Jonah Matranga has built his career on his own terms. The singer/songwriter is reluctant to use that word—career—but it would be difficult not to think of his musical output from the past 30 years in that manner. He has fronted bands like Far, Gratitude, and New End Original, collaborated with fellow post-hardcore legends, and released his own solo material, occasionally flirting with wider commercial success, all while remaining truly independent.
His latest album, Tenderwild, out on Iodine Recordings June 24, sees Matranga resurrecting his beloved onelinedrawing moniker some 18 years after laying it to rest. It’s a starkly personal album that explores concepts of love, togetherness and a hopeful future, while also observing the ugliness one has to navigate in modern America. It’s an album so sincere, only someone like Matranga could make it.
What made you return to the onelinedrawing moniker after all this time?
I’ve thought a lot about this lately. To tell you the truth, coming back to it was a pretty intuitive decision. Just all of the sudden I was like, “Why am I overthinking this? This is what this record needs to be; this is who I am as an entity in the world.” It just felt normal. I think it always did, but I’m very restless and I don’t like expectations. So onelinedrawing was a thing that started when Far was dissolving and it was just this sort of—who it was always was me and my guitar and some weird little microphones in my room—since I was 15 years old—but I kind of gave it a name when I realized how important that little personal outlet was for me.
So I just started calling that onelinedrawing. It was a concept I had around for a while and made a little cassette called Jonah’s onelinedrawing. It was just these weird little acoustic songs that Far wasn’t interested in. During that time—between the years of ’95-’98, I guess—I tried to get Far to play “Hostage”, “Better Than This”, “14-41”, “Yr Letter”, “Wings.” And so throughout Far, there’d be these tunes that, for one reason or another, the band wouldn’t be into, and it’s all love. But, so the point was there was these songs piling up that I really fucking loved and there wasn’t an outlet for them, and also my marriage was ending—a lot of things were happening.
So, it’s all to say that onelinedrawing came from that place, and then when Far did in fact break up and when I was kind of adrift all of the sudden this thing that was my little tiny personal outlet kind of had to sustain me, and so I went out started doing shows and putting out records and it was all just really survival. The first Sketchy EPs were literally demos that I just—basically the people that I was talking to on my little website were saying, “Look just release those and go and play,” and I just trusted that. So, that’s what onelinedrawing was, and then cut to from ’99 to 2001 or 2002, most lead singers had left their hardcore band and/or started solo projects with pseudonyms, and I’m not saying I made that happen but all I’m saying is that I was doing it and then a lot of other people were doing it.
So I started to feel a little bit like, “eh, this is starting to be a thing now.” And also emo was starting to be more of a commodity, which when Far was doing it certainly, and when I was doing it in my early, early solo stuff, it was not a word that was known. It was certainly not a word like it is now in the world. So as it started to become more of a scene, I noticed, or imagined or whatever, the crowds getting a little bit more expecting maybe this kind of mopey, really declarative, angsty thing. And I love doing that, clearly. I love a good mope, I love a good angst, I’m all about it. When it starts to be a thing that is commercially appealing, that disgusts me in a little bit of a way. It’s a little bit like how metal used to be totally for fucking misfits and nerds—like real metal. And then it became this really popular thing and I think I kind of understand how real fucking metalheads, of which I have never counted myself as one—I love heavy music—but being a real metalhead, I think there was a time when that was a not a real cool thing to be.
So I think I started to feel that way a little bit about my little post-hardcore emo kind of scene, because at first it was like, “We’re breaking all the walls down to really be face to face with each other,” and when that started to be a commercial hook that publicists were using to make bands cool, I just was not into that. So I think I kind of opted out. I ironically went back to a much more glossy thing with Gratitude at the time that I stopped using onelinedrawing, and then I thought, “Well I’ll just put out my solo shit under my name. Why not, it’s my name.” It felt right at the time. And then, cut to last year—this one gets a little bit more complex and COVID-y, but all I know is that when I was reflecting for a while being alone at home I just was thinking about who I wanted to be in the world, how I wanted to interface with the world, I was really getting sick of social networks, I was really understanding the way in which the algorithim is engineered to kind of upset us and I certainly wasn’t being my best self on the internet.
