Positive Nihilism: An Interview With Emperor X (Part I)

Just two communists in luxury vibing about fact-checking one's tunes and trying to be Randy Newman

Emperor X, probably laying into whichever city planner put that parking lot on the third floor (Photo by Yuri Gryaznov)

Chad Matheny is exactly the musician you want on your side, a science teacher who’s sung about concerns as large as Shiite/Sunni conflict in Iraq and as small as a hummingbird in a hurricane. Of course to either subject these fears are the same size and Matheny’s increasingly brilliant (and politically fraught) music as Emperor X honors that scale with as much intricacy as can be compressed into what usually shakes out to folk-punk tunes with electronic frills.

He’s both as exasperatedly direct as you want him to be (“The Ballad of HPAE Local 5085”) and elliptical when you need him to zoom out (“Freeway in Heaven”). Having toured via Greyhound for years, he also knows far more about the bureaucratic pitfalls of public transit than you or I, the subject of an uncomfortably specific EP that’s one of my favorite releases of the 2020s so far. He followed it up with a Ukranian-sung holiday record. Did I mention this uncommonly granular and heartfelt music is actually extremely fun and he puts on a killer one-man show?

So it’s my own personal shame that I’m only now posting the great, enlivening conversation we had almost one year ago to the day when Matheny, 45, spoke to RIOTRIOT via phone from his parent’s house in Florida. I cannot speak to how the statements and emotions expressed here hold up after irrefutably dark and detrimental developments in America this month, but revisiting his thoughtfulness and fresh perspective is helping my spirit today.

How's Florida?

It's good, man. I'm in a car in my parents' garage in their house so I can be unfettered in what I have to say. You know, giving an interview around family is stressful. So I decided to close myself in this box.

Have you done many interviews at your parents' house?

It always seems to be at the most awkward possible points. I'm not teaching currently, but when I teach, the interview time will be, like, in the teacher's lounge or something. I've done it on a Greyhound bus before. This is actually pretty ideal. Everyone's gonna leave me alone, and I love it.

Cars are very good for containing thoughts.

Yeah.