Any artist whose debut album features liner notes asking the timeless question “What is good music?” surely can’t lack for confidence. (C’mon, it was a joke, an homage to the album covers of the ’60s—sort of). Eric Matthews—half of baroque-pop duo Cardinal, former Sub Pop solo artist and, most recently, arranger/instrumentalist-for-hire—returns to the pop scene after an eight-year absence with nary a hair or a breathy sigh out of place. Fans of Matthews’ previous work will find much to admire about his third record, Six Kinds Of Passion Looking For An Exit (Empyrean). Gentle melodies are given the layered, careful attention once afforded the Left Banke and Pet Sounds, while his vocals often sound like hushed shower recitals (particularly the tribute “Cardinal Is More,” which finds Matthews mending fences with ex-bandmate Richard Davies: “I said that I hated you, but it just wasn’t true”). If there’s any complaint to be made, it’s that the album is a bit brief—a mere eight tracks in length—following a near decade-long silence. But it’s clear there’s plenty of sugar yet to be poured from this bowl.

MAGNET spoke with Matthews at his home, a converted church in rural Oregon.

Your bio says you were born in Compton. I was born one ghetto south of you in Long Beach.
I was gonna say Lakewood—I didn’t know what you were gonna come up with. It’s true, I’ve got the photographs to prove it; as a little kid, all these pictures of me in the glaring sun on some cement porch in Compton with a couple of black kids eating watermelon. [Laughs] Huge nappy ‘fros ... not that I had a nappy ‘fro. The truth is that I got out quick enough so that I wasn’t impacted culturally. But I had a lot family who stayed in Compton for a lot of years. I went back for visits for a while. Saw some weird stuff.

I don’t know if you get back to Southern California as much as you used to, but I still have family there and it’s amazing to me how much things have changed. Entire neighborhoods I once lived in are unrecognizable to me now.
I haven’t regularly been to L.A. for more than five years. On the press junkets I had to do, making videos, I’d generally be driving around a rental Jaguar and I wasn’t going into some neighborhood with my nice shirt, beautiful hair and rented Jaguar. I’d get killed.

So let’s talk about the new album first: It sounds like seven years haven’t gone by at all. It’s like you picked up right where you left off. What were you doing musically during this gap, and how did Empyrean know to ask you whether you were ready to make a record again?
I occupied most of that span of time working on other people’s albums. I developed an association with Andy Chase, a producer in New York City. At the time, he was working with a new band called Tahiti 80. And they had a trumpet player lined up in New York, but that guy didn’t make it, and they were sitting around brainstorming “Well, who should we get?” and the one thing they all had in common was that they loved my records. So they looked me up, and the Andy Chase-related projects have been the centerpiece of what I’ve been doing—working with Ivy. I love Ivy. That album I played on, Long Distance—people talk about Cardinal being one of the more important records of the ‘90s, or similar things have even been said about my records, but I think that belongs on the list. It never makes the list, but it’s such a song-by-song strong set of tunes. I keep busy playing on other people’s music, and of course, I never stopped recording. So if it sounds like a day hasn’t passed—I have a consistent notion of what my music should be. Had the time span been 20 years, I think the effect would still have occurred: there’d be no drop-off, no lack of continuity there.

Your work in the '90s, in hindsight, was as far away from the “grubby lo-fi” thing as could be imagined: lush arrangements and a sense of orchestration that didn’t neatly mesh with the lo-fi aesthetic of the moment. Has pop music finally caught up to you?
It had to do with the stuff I grew up listening to, it very much informed the way I go about thinking about my music. To me, it’s just a plain approach; the desire to not lose all that’s being done around the song. The clearest thing that must be communicated is the chord pattern that occurs and then the melody. And then it’s just a simple, meat-and-potatoes way of dressing that thing up in terms of the way I choose to use instruments—guitars, vocal harmonies, things like that. I think it’s a sensible approach. It may sound fancy—I hope it does, I suppose—but perhaps this is only by comparison to the way other people order their music. By that, I mean people who were largely exposed to the creators of the music of the past 15 years. A lot of what I hear doesn’t make sense as far as approach. I think it’s rare when a production—something like the Ivy record—comes together, when things are clearly communicated. That’s all I really seek to do.

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