I wasn’t feeling good about—I don’t know, I just wasn’t feeling good. There was something about taking my name out of it—this thing that is so important to us as human beings—and just being onelinedrawing that not only did this record make sense as a onelinedrawing record, but it was more that I as an entity just realized, “Man, I’ve always been onelinedrawing when it comes to this thing that I do.” And there’s so many projects that I’ve done along the way—I Is Another, that I did with Ian Love; Camorra that I did with J (Robbins) and Zach (Barocas), the New End Original, which is just an anagram for onelinedrawing—all of these records could have been onelinedrawing records in a different universe. Not that other people weren’t incredibly important in them, but that’s the whole point. onelinedrawing was never about me alone, it was about me running around and doing shit with different people, and doing super heavy stuff and super soft stuff, and all of the things. And this record I feel like encompassed a bunch of stuff a lot, brought a lot of friends together, so in some ways it was the furthest thing from a solo record that I had done in a long time and onelinedrawing was never intended to be my little solo pseudonym. It’s just that I guess I’m the constant in it, but all I’m trying to do is get ideas out of my head in as personal and direct a way as possible. So this record definitely felt like that for me, but I have to say it was a little but more of a personal thing of, “This is who I am in this world,” and it for some reason just feels like home.”
You mentioned onelinedrawing started for you during this period of chaos and change—is there some similarity between that and your experiences over the past couple of years?
Yeah, I try not to make up too many stories about cause and effect because I think it’s impossibly complex and we get ourselves in a lot of trouble doing that. I certainly do. And it’s hard not to notice that these two times of pretty deep turmoil and lack of certainty around the future led back to this place. I do think that music is first and foremost, for me, a refuge from the world, a way to process the world, and the best part of me, I really do believe, comes out in the music. So, yeah, onelinedrawing—it’s interesting to me that it was my shelter at a very intense time in my life, and then many, many years later—and all the circumstances couldn’t have been more different.
In fact, a relationship was really settling in, and I was getting married, and there was a lot of uncertainty in sort of more positive ways. Back in the late 90s my band was teetering, my marriage was teetering, I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen, but the common thread is I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen. And I still don’t. I mean, I don’t know where my career sits. I’ve never really thought of having a career, honestly, I don’t really like that word. But what I do in this world where I trade time for money, and I trade my creativity for money, and I trade my energy for money—there’s nothing even close to a complaint in this—and shit is crazy right now for truly indie DIY musicians.
It’s easy to say yes, there’s all this democracy with streaming platforms, but again, if we look a little deeper, the algorithms and the pay-for-play, it’s all still in play. In fact, I think it’s worse than it ever was in the major label system, there’s just more of the illusion of democracy. But the fact is, music for better or for worse—again, it’s not a complaint, I just try to see things as they are in a simple way—music is just not as valuable as it was in our market place anymore. It exists and everyone has it, but that’s the point. Everyone can pay seven bucks or steal a password—not steal, but share a password, or steal if they want to, I guess—and have all the music in the universe ever. So it’s a very different relationship with music for better or for worse.
I grew up in kind of a bubble in the music industry. There was physical media; there wasn’t the internet,; especially post-Nirvana, there was a real sense of, who knows what’s going to make money, so let’s throw some money at these different, weird, misfit things. So I was the beneficiary of that, so I feel very grateful for that. And the last 20 years since the internet really took hold and physical media kind of died has been a really intense one, and I don’t know where that leads for me, and again I don’t care much about the professional part, I just need to know that I’m going to be able to survive.
My music has not changed in the sense that I adore it, and it still comes from the same place, and it will never ever, ever, ever, ever fucking be a way to pay the rent, I just try to be realistic around how I want to do it and where the money’s going to come from. So, it is an unsure time for me, there’s no way around it, and I’m just sticking to what I’ve always known, which is this is medicine for me, it seems like it can really be medicine for other people—and the same thing I’ve known since I was 14 or 15—I know I’m not a genius; I do think I have a spark.
