who I didn’t know existed, moving into our living room after the earthquake because his apartment had been destroyed. He played video games and got into some kind of fight with my dad because he had no interest in leaving our house and wasn’t looking for a new apartment. I guess he liked the video games and the couch. But eventually he had to go. And then this year we had the fires and my parents’ house almost burned down. Literally their entire village in the Palisades burned down and most of the homes around them were destroyed. It was horrific. They were only able to move back into their place a few months ago but they were the lucky ones. Dear friends of ours lost everything and there’s no way to adequately capture the loss they feel. I guess what I’m saying is that there are the small moments and then the big historic moments and when you live in L.A., the line between those two gets super blurry.
JB: You mentioned that the material was labored over and re-recorded numerous times. Is there a specific version of a song that you had to axe or completely abandon to get to the version we hear on the record?
MK: Absolutely! I’d say there were about ten additional songs that at one point or another were going to be a centerpiece on the album but for various reasons got axed. One example is the title track, “Escape from L.A.” I mean, when I wrote it I assumed it was going to be right there at the top of the album. It had this uptempo, open chord, rhythmic thing happening and I couldn’t imagine the record without it. Then one day when I was listening back to it I just felt numb and disconnected from it. Something about it felt like it was trying too hard and then I had to let it go. There is another song called “Cheerios” that we actually finished and it has a really amazing drum part courtesy of Fievel Is Glauque’s drummer Gaspard (Sicx), but it just wasn’t sitting right in the flow of the record. That song may see the light of day at some point. And then a song that actually made it on the album, “A Little Mark,” was completely revised and re-recorded from this loose kind of Wilco / Loose Fur arrangement into a sort of pounding Velvet Underground / Stooges thing. I sang into this small, thin vintage mike that looks like the kind of thing Neil Diamond would have used and then the arrangement finally felt right. I don’t know, maybe I was just losing my mind.
JB: The bio mentions you have a “freeway mind,” having spent years on the I-10 and the 101 in L.A. Do you find that the rhythm of driving or the isolation of being in a car in L.A. traffic influences the tempo or structure of your solo work?
MK: I don’t think it influences the way I write or the sounds I’m drawn in by. But what it did for me was emphasize how important the album as an art form can be. I listened to so many albums front to back not because I had such great patience but because I was stuck in traffic! And having that focused listening time was profoundly valuable to me. I saw how records worked and how songs fit together. I noticed the details and the interludes and the fade outs and the pacing and I fell in love with the idea of writing songs that you can knit together into something solid and big. Van Dyke Parks’ ‘Song Cycle’ (Warner Bros. Records, 1967), was something I played a lot when I was driving around L.A. It’s one of many records that is in my DNA. As one song finishes I’m already hearing the start of the next one before it even begins. Even the effects he uses on that album are a sort of hook. His song “Palm Desert” is probably the most perfect L.A. songs. That lyric is stunning, “on the banks of toxicity” … but it’s said with love. It also kind of reminds me of System of a Down’s ‘Toxicity,’ (from album of same name, American Recordings / Columbia, 2001), a great song from another really inventive L.A. band that helped make up the soundtrack of my childhood. I’m getting off topic, but the main point is that being stuck in your car is a great way to get into music and listen to complete albums, and you often get to look at the L.A. skyline while you’re doing it! It’s not so bad.
JB: It’s rare to hear a song about a family moving to L.A. specifically because of a role in “The Natural” (Matt’s father Barry Kivel played the role of Pat McGee, Tri-Star Pictures, 1984). How does growing up with that specific intersection of baseball and Hollywood folklore shape your view of the city?
