Matt Jones likes his music squeaky clean.
"I feel like we could go spend $200, buy a guitar and never tune it, and then play it and release a record and try to get a buzz on it, because it's like something new and something different," Jones said. "But it wouldn't be what we were doing, and it wouldn't be real as far as we're concerned."
The Real Matt Jones released the album Passerby on Tuesday. Jones and bass player Lance Kelly will perform at a release party Saturday at Ralli's Fourth Street Pub and Grill, at 109 Fourth St. N.W.
Before Jones went solo, he and Kelly were in the band Boss Ordinance. The band opened for Rod Stewart in 2004.
"Isn't that nuts? It was crazy," he said. "That was, like, new Rod Stewart. It was, like, 20 minutes of 'Maggie May' and then, like, the Great American Songbook. There was a commercial in the middle. Literally a month after that, everything just fizzled out."
That summer, the band's guitarist moved to Phoenix with his girlfriend and bought a dog.
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"We were like, 'Great. We're never going to see you again,'" Jones said. "Our drummer, I give him some more credit, because he's a smart guy. So, now he's a Fulbright Scholar in Australia studying one of the foremost minds of something or other. I don't even know."
Before Boss Ordinance split, Jones had worked with a producer in Austin, Texas.
"We had started putting in some songs together, and by the time that our old band split up, I was like, you know, 'Hey. We've got like eight songs with this other producer in Austin. Why don't we just record two more and put out, like, a full record and see how that goes?'" Jones said. "A couple months after that record came out, we were selling it up, and we were playing enough shows that we were, like, 'You know, this project is really taking off.' And I was able to quit my full-time job."
Jones and Kelly learned to play instruments when they were in middle school.
"We both started playing guitar at the same time," Kelly said. "We went to middle school together. I used to play guitar. I was the guitar player for the first two years of our existence."
Jones said they were inspired by Nirvana.
"When I was, like, 13 years old," he said, "I heard that, and I wanted to start playing guitar. It would be so funny if you could hear a copy of our old record, because it literally sounds like kids who listen to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden made a CD. And at the very tail end of that, we started getting into Dave Matthews Band as well, and it was like this weird jam-out, rock-like, totally nonidentifiable sort of thing."
Kelly said it's a little weird since Jones went solo.
"I still get to play. I wish we were a band. I wish we had a band name," he said. "I don't know. We need help with that, I guess. Everything sounds awful. Whatever we've decided just sounds bad. If you have any ideas, let me know."