I have something to give and so I’m just trying to give it as best as I can, but to your point I think onelinedrawing is a really wonderful reminder of that for me as well. So that might be why I came back to it at this time. Who knows, but I appreciate where you’re going with it and I share your sense of that’s probably connected.
Like you said, Tenderwild has a sense of looking forward in a positive, hopeful way, especially in the very first couple songs. Was the idea of being OK a catalyst behind this material?
Hell yes. I mean, since I wrote a song called “Tides” a millions years ago—there’s a middle eight that’s “Just show up / there is time / Just walk in the light / And all you desire / Will rise like tides,” and then the main repeating refrain is “This time next year / I won’t be here / By then I swear / I’ll be somewhere”—and it was basically me looking, again, a very un-sturdy, unsteady future in the face and realizing that I had two choices: I could be terrified of that, or I could be curious about it.
So I’ve really tried to lead with that, not because I’m really into the “power of positive thinking” but because if I’m looking into the future, why not imagine something positive, or at least neutral. Because I can disasterbate with the best of them, and I just don’t want to do that. It’s like torture that I don’t need to give myself. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but why not?
In terms of these songs in particular, the songs really lead the way. I think that’s why I referenced “Tides,” because it helped me realize a thing that then became a solid thing in my life.But the fact is, these two songs that lead off the record, “Get A Dog” and “Tenderwild”—I mean, “Get A Dog,” the minute I wrote it, I thought, if this makes it to an album, because I never know, I just write the songs and see what happens and see how they feel after a little while, but if it makes an album, it’s probably going to be the opener. It’s just such and inviting song. I mean lyrically, I just really like opening a record whenever I get a chance with kind of a soft thing that kind of lets people in at their own pace.
I really like an inviting lyric; I’ve written a bunch over the years. I think of a lyric with “Gratitude”: “It’s okay if you don’t show / But I want you to know that you’re invited.” The very first song I ever wrote that I find myself talking about a lot these days was called “Communication” and the chorus was just, “Please come talk to me / All I need is communication.” So it’s really a theme for me, and so “Get A Dog,” to me, is just really another song in that tradition of, today is another one of those days; we could look back on it in all the softest focused ways, and the refrain is “I want to know you.” It’s so simple. ”I want to know you.” “I Really Love Yr Company,” “I Want You To Be My Witness”—these are all these songs that I’ve written that are all these sort of pleas and promises with the world, like I want to do a thing.
And “Tenderwild” was both my wedding vows—so it was a very functional song, and so that tells you how giddy and romantic a song it is for me—and that’s what I want in this life is tenderwild love. Not just for me and my sweetheart, but for me and myself, for me with the world, for the world writ large. I love a tenderwild love. I love when things are sweet and vulnerable and real and a little bit wild, a little bit pushing it, a little bit fiery.I get off on that. So that was me partially—both those songs were begun before the whole crazy hit.
So there was also a thing of, I was in this really interesting (place); love was unfolding, and a lot was feeling possible, and then we hit this wall where, as a couple, we were stuck in our little fucking apartment, like a lot of people were, and really having to face each other in a way we hadn’t. And then the world just entirely falling apart, just going fucking mad. Beginning with dumpster fire being whatever terrorist president and just showing how insane our country has been for a while and him showing up as this zit on the face of American was step one, and then we get to COVID and all the insanity around people just ignoring science and hating each other and just deciding that their version of truth was much more important than any sort of empirically sharable idea of truth.
It was horrifying for me. I’ve grown up trying to control and fix and save people,, and so between white nationalism rearing it’s head and “Grab them by the pussy” motherfuckers getting airtime, just really some insane behavior on the part of both white people and men—my two central demographics—I was just feeling really just flipped out by everything and that it really had come to this. I had done so much fighting about all this stuff, so much activism, and I still am just as passionate about all those things, but I hit some sort of wall where I just realized, wow I’m just screaming at the ocean right now. There’s just this sort of wave of insanity washing over me that I really can’t do anything about, and I needed to batten down the hatches and take care of myself.
