I spoke to Matthew about his new Best of, which begs an exploration of his career thus far. The humble rock everyman looked at what's behind and what's ahead, while sharing what goes into those criminally catchy tunes. And armed with the following, we now know not to call him a "craftsman" or a "retro rocker." Oh yeah -- and you don't have to worry about him when he sings that he needs "Someone to Pull the Trigger."

Putting together Time Capsule, was it hard to narrow down the selection? What was your role in the project?
The record itself is a contractual obligation. It's the last thing I owed under my original Zoo contract that's been passed around through the years. So I knew I had to do it, and we wanted to be involved in it so that it didn't come out later on without my involvement. I kind of dreaded (laughs) having to listen to all the stuff I'd done over the years, and then sit there and go, 'This is all I did for 10 years or whatever.' We tried to pick songs that were my more serious songs, maybe not so much fun songs that might be favorites of fans or big in concert. So those are the things that are missing -- the more goofy, fun things like 'Evangeline' and 'Come to California.'

Are there tracks from your first two albums that you wish could have been included?
Maybe if it was a two-disc set and was really trying to be comprehensive. For starters, they would've had to get rights for those records. Most of the fans only know me from Girlfriend on, so it's not like there's a huge amount of demand coming from them for that. Add that together with how little space we had. In a way it was a relief that we weren't considering those records. I think I could pick a song or two that means something to me, but I just figure someday we'll make a compilation that's more like that.

These liner notes say that between Blue Sky on Mars and In Reverse you wrote over 150 songs. Sounds like you'll have a great out-takes collection someday.
In that time frame I had an extra-ordinary amount of time, because I spent a bunch of time trying to get out of the deal, which meant I had a lot of time at home. And when I have free time at home and I'm thinking toward making a record I'll just tend to write a lot. To call them all songs is maybe a little loose. I'm sure there are a lot of experimental pieces in there that are a little different than traditional song structure. It is true -- I did demo that many songs. Out of those songs I think I had it down really easily to 30 or 35 songs that I was interested in at all. There's kind of a high error rate, and that's part of why I like to write a lot. But it does leave a lot of stuff, and I'd love to release all those demos someday. I'd have to figure out how I'd do that.

You've tried a few different production styles, from the rough-and-ready Brendan O'Brien approach to the Phil Spector thing. Are there other sound directions you'd like to explore?
There's a part of me where every time I write a new song I think, 'Oh, it's just another song. It's like all songs. What could I do to break the form of it and actually have it be totally new?' I find that when I make albums it's almost always totally dictated by what I write, and so what style I decide to do it in tends to be secondary. Today I don't have a clear idea of some new production type I'd like to try. I do have a vague feeling that I'd love to shatter some boundaries. Part of me feels like to go in a real, raw direction would be a very radical thing to do right now, when, to me anyway, records have become perfect and poised and lost a lot of that spontaneous, earthy kind of quality that made them really engaging in years past. Part of me wants to break away from what's considered normal and commercial, and then, on the other hand, I've got to figure out how to live and where I'm gonna make records, or if I'm just gonna do it on my own.

Under what circumstances do you get your best writing done?
Part of me thinks, 'Don't have any rules. Let it come when it comes,' and part of me feels like if I get in the mode of writing and I get in that swing where I'm doing lots of demos. I would say I've tended toward liking records when they have something of that free, inspirational feeling. I don't like it when records are only technical. I get called a craftsman a lot, and I always kind of bristle at that, because to me, what's important in music isn't what comes out of that so much. I like to be alone [when writing]. Sometimes I'll tinker around all day and not really focus on it, and then I know my wife's gonna come home from work in a couple hours, so I'll just jam and do everything, the whole song, because I have a little time limit. In the beginning, when I didn't have a career doing music, I felt guilty when I would spend all day in the dream world of recording. Now, where it's supposed to be my job, I have to divorce myself from that and get into my private world again.

Do you ever experience writer's block?
I don't think I've ever felt like I just can't write anything. I feel a feeling that's a little like that, especially lately, where I've written so many songs over time that I want to surprise myself and find something that seems new to me. That seems to be harder. In the beginning I'd just write and write, and it was all new and wondrous. Now it's like I'm looking for something that's beyond just writing a bunch of songs. That's a hard thing to live up to record after record -- just for yourself, let alone that everybody else judges you.