MK: It’s everything. My dad’s acting and then his interest in making my brother Jesse (also of the band Princeton), and I into star baseball players defined the first 14 years or so of my life. A lot of my memories from childhood take place on baseball fields with my dad and brother. My brother and I, along with our neighbor and best friend Cody Decker (who went on to play in the major leagues) would obsessively do this homerun derby in our driveway. We played this ongoing game for years. Keeping track of our stats with chalk on the garage door. And then my dad was just going out there and hustling as an actor. He was always going to auditions and sometimes he would bring me and Jesse along. He once got us a chance to audition for the movie “Little Giants” (Warner Bros., 1994), but I totally botched the whole thing. I’m a terrible actor. By the time I was an adult I had developed a lot of bitter feelings about baseball. But then, when I was living in New York, I went to see a screening of “The Natural” at the Metrograph. I wore my dad’s Knights jacket from the movie and I cried my eyes out the whole time. I saw how beautiful and mystical that movie was and it helped heal my relationship with baseball and seeing my dad on screen, in his early 30s, was very moving. It made me realize he would live forever in some small way. I found that beautiful.
JB: You have a song detailing a meditative conversation with your twin brother, Jesse, outside Dodger Stadium that you mentioned earlier. After playing in Princeton together for years, how has your dynamic shifted from creative partners in a band to subjects in each other’s lives?
MK: Jesse and I used to do everything together. As kids and young people our identities were totally blurred. We had very distinctive characteristics and we were different in lots of ways, but we always seemed to be working on some project together. It was always a team effort. A lot of wonderful things came of that. But by the time Princeton cratered out I think Jesse and I both had realized that we needed to go our separate ways and pursue our own paths. Then I moved away to Austin and for nearly a decade now we have really only seen each other a few times a year. The frequency of our visits is unfortunate but the strength of our relationship has never been better. We kind of needed to eliminate the inherent competition and pressure that comes from working together in order to fully appreciate our relationship. Over the past two years we started working on songs together again for a new Princeton record. We finished it recently with all the original band members (Ben Usen, David Kitz) plus our dear friend Andrew Maury. And then Jesse and I went on a trip to London this summer to celebrate our 40th brithday. We went to see Oasis play at Wembley because they were the band that inspired us to learn guitar and we just rode bikes and hung around Hyde Park. It was very special. I don’t think we could’ve done any of this stuff without having had some space from working so intensely together.
JB: You touch on the “failure of your first band set against the backdrop of Vampire Weekend’s meteoric rise.” It takes a lot of confidence to write about professional envy or disappointment so openly. Was it cathartic to put that specific timeline into a song?
MK: It really was. I think that everyone has a Vampire Weekend in their life and when I was younger I could have never imagined feeling comfortable discussing it. It can feel embarrassing to admit that you envy the success that someone else has had. But over time I realized it was perfectly natural. My generation of musicians watched Vampire Weekend basically ascend unimpeded from their inception. It’s hard to overstate how rare that is. They sold out this little show at the Silverlake Lounge maybe back in 2008. And then just every show that followed was sold out at a bigger and bigger venue. They are still ascending! Playing stadiums now. In my early 20s I thought, somewhat foolishly, that I should be having that level of success. That I was being unfairly ignored. But when I look back on it, I realize that we weren’t built for all of that. On so many levels we were not made to be that kind of rocketship success story. We didn’t have the poise or coherence of vision. Vampire Weekend had it all and I honestly am just impressed by the poise that those guys had from day one and continue to exhibit. It’s just meticulous and so deeply dialed in. But I say this as an outside observer. I don’t know how the people in the band feel. Who knows, maybe even Vampire Weekend have a Vampire Weekend in their lives!
JB: Your transition from the “jaunty indie rock” of Princeton to the “bleak, hauntingly spare” solo work was a distinct pivot. Was that shift a reaction to the burnout of touring, or was this quieter voice always there, waiting for the noise to die down?
MK: You put that really nicely. I was waiting for the noise to die down. I wanted to be quieter. For so long, I had been deeply afraid to get onto a stage by myself. I had relied on the other band members so heavily, especially my brother, to take the pressure off of me. The music I listened to the most was the kind of stuff that I would put headphones on for and just sort of sit in the pocket of. I wanted to make music like that but was basically afraid. When the band ended I realized that my vision needed to be something much more self-contained and it was three albums – Nick Drake ‘Pink Moon’ (Island Records, 1971), Brian Eno ‘Discreet Music’ (Obscure, 1975), and Broadcast ‘Tender Buttons’ (Warp Records, 2005) – that kind of unlocked the door for me. That was where I wanted to live musically, somewhere between those records. It just felt like my language and that was the jumping off point for everything.
