E-Mail This Article to a Friend Passion plays Eric Matthews’s well composed pop BY JONATHAN PERRY
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Boston sports teams aren’t the first topics you’d expect chamber-pop sophisticate Eric Matthews to start chatting about at the outset of a conversation about his first album in eight years. But as Matthews — who grew up and still resides in Portland, Oregon — points out, he spent the early 1990s living in Somerville, which is where he became fast friends with Sebadoh drummer Bob Fay, who introduced him Richard Davies, his future collaborator in the short-lived, critically adored duo Cardinal. Besides, with the recent Red Sox and Patriots championships, this is a great time to talk Boston sports if you’re a fan.

And Matthews, whose third solo album, Six Kinds of Passion Looking for an Exit, has just been issued on Empyrean, a new imprint that’s been launched by the Rhode Island label Wishing Tree, is. "I loved living there. I grew up a Celtics fan. In the ’80s, you were stuck watching the Celtics or the Lakers on TV one way or the other. I really believed that Reggie Lewis was going to be one of the most special players. That was so weird when he dropped dead."

A few folks may have wondered whether Matthews hadn’t suffered a similar fate in the years since his last release, 1997’s Lateness of the Hour, the second of two solo discs of lavishly arranged orchestral pop, following It’s Heavy in Here in 1995. Given Sub Pop’s rough-hewn punk æsthetic, these were brazenly anachronistic offerings that put Matthews’s balm-smooth voice and elegant flourishes of strings and brass and formalist pop song structures center stage, the work of a budding musician who after seeing Star Wars as a kid yearned not to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker but John Williams. But the glowing reviews they received couldn’t save Matthews from being dropped during those days of corporate mergers and shrinking rosters. "I had confidence in my material, but of course I was cocky and said, ‘I will be re-signed within a matter of weeks!’ " It would take him years, not weeks, to get a new deal. Meanwhile, he stayed busy behind the scenes, working on other people’s music and stockpiling his own compositions. He even showed up on Paula Kelley’s 2003 disc, The Trouble with Success or How You Fit into the World (Kimchee), contributing trumpet and flügelhorn. But his own songs went unheard. "I was beginning to wonder if it was ever going to happen again."

Matthews’s fortunes changed as he and his old Cardinal mate Davies — from whom he had been estranged since the band’s disintegration — began working together with Wishing Tree to prepare the 1994 Cardinal, which had been released by the now-defunct Flydaddy label, for a deluxe-treatment reissue. (Matthews, who holds joint ownership rights to the album with Davies, reports that there will be 11 bonus tracks.) Wishing Tree co-owner David Silva asked Matthews what he was up to. "Nothing," Matthews recalls saying. "Sight unseen, never even hearing a song, he said, ‘We’d love to do a record with you,’ Either he’s a fool or he believes in the right people."

Matthews considers Six Kinds of Passion a "mini-album," with seven tracks clocking in at just under 34 minutes; even so, it’s longer than the original Cardinal. Picking up where they left off, his melodies glide, gleam, and soar. His sensual tenor combines elements of Nick Drake, Joe Pernice, and Zombies singer Colin Blunstone, and echoes of psych-pop masterworks like the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle and Love’s Forever Changes reverberate in tracks "You Will Be Happy" and "Underground Song." Pristine embellishments of horn and piano set against warmly strummed acoustic guitars give the material a plush but uncluttered sophistication. There’s even a tender tribute to his old band and friend, "Cardinal Is More."

"Richard and I hadn’t spoken since ’96 or so, and it was simply time for boys to be men because we were partners in business. We talk, things are friendly, and that stirred something in me. It made me reflective, in a way I hadn’t been in a while about Cardinal and my relationship with Richard." As for future Cardinal-related projects, he says, "we’re just taking it one step at a time. If we can get through this [reissue] process without killing each other, we’ll probably work together again on something." At the moment, though, Matthews says Davies is tied up working on a solo album of his own. Guess who Davies has asked to help with string arrangements?