To what extent have your seven albums reflected your personal life at the time you were writing them? Do you sometimes draw upon other times and places?
I've often gone to pains to say that it's not all autobiographical. I'm not in some terrible relationship all the time where something's going vastly wrong. The feelings I try to get in songs are really universal. I feel anxiety or fear or happiness or any of those things. So, to that extent they are autobiographical, and that was one reason why when I put this thing together, I dreaded feeling and hearing all of that again. In a way I dreaded that maybe it would feel like nothing to me when I heard it. Luckily, it worked really well. Mostly it was a huge emotional experience for me. I got in the car and drove up along the coast highway so I'd have a good two or three hours that I knew I wouldn't be distracted and no one else would hear me blasting this thing that I felt vaguely embarrassed about. So I just kind of listened to the whole thing, and mainly it just gave me a lot of really warm feelings. I thought a lot about the people I was working with during that time, the experiences making the records. I really have been lucky over the course of my career that I really liked everybody I worked with. I never worked with people I didn't feel a real personal connection to, and that makes it easy to go back and listen, regardless of what the records are like. Then I also thought about the feelings I had when I wrote those songs and what I was like during that time. I thought I was really crazy and a mess when I made Altered Beast, but it made it cool. I didn't think, 'Oh man, that girl when I wrote that song.' Usually, they're more general than that.

Do your loved ones worry about you when they hear a song like 'Someone to Pull the Trigger'?
It's funny, because in retrospect you would think everybody would have really been worried. They should've been, because I was really having a hard time dealing with it personally -- suddenly having this job and having to hear about myself all the time. Although it was exciting and good, I think people who experience that learn that it isn't all exciting and good just because you have fame or financial success at some level. People who know me really well know that I've always written lots of songs, and that I've always dabbled into that bottomless pit of anxiety. Maybe it just seems natural to the people who know me that, 'Oh, he always writes a lot of miserable songs like that.'

I saw you live, and you prefaced 'I've Been Waiting' by saying that it was possibly the only pure, non-jaded love song you've written.
I fell in love with Lisa. She's my wife now -- we've been married for seven years, and I still love her. It is a testament that relationships can be good, even with a crazy, dysfunctional person or two in them. I remember so well when I wrote that song, because I was so in love. I woke up in the morning and wrote that song in like 10 minutes and recorded it right then. I remember that feeling really strongly. That's really the way you wish every song would be, [like] bang! it popped into your head and it was really inspired. That's the magic time when you're so carried away with the feeling inside of you that you have to express it. That's a really personal way to go about doing music, and that's why it's probably so easy for it to get crushed underfoot by success and all those things that happen to you. It's harder to get in that mode of inspiration.

You tend to be associated with the musical styles of the '60s. What other stuff would people be surprised to hear that you're into?
A lot of the stuff I was really into as a teenager that made me want to write songs were artists that were more from the late '70s, early '80s -- people like Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, the songwriters out of that snotty, edgy English punk rock scene. I don't know if people would be surprised I like those people, but I think they don't realize that I like a range of stuff over time. I'd say people don't know that I'm a huge country rock fan, largely out of my fandom for Gram Parsons. I always have to watch those Gram Parsons tributes go by, and I'm like, 'I love him more than any of you.'

I guess because Girlfriend was so stylized more like the '60s Beatles-sounding records, that's always been really strongly associated with me, even though other records I've made are not very '60s-y. Blue Sky on Mars owes probably as much to my New Wave teenage years. Even the bands, and not those songwriters -- like Generation X, XTC and The Clash. 100% Fun is really not very '60s. I tried to make a lot of records where I didn't want them to be specifically retro. It's another thing that kinda bugs me. I get called a retro rocker. I've never really had the kind of reverence for the style, where it all has to be exactly the same sounds and exactly like it was then. I like a lot of sounds from then, but I care much more about the feeling from the music and the inspiration.

