Despite being an avowed fan of guitar-based rock music — and possessing the ability to, as one critic described, “synthesiz[e] sounds and idioms with breaktaking ease” — pianist, composer, and improviser Matt Mitchell has never quite picked up the instrument for himself.
“I own a guitar or two, but I [only know] really basic guitar shit,” he explains to Excited Ones! “I just haven’t had the patience to learn it myself. But I can recognize guitar voicing and things like that. I just hear it in a certain way — kind of like blocks of sound.”
For Mitchell, the prospect of writing in a pop or rock idiom comes with a familiar pitfall: derivativeness — “feeling like you’re just ripping off 1,000 other people.” Central to his enduring fascination is how Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices managed to synthesize the “six Ps” — pop, psychedelic, prog, punk, power pop, and post-punk — in a way that feels commensurately familiar and alien.
“I tend to like things that are a little unusual,” Mitchell says. “Even the most normal-seeming kind of song of his has this undercurrent of mystery to it.”
Mystery permeates Mitchell’s own ever-expanding body of work. A central pianist-composer on Brooklyn’s creative-music scene for more than a decade, he’s long been associated with projects that blur the boundary between composition and improvisation — dense, intricate music that rewards close listening without demanding orthodoxy.
As a bandleader, his catalog stretches from ensemble statements like Vista Accumulation (2015), A Pouting Grimace (2017), and Phalanx Ambassadors (2019) to a recent pair of solo piano releases — Illimitable (2024) and Sacrosanctity (2025) — each captured in a single, unedited improvisation. He also co-runs the artist-driven Obliquity Records with his partner, drummer and composer Kate Gentile.
Whether writing for ensembles, working in long-term collaborations, or, most recently, exploring pared-down intimacy on End of Something (2025), his duo with vocalist Sara Serpa, Mitchell’s music operates on the same principle that draws him to Robert Pollard: familiar materials, refracted until they feel strange, unsettled, and alive.
Read on for an interview with Mitchell about what Pollard and GBV mean to him.
What’s up, Matt? How were the shows with Sara?
They were great. It was really nice. And actually, since then, this past weekend, I recorded my next record.
You’re hitting the ground running. Burning the candle at both ends.
Hitting the ground with both ends of the candle. This was me, Kim Cass on bass, Kate Gentile on drums, and Andrew Smiley on guitar. We did about 10 new pieces of mine. They’re all sort of polymetric, with multiple parts of the band playing different lines, and then it’s pretty high-intensity improvisation.
Smiley plays a Strat with a metal pick with little to no effects. He’s got a crazy playing style, which is pretty great.
Would you want to plug it here?
I mean, there’s no point, because I’ve got to add synths to it. It hasn’t even been mixed. I don’t even have a name for the record. We just did it, so there’s no timeline, but I appreciate that.
Anything you’d plug instead?
Maybe just our label, Obliquity Records. We put out that Sara album [on November 7] and we put out an album of Kate’s [Sifters] with [tenor saxophonist] Jeremy Viner and Marc Ducret, this French guitar player who is really fantastic. And I have my own solo piano albums on it. We’re sort of between things, but if you could mention the label, I guess that would probably be the coolest thing.
Are you very strategic with when you put stuff out? Or are you just like, “This is dope, let’s put it out.”
Sort of a combination of both. I mean, that’s why we started this label — so we could just kind of not worry about it. It’s not like I have unlimited money to put stuff out, but at the same time, I just don’t want to be encumbered by release schedules.
I’ve worked with Pi Recordings a lot, and I have an every-other-year thing with them. I tend to want to put out an album a year. And since we’ve been doing this label the last couple of years, I’ve put out two things a year — just me playing piano, or a duo thing, or a trio thing. Last year I put out an album on our label [Illimitable], but also one on Pi [Zealous Angles, in a trio with bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Dan Weiss].
These kinds of recordings, CDs — they’re a tough sell these days. So you kind of just have to do it because you really need to, or want to, or want to and need to.
That said, I probably stopped short of the [Anthony] Braxton model putting a 12-CD boxed set more than putting out more than 10 albums a year — or the Zorn thing, which I respect the hell out of. But I’m maybe between someone like that and someone who just puts out one album every three years, or something like that. Because it’s exhausting to just lead bands; I play in my friends’ bands too.
So, it’s one of those things where I don’t have unlimited time to do my own things, but the sideman work is also important to me.
I want to get into your GBV story. But first, I’d love if you’d apply your full music brain to them. What are you hearing?