JB: You’ve worked with a distinct lineage of songwriters—Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Robin Pecknold, Alasdair Roberts. Do you view ‘Escape From L.A.’ as a continuation of that folk/songwriter lineage, or is this album an attempt to break away and stand entirely on your own narrative history?
MK: Those are all very special songwriters and I feel fortunate that I have gotten to know them and make music with them. What I respect so much about Will, Robin, and Ali is that they have put their own stamp on this idea of folk or traditional music. Nothing is cast in amber. Their music is really alive and they are unafraid to take risks with form. The music is precious but the tradition is something that can evolve. Basically they, and many other artists I love, showed me that you can do whatever you want. And so that’s what I’m doing. I don’t think I can break away from my influences or the music that made me. I stopped trying to do that a long time ago. I just do whatever I want now and hope it’s good.
JB: If the mythical tsunami you sing about was actually coming for L.A., what is the one specific landmark (other than your childhood home) you would be saddest to see washed away and why?
MK: Wow! Amazing question. I would say Barnsdall Art Park in Los Feliz. If that somehow got washed away I would be devastated. When I was 20 I interned for Arthur Magazine which was this beautiful counterculture paper run by Jay Babcock. He put on the most amazing festival I have ever been to, Arthur Fest, at Barnsdall. Marissa Nadler was there. Yoko Ono. Olivia Tremor Control. And Cat Power was there and I remember her running off the stage with tears in her eyes, which was very hard to watch, but made me realize that other people dealt with stage fright and that it shouldn’t stop me from making music. Anyways, I returned there often over the years. It is a beautiful, placid space with interesting trees and art classes and looks out over the whole city. When you go there it feels like you’re not even in L.A. anymore in a really good and refreshing way. People who live in L.A. need spaces like that and to lose it would be a real tragedy.
JB: Now that you have settled in Austin, a city with a very different musical gravity than L.A. or NYC, has the Texas landscape started creeping into your writing yet, or is your “freeway mind” still stuck on the Pacific Coast Highway?
MK: (Laughs) I’m less of a PCH guy and more of a I-10 guy. My mind will forever be stuck on the 10! But Texas has really opened my brain up and its landscape, which is quite beautiful, has been all over my songs ever since I moved here. There is no ocean in central Texas, but there are all of these swimming holes that seem to appear out of nowhere. There are armadillos, hawks, and foxes in my neighborhood and the cicadas scream almost every day. It’s a different type of mythology here. It feels more eternal and less wedded to the human experience and I think that has healed my brain a little bit.
JB: You’re heading out on to play some dates with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and friends. After spending so much time recording and re-recording these songs in the studio, how does it feel to finally translate this specific autobiography to a live audience?
MK: It feels really nice. I’m grateful that Will is taking me out on the road with him and that I get to play for his audience. The Bonnie “Prince” Billy fans (of which I am one) are wonderful. I got to open for Will in Lisbon once and it was a magnificent experience. The crowd was attentive and lovely. And it’s funny, I spent all this time reworking all of this ‘Escape From L.A.’ material to get the arrangements perfect and now I’m going on the road and performing it with just me and my friend Zack Wiggs on pedal steel. All of the layers are stripped away and I’m right back where I started with these songs. I worked really hard to get back to the beginning … Sisyphus style.
Upcoming 2025 Tour Dates:
December 2 – Haw River Ballroom – Saxapahaw, NC with Bonnie “Prince” Billy
December 3 – Grey Eagle – Asheville, NC with Bonnie “Prince” Billy
December 4 – Variety Playhouse – Atlanta, GA with Bonnie “Prince” Billy
December 5 – The Blue Room at Third Man Records – Nashville, TN with Bonnie “Prince” Billy
December 6 – The Monarch – Louisville, KY with Grace Rogers
February 21, 2026 – Gold Diggers – Los Angeles, CA with North Americans
For more information or to have a listen, please visit Bandcamp,
Scissor Tail Records and Instagram.