You were a big force in '90s music. How do you think the '90s will be remembered musically, and how would you like them to be remembered?
The thing that was great about the early '90s, when Girlfriend came out and things started to happen for me, was college radio. It really was alternative music. It was so far from the music that was on the radio. It was everything that music wasn't. Then it became big on college radio with bands like R.E.M. To me, without an R.E.M. to open the door, not only can there not be people like me, but there wouldn't be people like Nirvana. I'm sure Kurt Cobain would say the same thing, because I know he loved them. R.E.M. came along, and they were so different. When I had R.E.M.'s first records before people knew about them -- when they put out Chronic Town -- they were nothing like the things all my friends listened to. All of a sudden there popped up these commercial stations that had kind of college radio playlists, and they had some success with that. It grew and grew, and out of that came all these really successful bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

As far as me in that era, I was always kind of a fringe person. I never had the really big hits, or got big attention. It was a rarity for there to be a singer-songwriter kind of guy during that time. There was a period on the tail of that, but it really focused more on women. In a way it's a good thing, because now I don't feel like I was only part of that era. I never fit in then; I always felt like I was on the fringe. It was a good time for me, because my records were able to get on the radio, and that changes everything in terms of having success in your career.

How about now? What's going to emerge in the wake of rap-metal and boy bands?
The bad thing about now is that it seems as narrow and contrived as ever. Part of me wants to never bitch about now, because I don't want to be the old fogey who can't get with the hip new music. It doesn't seem readily available to artists like myself who are more songwriting-based, more personal. It's the age-old challenge of, 'How can I make an artistic statement and still get records put out somehow, and find an audience?' That's a challenge for a lot of the established artists right now in a time when most of the things that are becoming huge success stories are not going to be stuck by. It's not like that's the music that's going to be around forever, that everybody goes back and reminisces about. What worries me the most is it's hard to feel like there's an audience that wants records to experience the way we used to need them. The world's changing so much. You can go online and get a lot of human contact in that way, whereas it used to be that a record was your escape from the asylum you were living in. You could use it to help posture yourself against this world you didn't feel a part of. I always feel better when I let go of everything and think, 'If everything's gone I'll be there like a brook in the forest, doing my thing, and for better or worse, there'll be some use in the world for it.'

What are some life goals that you're working on but have yet to achieve? What are some that you have achieved?
I'd love to have more financial security. I've never made enough to not have to worry. That's the scariest thing as a person -- 'How will I live?' Even if you have a name. For me, it seems like I'll always have to worry about that -- and everybody does, so it's not like I feel alone in that. Tied in with that I think about having kids. That's the reason I wish I'd sell millions of records, so I'd know it was safe to bring another person into the world, with me as their dad (laughs). It's something I'd hate to not ever do. I want to be a better person in all kinds of ways. What I beat myself up the most about is when I tend to withdraw from the world, and I don't deal with calling people -- all the reasons why I hid out and wrote songs instead of being a lawyer. I wish I was more outgoing. That's a personal thing I work on. I've come a long way over the years, just because I've gone out and toured so much. I've gotten much more used to doing my songs and performing them and being with people.

If you're not in the studio or out on tour, what are you doing on a Saturday night?
I'm usually home, because I'm such a crowd-phobic kind of person. I hate going to movies when they're really crowded -- I'm at a lot of matinees. We've been collecting this art from the early '60s for a few years now, in this slightly surrealistic, sort of cartoonish, big-eyed kid style. The painting on In Reverse is one of the paintings in our collection, by probably the most famous artist that painted this kind of stuff, Margaret Keene. We have a publisher, a friend of mine, and we're co-writing a book about all the artists that did this kind of art. It's totally a lost story. Most of the artists are dead, and almost no one is around still who knew who they were or has any photos of them. It's a real sleuthing job. We were involved in an exhibit that the Laguna [CA] Art Museum put on. They put on a Margaret Keene exhibit [and] we wrote an essay for the booklet. A lot of stuff from our collection is in the exhibit, including the one that's on In Reverse. When I'm in that mode I get to pretend I'm not Matthew Sweet, the rock guy. I don't expect any of these 70 year-old people that know about the art are gonna have any cares about who I am. It's kinda cool.