Matt Charette was born and raised in Mashpee, at the foot of Cape Cod – “My mother’s a hair stylist and my dad’s a truckdriver,” he says. “My dad listened to a lot of John Prine when I was growing up and my mother loved Bonnie Raitt. She had every single Bonnie Raitt cassette tape in her Toyota Tercel.” Matt’s first guitar was his mom’s nylon-string acoustic, which he found under her bed when he was nine. It needed some repair, and his Aunt chipped in a chordbook, and that was it – as Matt says “I realized quickly that I had an ear. Pretty much anything I listened to, I could figure out.” Left to his own devices he inclined towards punk, and his dad realised that a classical guitar was not really the thing for playing along to The Clash and so got him, at age 12, a Hohner copy of a Les Paul and a low-watt solid-state amp – and that saw him through his school bands.
And with a relocation to Boston it seemed at first as if it would be punk and hardcore all the way – but, wouldn’t you know it, and perhaps drawing on those early home musical influences, Matt Charette is also a traveller on that now well-worn path from punk to Americana. His current band The Truer Sound, play sturdy rock and roll buoyed by organist Chris Coughlin’s Hammond M-3 licks and with a country influence in the lilt of Cody Nilsen’s pedal-steel. Drummer Greg Hoffman and bassist Nick Scotti form the rhythm section . Their second album ‘Lo Fi High Hopes‘ draws some inspiration from Steve Earle’s early-era Dukes release.
Matt Charette told us that ’Going Down Swinging’ is “about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. As long as you do it with love. It’s my anti-racist, anti-fascist, pro-kindness, pro-acceptance statement of hope.”
