While we were busy back in January restarting our year and focusing on New Year resolutions, Matt Penny was also busy, releasing his second instrumental album, The Second Story Revival. We caught up with Matt and asked him for a description of his second album:

The Second Story Revival

After people responded so kindly to my first EP, REALIGN, I was so hyped that I pretty quickly started working on the follow up – which would become “The Second Story Revival”.

The first few songs came together pretty quickly, but I ended up hitting writer’s block. I usually start a new project when I have a few solid song ideas, but once you use all of them, it’s always “well… what now?”. Some of the song ideas I had been toying around with for years. I tinker around on the guitar all the time. If I come up with something I like, I’ll pull out my phone and record it. Then if I get stuck, I’ll go back and listen to those ideas. That helps sometimes, but most of the time these ideas are just a single riff, or concept. It’s not always easy to get inspired by just one idea.

So even after I would find pieces that I liked, since it was just a single snippet of something, often I wouldn’t find any inspiration in them. It’s not until weeks or months later when you’re improvising and you think “oh man, that part from 6 months ago would go perfect with this.” That’s how a couple of these songs came together. After probably 6 months, I had 5 songs done. Since it had only been 6 months since REALIGN, I thought it would be better to put more songs on it, and make it a full album. I loved the idea of making it a full album, but I wasn’t sure if I was really up for it.

Regardless of if there are 5 songs, or 15 songs on an album – it takes a lot of work. I do all of this 100% myself. I write all of the music, and I do all of the production and recording. It’s a major investment when I decide to do something like this. So even though I was only adding 3 songs, that could mean another 3 months worth of work, potentially. I do this as a hobby. This is not a career for me, so I don’t have the luxury of being able to focus all of my time on music. You fit it in when you can, as anybody does with a hobby. The final product turned out really well, and has one of the best songs I’ve possibly ever written on it, called “All We Got”.

I think that was definitely the first song where people specifically acknowledged it apart from other things I’ve done. People who weren’t even aware I did music were messaging me saying how much they liked the song. There are a lot of other really cool moments on THE SECOND STORY REVIVAL. I don’t listen to it very often, but when it does come up on the iPod, I’m always very happy with how it turned out.