It’s sort of a joke that people with perfect pitch are obnoxious about it. I try not to be, but I do have perfect pitch, so I always know what keys the songs are in right when I’m hearing them. At least within [parameters of] This is closest to this note.
On some of those early GBV albums, the tuning is very…
It’s not exactly Western tonality.
Yeah, sure, it’s pretty variable, but that’s a feature for me. I love that kind of thing. I love super-ultra-produced kind of stuff from the ‘70s and ‘80s when it’s done really well, and the more modern GBV stuff is pretty tightened up in a certain way. But the older stuff — the nasty garage shit that was recorded into a boom box — I love the sound of that too.
Guitar-based rock-type music hits my brain in a specific way. I came up playing classical music since I was pretty young, and got into jazz when it was pretty young for getting into jazz. I was 12, 13.
But when I was a toddler, my favorite music was the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder. My parents had those on LP, and they would let me play it on my little Fisher-Price record player, which actually played records.
So, a couple of those albums, at some point, were kind of beat up and scratched — maybe, possibly, because it was my fault. Because I was one or two years old, messing with it. But they would just let me listen to those, and I think, maybe, that planted the seed for my whole life in music.
Especially the Beatles aspect of it. I just hear it. I’m not a guitar player — that’s the thing. I’m a pianist and a keyboardist — I mean, I own a guitar or two, but I [only know] really basic guitar shit. I just haven’t had the patience to learn it myself. But I can recognize guitar voicing and things like that. I just hear it in a certain way — kind of like blocks of sound.
I find that Bob Pollard’s songs are pretty unique in their structures. They’re unusual. They’ve always been, in very different ways. Even when they are, like, verse-chorus, they don’t do it in a typical way.
I don’t know if it would annoy the shit out of him to hear it called “stream of consciousness,” but some of it seems like the words are driving them — like the tunes are sort of structured around the lyrics.
Not to drag Robert into the New School too much. But what could you talk about as far as melodies, harmonies, and the like?
It’s tough. Whenever I’ve imagined, Do I want to try to write up some rock and pop tunes? it’s a tough area to go in and not just sound like you’re just ripping off 1,000 other people. But part of it is, also, you are actively engaging with all this old music that you love, and then you’re finding [your own] path.
Melodically, he just seems to accomplish something that’s absolutely inimitable for himself, that I just find a little astounding. That he’s able to do it in that it sounds like the Beatles from Saturn, or whatever — in a different universe, 300 years from now, or whatever.
But it still absolutely sounds like him. And part of it is just that voice, which has also progressed in a really interesting way — the way his voice carries these melodies. I think a lot of the instructional aspect of it is when you get to hear the demos, which are all over those Suitcase albums, which is a giant trove that I haven’t [gotten to the bottom of]. Even the extreme enthusiast kind of has get to get a Ph.D. in Pollard studies to really know the ins and outs of everything.
Because it’s hundreds and hundreds of songs. Hundreds of stuff. That sounds like a title of his. “Hundreds of Stuff.”
On a core musical level, which Pollardian idiosyncrasies do you notice?
He has this D major triad chord where the third is the lowest note. It’s like the second fret of the low E string, or whatever. And then the top two notes in the chord are the next two open strings, and then he’ll move that down to the first fret. He uses that a lot, like on the last song on [his 2006 solo album] From a Compound Eye, “Recovering.”
So, harmonically, I definitely recognize some things are popping up like that again — which then seems to just give rise to these melodies. But, yeah, From a Compound Eye is definitely a high point. I love all those Todd Tobias-produced albums: Moses on a Snail, We All Got Out of the Army, Elephant Jokes. I love Space City Kicks, which is really strange, and doesn’t seem to get enough…
“I Wanna Be Your Man in the Moon.” Great title.
Or “Follow a Loser.” [Chuckles] Which is killing.
Robert Pollard is GBV is Robert Pollard, but I kind of miss his solo records. That’s some of my favorite stuff.
Maybe he’s feeling since he’s got a new, solid lineup — I mean, he’s had this new-jack lineup for GBV since 2017 or something like that. So he’s clearly feeling fulfilled enough to not need to do the solo records or whatever.
I’ve sat with all these albums for months before release. But our mutual friend Hank Shteamer [of Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches fame] is going through their modern catalog backwards — he’s on Mirrored Aztec now — and our preferences are almost opposite.
For a while, they were doing two or three a year. I mean, there’s nothing I’ve disliked from the recent five years. There’s not really anything I dislike anyway, because to me, it seems like one of those things: if you like what he does fundamentally, it’s just a matter of time before you start to like and even love something that you were kind of nonplussed about at first.