I realized that I could have gotten incredibly depressed and slovenly during the pandemic, and I made a very conscious choice to dig in and to, if nothing else, love myself and love my loved ones and get through this storm, and that’s what a lot of the rest of the record is about. It starts real giddy and then reality hits, which I think is a little bit like a baby being born. There’s all this sort of possibility, and then all the limitations of the world come around and the disappointments come around and the trauma comes around. And it’s about getting through that, so the rest of the record really became about that for me.
“This Is Water” is sort of the splash of cold water on the face as it were, of, like, oh my god I’m surrounded by this insanity, what am I going to do? ”Don’t Give Up” is my little balmy kind of thing. ”Serious Question” is another kind of call to arms or looking around for some community. I believe “When I Did Drugs Comes Next,” a really kind of another level down into like, fuck. “Everyday Angels” is a little shot of hope, like “Do we have this?” “Hell Of A Year” is a kind of pick up the pieces, kind of moody mournful kind of vibes. I did a duet with someone across the ocean to kind of have a sense of connectedness with someone far away who I had never met but maybe was going through the same thing as I was—another independent musician in Liam Frost.
“What I Know” is an incredibly old tune that was finished with friends which felt really beautiful—Zach (Lind) from Jimmy (Eat World) on the drums and a song I wrote with Norman [Brannon] of New End [Original] and Jeremy (Tappero) from Gratitude and New End producing it—it just felt like a family affair—and a new friend Rod Castro providing a bunch of guitars. And so that’s an anthem about reflection and recovery. And then “Hello From Here” is for my mom. I wrote it with her in mind, but it’s really just for anyone who has gone through a hard time with someone else, and they know they are family and they know they’ve been though some shit that they can’t unsee and can’t not remember anymore, like can’t deny it.
So you gotta be real and still love wins, and that’s how I was trying to feel about the world, and I was trying to feel about my mom who I just adore and we got history, it’s been a fucking weird life. And so I like to be honest about my love. And then “You’re A Home” is kind of back to a deep, sweet macaroni and cheese comfort food love song. So it really became this—it wasn’t on purpose at all, but when I look back at the sequencing and it’s all in my head now, I can see it, but the songs really led the way. That wasn’t me trying to make a concept album, it was just a chronicle of a pretty wild few years basically.
In those songs that deal with more political or societal issues, you are very candid, straightforward, and to the point. There is no imagery or metaphor.
I’ve very rarely written in any socio-political terminology that is particularly—I mean, it’s funny, I used the term MAGA, the Make America Great Again acronym, in “Hell Of A Year,” which was one of the most tied-to-a-moment things I’ve ever done in terms of the term. But I thought it was important because I think it’s important to mark this part in history where our democracy is either in the process of leaving or we just survived a really heavy battle with fascist forces, which might sound like hyperbole—especially now that we’re kind of okay again—but look at history, this shit goes down.
Big, beautiful countries turn into messes of horrifying genocide. Not that we don’t have enough of that to contend with already as country, but in terms of the very underpinnings of the democracy, however it’s been built and whatever the real history is, which needs to be acknowledged, but we’re in a crazy time right now. So at the same time I’m done fighting about it. To me the history is written, it’s pretty obvious, we have the internet now. I know that it cause confusion, but if you want to check your sources and really back through what happened it’s a pretty easy thing to do if you want to do it.
COVID was a really easy science thing that we just fucked up every step of the way, and anyone who wants to check the tape, there you go. White supremacy, if you care to look from slavery into Jim Crow into the creation of the police force, which was essentially a kind of post-slavery way to control black people, into just the voting rights battles and the New Deal giving away a bunch of houses to where, I mean, the math is there. I’m tired of sharing articles and sharing data. I’m tired of fighting.
