photo credit: Alex Kweskin

“I feel really guilty saying this, but I’m having the best fucking year ever,” Matthew Logan Vasquez blurts out, while calling from his home studio in rural Wimberley, Texas.

When Vasquez picks up the phone, an hour prior, he is joyously howling over a twinkling synthesizer. And as the singer/ guitarist recounts his musical story—how he co-founded the indie-famous rock band Delta Spirit with his best friends, then walked away from it all five years ago and reformed the group only to have all his grand plans derailed by a pandemic—it becomes clear that his proclamation isn’t just peacocking.

In 2020, Vasquez and Delta Spirit released What Is There, their first album in six years and their best in nearly a decade. Yet, unable to tour behind the record, the 37-year-old musician has spent the past few months flying kites and exploring state parks with his young son, who is named after the mythical God of Thunder. He calls them “Papa and Thor Adventure Days;” he’s been kayaking down the river that winds through his Hill Country property.

Vasquez has also been working on material for both his next solo project and Delta Spirit; he finally feels like he has room for both in his life.

“I’ve got love in my heart now. And I know the only thing I can control is being as kind as I can to the people in front of me,” he says, acutely aware of— and pleasantly surprised by—just how centered he feels nowadays.

After years of struggling and squirming to find his footing between his independent, frenetic energy and his allegiance to a self-described “super democratic band,” the rock-and-roll frontman has somehow unlocked the door to a well-balanced musical career. But it was a journey filled with hard drinking, bruised egos, electrifying live shows and a pot of simmering band tensions taken off the flame just before it boiled over.

But, in order to get here—once again fronting his band of best friends while still existing within his own bubble of Zen—Vasquez had to blow it all up and go it alone.

What Is There is Delta Spirit’s fifth proper album. It’s a rock record—no genre qualifiers necessary—filled with blazing guitar solos, fluttering pianos, heavy and pulsing percussion, haunting harmonies and pumped-up, sing-along choruses. But what’s most arresting about these cuts are the lyrics: What Is There is a true examination of the relationships that go into making music, and sometimes suffer or burn out because of it. It’s full of stories about desperately missed loved ones, expectant strangers and bandmates with a shared musical language. In other words, it’s the story of Delta Spirit, brought to life through rock-and-roll.

***

Fifteen years ago, Delta Spirit was a raucous rock band made up of five ambitious, energetic young players, all of whom had already spent time floating within the Southern California indie-rock scene that orbited around producer and musician Richard Swift. Vasquez, multi-instrumentalist Kelly Winrich, bassist Jon Jameson, drummer Brandon Young and original guitarist Sean Walker (who was replaced by Will McLaren in 2011) came from different musical backgrounds—Jameson and Young’s talents were forged in the hardcore punk scene—but, together, they managed to create their own brand of loose, catchy, tumbling rock.

Though Delta Spirit’s debut EP, 2006’s I Think I’ve Found It, is as taut and punchy as The Strokes’ early work, the quintet were instantly lumped into the new Americana movement that was concurrently sweeping the country thanks to Vasquez’s harmonica and a handful of acoustic-leaning tunes. Those six songs were enough to light a spark.

“We started playing residencies in clubs across Los Angeles and Orange County,” Winrich says, while calling from his Brooklyn apartment. “Each week, same bar. And each week, a couple hundred more people would show up—by the end of the month, people were lined up around the corner. We were working out loose ideas onstage. We’d have some cool idea, then play it live and immediately know: ‘OK, fuck that song.’ And we’d move on. But we knew we were onto something.”

The residencies allowed Delta Spirit to dive deeper into the sound they minted on their 2007 debut LP, Ode to Sunshine—a mix of catchy, Beatles-like melodies, heavy, ballroom-piano grooves, riproaring guitars and vocals so energetic that they could’ve shot fire through the speakers. Like their EP, the album had enough leather-jacket swagger for the rock kids to lap it up and enough whiskey-bender looseness to gain some traction on the burgeoning modern folk-rock festival circuit.

The band laid down Ode to Sunshine in a cabin, dumpster-diving for food from Trader Joe’s and spending their limited income on booze.

