What I am Listening to: Matt Berry

I don’t remember where I first heard Matt Berry (some streaming platform like Spotify or Pandora) but I quickly fell in love. Now, my friends were already fans, but it took me a bit. I don’t watch a lot of TV and in comparison to the average American in 2022, I am a Luddite. But I have watched the British sitcom The IT Crowd and I do know Berry in his role as Douglas Reynholm. I don’t feel like I can talk about Berry without some comparison to Jack Black. Black is definitely a huge fan of the rock songs of his youth, but he celebrates them with a knowing smirk. Berry as musician is weird, because well, it’s not weird. It doesn’t come across as parody or satire, he legitimately is trying to make 70s style progressive rock and psychedelic folk. Maybe it is because that era provided unintentional laughs that when Berry sings “There'll be smoke and lots of magic Cinder, too, and acrobatics”, it’s hard to decipher if he is aiming for a chuckle or not He’s now 9 albums in and though I am new to the discography, any amount of reading about his career reveals each album gets better and he’s dropped in influences like jazz, funk, and country rock. All of this leading to 2021s The Blue Elephant showing up on Best Ofs While Berry continues to grow, his best moment surely is his signature song -2011’s “Take My Hand” and rightly so - it feels immediately recognizable and yet doesn’t feel derivative. In short, while trying to copy the great masters, he made a masterpiece of his own.