How Sweet It Is

Lock the back door improperly and attach the trailer to your vehicle.

Begin transit from point A to point B, but along the way you'll fail to notice as a road case and classic guitar fall from the U-Haul into the middle of a busy highway. Next you'll continue driving, oblivious, only realizing the mistake one mile later.

Suddenly you'll stop, scream in alarm and send two crew guys sprinting back down the highway for the aforementioned mile. Amazingly, your crew guys will find your gear unharmed. They'll dodge traffic until they're within 100 feet of said gear, risking life and limb. But as your crew guys get closer, so does an ill-timed semi.

As the semi barrels toward you, you'll hold your breath and watch in horror as the road case and guitar are smashed into thousands of tiny pieces.

Welcome to a bad day in Matthew Sweet's life on the road. But don't worry -- it gets a little easier, he said.

"Touring is certainly something that, over the years, I've definitely grown fonder of than in the beginning," Sweet said.

Sweet, an alternative rock singer/songwriter with an ear for classic, Beach Boys-esque pop, has been described as an amalgamation of the Beatles, R.E.M. and Neil Young. His 1991 album Girlfriend won critical acclaim and reached the top five on the modern rock charts, and his 1994 effort, 100% Fun, received radio airplay with "Sick of Myself." He even collaborated with comedian Mike Myers, co-writing "BBC" for Myers' hit "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery."

After a greatest hits compilation and a few brief tours promoting 1999's In Reverse, Sweet ditched his record label and set out on his own.

Faced with the task of self-promotion, he accepted offers for double-night bookings in Chicago and New York. From these club dates spawned his current tour across the Midwest and East Coast. All in all, Sweet will visit 11 states and the District of Columbia in less than a month.

Now, after four or five years away from N.C. clubs, Sweet will roll in to Cat's Cradle on Thursday.

Traveling from state to state via tour bus (mostly due to his extreme fear of flying), Sweet said touring definitely has its pros and cons.

"I would say I like touring from the standpoint of getting to see the people that care about the records -- that's super gratifying," he said.

The touring process also has allowed Sweet the opportunity to visit his family, most of whom still live in his native Nebraska, more often.

But being forced to leave the comforts of home behind is trying, if not physically exhausting. While most of his longest tours have lasted only three months, Sweet has toured for almost an entire year with only an occasional three-week break to recuperate.

While the play-late, get-up-early and do-promotions-all-afternoon lifestyle may suit the musician, that doesn't mean the lifestyle will always suit the spouse. But Sweet said time spent apart from each other, on the other hand, is somewhat more manageable.

"Although I would like to have my wife with me, I know she would hate it," Sweet said. "We learned early on in our relationship how to deal with (the separation) so it's never really been a problem."

Besides his wife, Sweet said he wished he could take his four cats and the ability to get a normal night's sleep with him on the road. En route, a lot of time is taken up with promotional activities such as radio appearances and telephone interviews, but trying to fit in seven to eight hours of sleep is a necessary precursor to a good performance, he added.

He also recommended that the touring musician always carry "a cell phone and an extra course of antibiotics; you almost always get sick."

Sweet has slowly put touring on the back burner over the past four to five years of his career. He said that this change is partially due to a narrowing music market, citing live music's declining popularity in the Internet age.

In the meantime, Sweet is working on a book focusing on artists such as Margaret Keane, Gig and Maio and their portrayal of harlequins, paintings that depict children or animals with droopy, unusually large eyes.

Part of the book is based on Sweet's own collection of harlequin works, from which one of Keane's 1963 paintings was chosen as the cover image of In Reverse. On the current road tour, Sweet is conducting interviews with other art collectors and relatives of the artists themselves as research.

The future for Sweet is somewhat uncertain. He's contemplating releasing a live record or a demo compilation, but he is caught in a debate over whether to sign to another record label or just produce his own next album.

"If I do sign to a label it will probably take a bit of time (before another album is produced)," he said. "It's kind of hard to say at this point."

The Arts & Entertainment Editor can be reached at artsdesk@unc.edu.