“We were having sleepovers and getting way too drunk,” Vasquez says with a laugh. “I remember [co-producer] Eli Thomson, who was part of the Richard Swift camp, trying to calm us down. He made us run outside, around the block, and do 50 jumping jacks.”

They were barely legal rock-and-roll dreamers—and it felt like their dream was coming true. Ode to Sunshine was an underground hit, and Delta Spirit began touring nonstop, with Vasquez often climbing nightclub walls and generally losing his mind onstage.

“We felt like The Beatles running down the street in Hamburg,” Vasquez says. “Of course, we didn’t take over the world. But we were young. And that amount of delusion helps you really mean it when you play. I think of my 23-year-old self, that self-importance, that attitude of: ‘OK guys, here’s a song and it’s gonna change your lives. Are you ready?’ The older me looks at that young man, and I want to give him some grace. I want to pat him on the head and say, ‘It’s great that you mean that.’”

But from the beginning, a simple problem was bubbling: Vasquez just had too many songs. Delta Spirit operated by consensus. If one member wasn’t feeling a song—if he couldn’t play it with purpose— then it was left behind in the studio. Early on, Vasquez began seeking other outlets for his plethora of originals. The most notable was Middle Brother, a folk-rock supergroup he formed with Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Deer Tick’s John McCauley. The trio’s self-titled 2011 album rippled through all three bands’ fanbases.

“I was already having a crisis of confidence with Delta Spirit, so I needed that project so much at the time,” Vasquez remembers. “I’d written songs that I knew were good, but I’d gotten a ‘meh’ from my band. And they ended up being some of the most popular on [Middle Brother].”

Following Delta Spirit’s third, selftitled album in 2012, Vasquez needed to, once again, release the pressure valve. So he recorded his still-unreleased solo debut Solicitor, with the only parameter being “to make something Delta Spirit would never do.” That translated, he says, to “a tantrum on drum machines and synthesizers, really industrial and super-sarcastic.” But Delta Spirit’s management talked him out of releasing it—the band was on a roll.

However, it wasn’t just that Vasquez had too many songs. Though he was thankful that he could exorcise his rock-and-roll demons with Delta Spirit—they made serious, ‘come to God’ type rock—he also wanted to goof off and get weird, onstage and in song. But only one of those personas fit in his band.

“Matt has this exuberant personality, and he’d do some wild shit onstage that’d bring scowls from the whole band. We ended up wagging a finger at him,” Jameson says, while checking in from his home in Montreal. “That dynamic just couldn’t work; it crushes people. Matt felt creatively squashed by us, I knew it. Plus, we work very slowly, and all of us critique each song. That’s super frustrating to someone so prolific. He writes songs like crazy, and he likes most of them. Should he bring them to a band full of critics? That’s a tough question to answer.”

“The ship had just become too big to turn quickly,” Vasquez says.

The dissonance within the band was bubbling to the surface. What began as a deliriously fun project between five young, rock-obsessed friends had become a business, a career. Delta Spirit’s fourth album, 2014’s Into the Wide, was their first release that didn’t propel them forward.

“We had a meeting in Texas to listen to some new songs. I looked around the room at everyone and felt the vibe. Nobody’s head was in the game,” Vasquez remembers. “It felt like there was a chink in the armor of the band. And this band is way too important to all of us for anyone to give a half-assed effort. I thought, ‘If we don’t take a break and reset, in a few years, one of these guys is gonna quit.’”

After the meeting, Vasquez drove across the state to play a solo show and, as if in slow motion, witnessed a horrifying scene that would change everything.

“Someone had committed suicide on the freeway. I saw his bloody splash on the pavement. And that was the moment I made the decision that I had to walk away,” he says.

The following day, he called each of his bandmates individually to break the news. Vasquez saw that blood stain on the highway—a very real reminder that there isn’t a second to lose in this life—and he dove off the slow-turning ship and swam to shore alone.

***

After putting Delta Spirit on ice, Vasquez charged head on into his solo career. First came the cheekily titled Solicitor Returns in 2016, then the even more on-the-nose Does What He Wants in 2017. In 2018, Vasquez assembled a crew of friends—including Nathaniel Rateliff, Noah Gundersen and David Ramirez—for a nine-day marathon recording session, resulting in the shit-kicking album Glorietta and a national tour. Most recently, he dropped Light’n Up in 2019.