I’m just talking about my own experience. ”When I Did Drugs,” the first verse of that, “When I did drugs and ran around / We were kids, we owned that town / We’d steal for fun and we’d get caught / We would run but we wouldn’t get shot.” I love the way that falls to people because it’s not a political song, it’s me reflecting on my childhood as a fucking, for the first bunch of years real poor, and then for my adolescence, not as desperately poor but pretty beat up and fucked up and getting into a shit ton of trouble. I mean, vandalism, drugs, the whole 9—probation—and not once being fucking thrown up against the cop car, much less shot.
I mean, yeah, all I can do is tell my story and all I really wish anyone would do, frankly. If people want to be historians and do that, and that’s what they do and they love, I love you and I love people for providing data and writing it in clear ways—I’m a songwriter. And again coming back to the onelinedrawing thing, that’s what I want to do, is I just want to write songs that certainly pierce my heart and get me to think about things, and get me to check out my blindspots.
That’s the main thing—I’m not trying to fucking give anyone else advice—and I do believe that being really personal about it is the way to the universal, and if there is any way I’m going to change a heart or a mind around these issues I’m talking about, it’s not going to be with one of my many lectures. I’m just so tired of myself on that level and I just love being as real as I can in the music. In “This Is Water” it’s a more general thing, but ‘Growing up poor as dirt / Gotta know if you get hurt / You can call 911 / but nobody’s gonna come.” It’s just true. The lighter your skin is and/or the more loot you have in this world the better off your existence, and we can scream or cry and fight about that and deny it all we want, but there it is. I just want to sit with that and go through it, go through the feelings of that. How confusing is it that I’ve benefited from all this stuff, clearly, by any measure. My dream is that other people in positions of privilege, whether it’s from being a man of any color, or being a white person of any gender, or being anywhere on the gender and sexual preference spectrum, but having one or the other of these privileges, I just want everyone to look at their shit. That’s all I want, and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to bully people into that with my smarts and my whateverness, and I’m just kind of tired about all that stuff. I don’t feel ashamed.
I’m doing my best, but at this point I just want to tell my story and it’s not truth with a capital T, it’s just me. Hopefully that’s infectious because I’m a utopian in the sense that if we could just shut the fuck up and tell our honest truth to each other with each other, make some real apologies, make some real reparations on whatever level we want to do that in, we got a shot. If not, we’re fucking doomed. I don’t know how else to say it. I think in the end of “What I Know” where I say—like in the chorus I say, “We might be failures or just unkind,” and then at the end of the tune I kind of scream, “We’re not just failures.” I really believe that’s true; we aren’t. We aren’t doomed to fail, we aren’t doomed to sin, we aren’t doomed to be these broken creatures. We’re humans who have made up some really wild shit about being human, or really about being an animal, but we call ourselves human and say we’ve got whatever, infinite spirits and unique qualities not found anywhere else in the animal kingdom. To me all that is nonsense, I’m just done fighting about it. I’m just an animal in the world trying to do my thing and this is what I love to do so I hope other people love it to.
From a musical perspective, is this your poppiest batch of songs?
I think it’s certainly the cleanest thing I’ve put together in a while in terms of production. I would say mostly I give that up to Jeremy because he’s just a really great producer and engineer and mixer. He really loves a down-the-middle, let’s preserve this song in the sweetest, biggest way possible. So, no, I mean, shit, I love the tunes. I think there’s some bangers on there, but in terms of straight poppy tunes, there’s a few for sure.
I would say, to me, “Tenderwild” is the straightest, to me, pop, summer, fizzy—in the tradition of “Smile” or “Lukewarm” or something, that kind of vibe. ”This Is Water” is cool, but it’s kind of weird. It’s got a real big chorus, and I think it’s poppy, but I don’t know where it fits in genres basically. ”Don’t Give Up” is a real sweet ballad, but it gets pretty dense in the second verse. ”Everyday Angels” I think honestly it could have been that something really—I love the tune—it could have been something more expansive; there’s just something about the studio that didn’t quite make it through to the glory of what it could have been on a pop level. And then besides that there’s some pretty—”Hell Of A Year,” “When I Did Drugs,” “What I Know”, they’re pretty meditative tunes. ”Hello From Here” is a sweet little number, but I wouldn’t call it poppy by any stretch. It’s more of a campfire pop song, I guess. And then “You’re A Home” is kind of ballady and stuff.
