PREVIEW: Swamp Baby Returns to the Stage… with a Beard?
09/18 @ Opalka Gallery, Albany
“The swamp baby went to bed and woke up with a beard.”
On Friday, September 18, Opalka Gallery will be featuring a set of music from local artist Swamp Baby, in their first performance since 2023. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Nick Matulis of the band and I asked about the hiatus, what he had been up to in the interim and what made now the right time to bring Swamp Baby back.
“We went on a little bit of a pause that wasn’t intentional,” Matulis says with a pause. “Life just intervened.
“The last music that we had been working on was very ambient and I was singing in this high falsetto, whisper-tone range. Then we went through COVID and I got deeper and deeper into this different style of singing; I started to wonder what my full-throated voice even sounded like. So I started doing these exercises — playing some of my favorite songs of the past. Stuff I grew up listening to. I started singing along and changing keys. Then I realized I was really enjoying singing in a very gravelly Americana style.”
With the changing in his preferred singing style going from a quieter tone to a more gravelly one, it only seemed natural that the Swamp Baby sound would change a bit as well. As Matulis puts it:
“The swamp baby went to bed and woke up with a beard.”
It also should be mentioned that while Swamp Baby was on hiatus, Matulis was far from idle. He was playing with the band The Husbands, as well as writing songs for himself. In fact, the amount of songs he wrote in that short time is nothing short of staggering.
“I ended up going on this year-and-a-half long songwriting odyssey where I probably completed 75 songs.”
Thinking that it might be too much to manage the songs within the band and not knowing what to do with them, Matulis decided to call “the swamp babies” and discuss getting together to work through a batch together. The rest, as they say, is history.
These songs will not only be played live at the Opalka Gallery show on the 18th, but the band also recorded them for their upcoming album, Portrait of Eleanor.
“For Opalka, we'll be playing the brand new record of songs and some older hits. But mostly, they will be really current — songs written within the past year and a half,” Matulis tells me.
Out of the dozens of venues around the Capital Region, I asked Matulis what made him choose Opalka for the return of Swamp Baby, and he was very quick to reply.
“I love the vibe of those shows,” Matulis begins. “I love shows where you don't have to invite your friends because there's that built-in audience. Opalka has everything so well-crafted where folks from the neighborhood just walk over and are open to whatever is gonna be presented to them. I think that's really neat.”
With a new record on the horizon showcasing a change in direction for the band, it’s clear that Friday’s performance will mark the beginning of an exciting chapter ahead. And though they may not have to invite their friends, we’re going to invite ours for them: mark your calendars and don’t miss a grand ol’ time at Opalka this Friday.
You can catch Swamp Baby at Opalka Gallery, located at 140 New Scotland Ave, this Friday at 6 p.m.