Vasquez’s solo music is equal parts sincere and silly. He’s recorded songs about fishing, trailer parks, ball pits and high thread count Egyptian sheets, as well as some gorgeous odes to his wife and son. He’s put together small, lean touring bands and crisscrossed the country as if he were being chased. In short, the creative energy that he kept bottled up while with Delta Spirit has exploded spectacularly.

Yet, it hasn’t all been jokes. Vasquez moved his family to Norway in 2017 to care for his father-in-law, a move that resulted in a deep depression and most of the songs on Light’n Up, including the pitch-black ballad “Oslo.”

“I played that song in Paris, and prefaced it by saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’m doing a lot better now,’” he says. “The Parisians laughed the whole way through.”

The rest of Delta Spirit moved on as well, touring with different bands, producing other musicians, raising families and pursuing a mix of other interests. Jameson began studying to become an Anglican priest. Winrich bought and renovated a bar in Brooklyn. Everyone got on with their lives, saving some space for the band they all loved dearly—and the friends they’d grown up with.

In late 2018, Vasquez began reaching out to his band of brothers, asking them if they’d give Delta Spirit another shot. His pressure gauge had been released— and he no longer had to hide away his weirder musical impulses. And he started to seriously consider that Delta Spirit could exist alongside his solo career.

“Look, we all wanted to make a record again. But we had to make sure we’d still have fun playing music together,” Jameson says. “We had to get in a room and feel the energy. There’s no point in making music together out of obligation. Delta Spirit isn’t a means to an end.”

Vasquez agreed with his old friends, and they started to develop a plan. “Fun was the biggest factor for me,” Vasquez says. “I missed Brandon, Kelly, Jon and Will so much. And when we all click in, it’s an unstoppable force. By 2015, it’d become too hard to get to that point. But I knew it was still there.”

So all five Delta Spirit members converged in New York, entering their rehearsal space unsure of what would emerge. Like their SoCal residency days, the band focused more on ideas than songs—a bass riff, a vocal melody. And they recorded every jam.

“Some ideas felt like old Delta Spirit— like we were ripping ourselves off. But when something unique and new would come about, our ears would perk up, and we would say, ‘Oh shit, where did that come from?’” Jameson says with a laugh. “More than playing any old songs, it was those moments that convinced me we that could do this again.”

Jameson and Winrich aren’t precious when describing Vasquez’s absence in their lives. But they recognize that he came back to them humbled, as an equal and as a friend, ready to find their groove once again.

“It felt like Matt was estranged and now he’s back, and we’re repairing those relationships,” Jameson says. “The rest of the band stayed in touch while Matt needed space. So coming back together in 2018, it felt like Matt coming home. We had no songs, we just wanted to play music together. And we moved forward from there.”

Throughout 2019, Delta Spirit ganged up in Texas to create what would become What Is There. They approached the sessions cautiously— guarded, even. But the more they opened up, the better the music sounded.

“We found it again— the place where everybody feels cool, everybody feels funny, everybody has a great time in Delta Spirit,” Vasquez says.

“We found the place where each person can communicate their persona through our music.”

The most immediate new persona on What Is There is Winrich, who shares vocal duties with Vasquez for the first time on the devastating breakup ballad “Just the Same.”

“There’s been a huge opening for the band. Kelly finally taking the mic,” Vasquez says, before trailing off and then shouting, “I’m so proud of him! And Will’s guitar solos are the best I’ve ever heard! And when Brandon and Jon click, there’s just nothing like it.”

The gorgeous, acoustic title-track closes the record—a love letter from Vasquez to his bandmates, written as an acrostic of their names. The lyrics read like a prayer for the universe to allow these five friends a few more moments of grace, a little more time as an unstoppable force and some more fun.

“If it’s one more record/ Let it play on forever,” Vasquez sings. “Keep flipping the B-side to the A/ May it remain in our memory/ The joy we found in the journey/ Never needed to get there anyway.”

To Vasquez, What Is There shows that “Delta Spirit is healthy, and we also have some work to do.”

“Everyone felt heard in these songs,” he says, before returning to his synthesizer. “But I can hear us getting even better. I can feel the growth. I can see the future. I have hopes again.”