Well, that’s the prevailing myth, anyway.
I have a friend who’s an old-school metalhead, and outside of my music, he probably has no concept of what’s gone on in pop over the past 20 years. He had just watched some movie with Natalie Portman on DVD, an indie thing, a Miramax film. And Nick Drake did the whole soundtrack.

Sure, Garden State. More a soundtrack than a film, really.
So he’s talking to me today and says, “The movie’s not so great, but you have to hear this soundtrack. At first I thought it was you.” And I was thinking about who it might have been and asked him, “Was it Elliott Smith?” And he said, “It might have been Elliott Smith.” Of the guys recently working, there aren’t a lot of people you could compare my music to or voice to directly. So we figured out it wasn’t Elliott Smith. He went on this Internet movie site and found out it was Nick Drake, and meanwhile I’m thinking. “Great—of the two people it could have been besides me, both of them are dead.” I’m in such good company.

Well, your albums definitely bear something in common with the more orchestral parts of Drake’s catalogue. Five Leaves Left comes to mind.
I always prefer the earlier stuff. Five Leaves is my favorite by far.

I’ve always thought of your catalogue—forgive me for saying it—as though it’s almost like you’re arranging someone else’s songs. They just happen to be yours. Are there other artists you pay attention to or feel affinity for?
The only person I keep track of is Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy. He’s my living superhero in music today. We talked about Bacharach but I’m not a fan of anything he’s written in the past few decades. But Neil Hannon is a contemporary, he is so hitting the nail on the head every time. And Jason Falkner is of course great. And Tahiti 80. Things like the Aluminum Group, I’m not connecting with fully, but I see what they’re doing, and I know it’s very good. We are moving in some better direction musically, I think. But it’s such a hard time in the music business, if I can be depressed about anything, it’s that we have a world here where artists who are so developed like myself and Jason Falkner have been relegated to long periods of silence and then putting out seven- and eight-song “mini albums.” I didn’t even know what one of these things was until this year. Turns out I’m releasing one. There’s something humiliating about it.

But the fact that you’re being heard must give you some confidence that things can’t be all bad, right?
It’s cool that a label did step up and put its neck on the line and will try to sell some Eric Matthews records. And that’s what was missing. The amount of deals I had on my desk over the past seven years, it was a huge pile, but in the end, every one of those parties basically chickened out. Sometimes it wasn’t fear. Sometimes it was corporate upheaval. All I can hope is that this is the beginning of another run. I’ve got literally dozens and dozens and dozens of songs that I think people would like to hear. And I continue to write, and as every artist says, “I’m writing my best stuff now!” [Laughs] All I can hope is that the people who already knew about me haven’t moved on in some other direction. A lot of people who enjoyed my music before were probably pretty mature already; I got a lot of fan mail from people under the age of 15. Those people are now 25, let’s be honest about that! [Laughs] Somebody weird enough at age 12 in 1995 to be into my records, hopefully, they’re still willing to give my music a shot.