To me it goes down to how I presented it. There’s a way that I could have done this record, if I had done it on my own, R2 style, it would have been super lo-fi and it would have read I think like a lot of the Sketchy‘s, like Visitor maybe, like The Volunteers. I think it’s closest relative is probably The Volunteers except with a little more guitar muscle consistently courtesy of Jeremy and Rod and the people around me, and just courtesy of bigger, more streamlined production, which really is just honestly working with another human being. And Norman, who also was a big part in making the record in his own beautiful way, he said to me a long time ago that there’s something different about when I really let people in and collaborate with them.
Not better or worse, but different. And so I think what you’re hearing is that you’re hearing me frankly in a band atmosphere, even though it’s a onelinedrawing or solo record, and it’s the most band atmosphere that I have ever let a solo record be, but that was on purpose. It was like, I want to let people in, I felt so disconnected from the world in so many ways so I really wanted—you know, we were all just sitting on our asses trying to figure out what to do when we were making this record, so it’s very much just people connecting through music. But I think that’s what you hear, is just me not leaning so much on my idiosyncrasies but leaning rather more on other people and letting them in. So that’s what I take from the record.
What is your inspiration when writing songs like “Tenderwild” or “This Is Water” that have these big hooks?
The two artists that I most often say put these two in a blender and you got something like me is Prince and Tom Petty. ”Tenderwild” is not a bad example of that. It starts off in an incredibly sparse, simple chordal way with this interesting melody over this weird loop of—it’s three chords but looping in a four bar system, so it’s very Prince-y in a lot of ways and it’s very stripped back, which again is very Prince verse. And then the chorus is a million percent Tom Petty. It’s such a “Won’t Back Down” kind of chorus. But at the same time, the chords of the chorus of “Tenderwild” are literally the same chords of the chorus to “Smile,” so it might just be the language of my “When The Sun Comes Out” or something. I’m a pretty simple creature when it comes down to it and the songs lead the way.
It was just me trying to express the giddiness and the fear and the doubt and ultimately this surrender into love. I guess that’s what that sounds like musically, but when I do think of—it is a pretty down the middle song for me in the sense of it’s leaning on some aesthetics that I’ve just really been in love with for a long, long time. I mean I grew up surrounded by The Cars and Aerosmith and the band Boston, and then The Clash and U2 and The Pretenders and this post-punk thing that was happening and REM. A lot of those bands, if you go back and listen to them, it’s a lot of pretty stripped back, very melodic verses into big old gorgeous choruses. So I think I just love that form. I love getting real weird too, but to me there’s nothing like a solid chorus full of hooks and then a lose-your-shit chorus.
If there is one song you hope people connect to from Tenderwild, which is it?
I think it’s gotta be “Don’t Give Up.” That’s a song that in some ways has been around and fully completed. There’s actually a demo of “Don’t Give Up” that I left up on Spotify, that I put up just for a fun a bunch of years ago, and it actually got some streams and stuff, it kind of got out there. I think that song has, whether it’s in the really simple chorus, ‘Don’t give up no matter what now,” it’s just a very simple sentiment. ”Don’t you stop / Don’t give up.” I believe in that, and I think that’s the one if there is any one of these tunes that’s going to find a place in the world beyond me, I think it’s that one. I love it.
I have dreams of all of them being—”Hello From Here” is just the most comforting song to me. It’s the most comfortable real song about really loving someone over a whole life and all the things that happen. So I dream of all of those things happening, but I think “Don’t Give Up” is the one that I would say, yeah. “Tenderwild” has got the fizzy pop; “This Is Water” is like the big anthem, and both of those have their moments for sure, but “Don’t Give Up” is the one I think we all—at the end of the day we just want a sweet little number to kind of help us get through it, and “Don’t Give Up” is that for me.
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Listen to “Tenderwild” here:
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Photo courtesy of Phill Mamula
