Midnight Channel Blends Delusional Romance and Brazilian Rhythms on First-Ever Vocal Single, “Must Be Nice”
Midnight Channel surprises longtime listeners with their first-ever vocal track, “Must Be Nice” – a dreamy, rhythm-forward blend of bossa nova melancholy, delusional romanticism, and subtle frustration. With vocals by Geneva Murphy, the Lethbridge-based jazz collective explores what it feels like to be left behind in love and how powerful it is when someone finally sees you.
“Must Be Nice” is a love song about how hard it is to even get a date, let alone meet people who see you. It’s a reflection on that third-wheel feeling from high school, when everyone around you seems to be finding connection, and you’re stuck focusing on all the “self-work” people tell you to do. It’s about longing, being left out, and how powerful it is when you finally do meet someone.
The song is lush and layered, blending soft Latin grooves with warped jazz harmony, cuíca and berimbau percussion, and a moody, meditative vocal performance. Guitarist Austin Phillips flips his strings upside down – literally – to craft piano-like voicings, while Matthew Erdmann’s production channels cosmic textures using a Yamaha YC-30 portamento strip, à la Sun Ra. The result is a richly expressive, emotionally off-kilter song about the ache of watching connection happen around you and wondering when it’ll be your turn.
Matthew Erdmann (Bassist) says,
“Must Be Nice” is a love song about how hard it is to get a date, let alone meet people. It’s meant to remind you of third-wheeling your best friend and his girl in high school while seeing everyone around you connect while you’re stuck doing all the self-improvement people tell you to do.
First off, care to introduce yourself to our readers?
My name is Matthew Erdmann, and I play bass and kamale n’goni in Midnight Channel. I also produce our records and write some of our songs.
Tell us a bit about your recent release.
Must Be Nice is kind of a new one for us; it’s more of a pop song than what we’ve ever done before. I always write lyrics for my songs to make sure they have decent phrasing in the melody, but I never tell anyone what they are. When we ran the song at practice, our tenor saxophonist Stu mentioned to me that the song sounded like it should have words, to which I had to reply, “It kinda does, actually…” I’ve been nervous about making the words to my songs public because I’m just not used to that level of vulnerability, especially with a song with these kinds of delusional lyrics. I’m used to my instrumental stuff being out there, but my songs with lyrics? Nah, that’s different to me for some reason. When writing the song, I imagined it being sung like those ’60s bossa/pop-jazz records. Stuff like Stan Getz, João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Sergio Mendes, Ivan Lins, and so on. I wanted to highlight some Brazilian instruments as well that most people might not know of, like the cuica and berimbau you can hear throughout the song. I love Brazilian music so much. It’s intricate and complex, but always done in a way that’s not distracting. I hope I captured some of that energy.
Once we played it enough, we decided it should be a vocal song. We had the song and the lyrics, but I had no idea who would sing it. Our keyboardist, Chris, had performed a couple of times with Geneva Murphy, a singer who was finishing up a university degree at the time. Other musicians that we knew gave her high praise, too, so we reached out, and to my surprise, she wanted to do it! I was almost certain that my lyrics might have been too weird for a stranger to want to sing out loud. I didn’t meet her until the day we recorded, but she had the perfect voice for the song, and I was thankful for the network of really talented performers we have to rely on. Lethbridge might be a small town, but you really do meet the right people quickly.
On this new album, we wanted to condense things to be a bit more approachable to most listeners and hopefully make a bigger impact in a shorter amount of time. We approached it more as a pop album where, if we wanted, we could break the rules a bit and overdub things, or add in instruments later that we couldn’t use otherwise. Most of us are multi-instrumentalists, so it was nice to allow ourselves the option to add more after the fact if we thought it would fit. This would mean adding in extra percussion parts, synths, or even just adding effects to instruments in a way we couldn’t do live. We didn’t want to over-produce, but produce it just enough where it still felt natural. 90% of what you’re hearing on the record is still live off the floor, though, expertly recorded by local engineering legend Matt Rederburg.
How do you typically go about the songwriting process? Do you have a specific method or creative routine that you follow?
We will usually write our songs individually, then bring the charts to practice and play them together. At practice, we iron out anything that feels unnatural, figure out the form, and shape the rhythms we want to use. Everyone fills in their role on their given instrument, and just like that, we have a new song. We normally approach our songs the way you’d approach a jazz standard, which is more about adapting to each other and less about rigid part writing. Some songs, however, like our last single, Alien Love Song, became more rigid as a result of practicing and led to a more Japanese fusion style of song, which we also like very much.
Looking ahead, what are your plans for supporting this new release? Are there any upcoming tours, music videos, or additional content that fans can look forward to in connection with this project?
The album is going to be released on September 12 of this year, so please check it out if you like what we’re doing because I think we cover a lot of ground on it as far as songwriting goes. We also have a tour planned for the Fall, where we’ll be hitting the road on weekends in western Canada. We’ll post more about these through our Instagram as we get closer to the dates. We were also just announced in the first wave of artists at Swamp Fest in Regina, so you can catch us there in early September.
We always have lots of fun merch largely designed in-house by our percussionist Gabby that people can buy online off our website too if they can’t make it out to the shows. There will be another single and music video coming out next month, which will be a very different kind of jazz from Must Be Nice.
Looking back on your musical career, is there a particular moment or accomplishment that you consider a turning point or a highlight?
To me, it was meeting the people that I’m playing with now in Midnight Channel and playing the first session that we did at Nikka Yuko, our local Japanese Garden. The reception to our first show at the Garden was so warm compared to other performances that I had done. It was at that moment that I knew this was something I wanted to keep doing. Everyone in the band wants to be here and contribute, and we have gained so much support from so many people here locally in Lethbridge and Southern Alberta that it makes everything we’re doing feel like it’s worth it.
Last but not least, it’s time to pay it forward. What upcoming band or artist would you recommend your fans check out?
Our longtime friends and collaborators here in Lethbridge, the Cool Cats Combo, just put out a new album a couple of weeks ago called Cool Cats & Friends. I really like how clear the production is on their record, and it’s a very enjoyable listen top to bottom. I’d also like to shout out my friends Black Mana and Fryman from Vancouver, who put out a really fun jazz/hip-hop record earlier this year called WE’RE SO BACK. Lots of funny lyrics and old school fusion grooves to be had here. Some of us in Midnight Channel played on that record too.