Matt Steele 
“Lazy Day” 

Matt Steele [ August Gallant]

This month’s PRESS PLAY featured artist is Dartmouth-based singer-songwriter, Matt Steele.

As the hustle and stress of the upcoming holiday season approaches, it’s wholly appropriate that Nova Scotian Matt Steele reminds us all to put a little self-care in our stockings, courtesy of his PRESS PLAY contribution, “Lazy Day.” Below, Steele, who also records under the Sunset Corvette name, discusses the origins of the song:

I think most people close to me know how much of a stress case I can be and how often I used to work myself to exhaustion in the process of having a “day job” career and a music career. Even though I am trained as a Recreation Therapist until relatively recently, I hadn’t been taking enough self-care leisure time except for sick days. “Lazy Day” is imagining myself living a slacker life that, as an Enneagram 3 (“The Achiever”), I deeply fear but also have a great deal of envy towards. What if the only way out of my workaholic tendencies is to learn to love the lazy day?

Production/Songwriting-wise, this song was a gift from the slacker songwriting gods. I was jamming some acoustic guitar and happened upon an interpolation of Helicopter by Deerhunter. I immediately started singing, “Might take a lazy day, or two, or three,” and knew I had a fun rhyme/rhythm/theme scheme to work with, and mad libbed the rest over a few sessions. You can’t have a song about lazy days that sounds too edited, yeah? Rather than shy away from the original Deerhunter comparison, I decided to follow that hazy trail into a Mac DeMarco / Peter Bjorn & John kind of vibe in my home studio, throwing old-school tape emulators on everything and cranking the reverb. It’s the most lo-fi recording I’ve made, but it was so freeing to just work on a song for fun, record all the parts myself, and not think about whether I’d even release it commercially. None of us (I hope) started playing music for those reasons; we started because making music felt good. Hopefully, that carefree vibe shines through for everyone hearing “Lazy Day” on PRESS PLAY.

“Lazy Day” by Matt Steele

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