Farewell Youth

Matt Walters has featured with the beautiful Megan Washington, toured with the likes of Ed Kowalczyk, and Gyspy & The Cat, and climbed mountains of great magnitude. Now Matt is about to release his stellar debut album Farewell Youth. It took exactly one album for Matt Walters to come full circle. For two years the Melbourne singer-songwriter has been honing this long-awaited debut at gigs, in hotel rooms and in his head, seizing inspiration then second-guessing himself through countless demos and studio sessions. FAREWELL YOUTH marks the end of all that, while taking him back to the spark that first lit his musical path.

A few of the songs on FAREWELL YOUTH have been kicking around a while. Conversation is the one Matt famously strummed for Mercury Records A&R head Peter Karpin at a chance encounter in Melbourne a few years ago. In a first for both of them, he was signed on the spot. The exquisitely languid ode to innocence, Horses, is another that came ready-made to the sessions at McKercher's Electric Avenue studios in Sydney last winter. It was produced by Francois Tetaz (Gotye, Bertie Blackman) and co-written and sung by Nashville artist Kim Richey, who Matt befriended after hearing her on Ryan Adams' Come Pick Me Up. Another of the older songs is Sleeping In New York, which was produced by Scott Horscroft (Little Red, The Panics), and contains a key line that almost seems like an affirmation of the reckless spirit of youth that informs the rest of the album: "This is your life and it's passing so carelessly."