There was a period where I did not really get into It’s Not Them. It Couldn’t Be Them. It Is Them! And then in a later GBV phase — a year or two later — I put it on. I was like, Oh, why didn’t I like this? This album fucking rules.
I also thought it was cool how Universe Room was sort of a harkening back to the old sort of shards approach. Small bits, sometimes even in the same track, Frankensteined together. Warp and Woof is a little bit like that too — one of my favorites of the recent lineup.
An interesting bit is that I’m on an album of [saxophonist] Caroline Davis’s called Alula, which Greg [Saunier] from Deerhoof is also on and produced. And she hired Pollard for the cover.
It was a commission, or based on something he had previously made?
No, it was a commission from her. It was work for hire.
This is great. Jazz album covers often kind of suck.
I know, I know. Well, my partner Kate does all our album covers, and does mine even for other labels too. And she loves his artwork.
I remember reading in one of the biographies that he does collage stuff first thing in the morning. That’s the thing that’s more of a normal, regular, everyday thing for him, even than writing songs like that. And they’re all so different.
What’s at the root of your GBV fandom? Is it more of a head thing, like we discussed, or more of a heart thing?
Yeah, it connects a lot of things. For me, it does provide an emotional combination of familiarity, but also some sort of inscrutable aspect. I tend to like things that are a little unusual, and even the most normal-seeming kind of song of his has this undercurrent of mystery to it, which is a draw for me.
I like music that just rocks, for one thing, and it always does that to one degree or another.
Or, in Pollard’s parlance, “It needs to kick ass.”
It just kicks ass. Yeah, a lot of it just kicks ass. Even the pretty stuff. And a lot of times, it connects to the psychedelic aspect of it when it gets that way, which is super appealing to me.
I like a lot of old school electronic tape music from the ‘60s and noise music and a lot of that stuff, so a certain, significant cross section of what he’s done absolutely intersects with that for me. The way he marries that, even — even it’s like, Oh, we just recorded to a boombox or whatever — no matter how it’s done, it still has that effect. Even just listening to Bee Thousand, how nasty the sonics are.
It’s like the Sun Ra shit from the ‘60s — a lot of that was done pretty low budget. They were just recording it themselves at the rehearsal space a lot of the time. That’s part of what I enjoy. I like the shittiness of the sound.
Do you like bad-sounding Charlie Parker recordings?
Sure, yeah.
Same.
Of course. Old recordings from the ‘40s, especially if you can still hear all the instruments. And this isn’t even an example of that, necessarily, but the Kinks albums from the mid-’60s are super crisp and crunchy. You know what it feels like to chew on it. The way the drums sound, and the way the guitars sound — everything sounds so good.
It’s like, How the fuck do I get things to sound like that these days? But then again, as a pianist, I’m also part of that world where you want the piano to sound as good as possible — but, then, how can you make the drums sound that way? That kind of thing.
I’ve been getting into all the Beatles Giles Martin remixes…
What do you think?
I love them.
Same, across the board. But I think I’m in a minority.
Oh, man, no, I’m super down. I think they sound fantastic. On those Red Album remixes he did, it’s the first time you got to hear how he dealt with the pre-Rubber Soul stuff. He hasn’t done Rubber Soul yet, and a lot of those tracks are on the Red Album.
So, the sonics for me are [huge], but I like the new sonics too — the heaviness of, say, Zeppelin Over China — a nice, big, modern, chunky rock sound. It’s massive, it’s huge, and it’s a lot of songs. But what Pollard’s music exemplifies for me is the phenomenon that if you like what he does, I contend that you’ll like almost everything eventually.
Because it’s like, he’s so consistent. He doesn’t really go off the reservation in terms of I’m just going to try this on this album, and it’s completely left field. Maybe he works within a very specific sphere of types of material, but he just finds lots of nuances.
I think it’s just that kind of focus — you listen to classical composers, and they have their style. They don’t sound like everyone, you know. There’s a modern tendency to feel like you’re influenced by everything, in a positive way. Which is great.
So, I find that with Guided by Voices albums, it’s always been one of those things. If, at first, I might be like, OK, just sounds like some more Guided by Voices, I sit down with it a little bit and listen three or four times. And I’m like, Oh, yeah, this is just as great. He’s done it again.
Is Kate a big GBV head?
Oh, huge, yeah. Maybe her listening style is different from mine. She’ll listen to an album for two weeks or whatever, and then move on to another.
Is one a bigger head than the other?
I mean, I was a fan first just because I’m older than her — but yes, I would stay we’re equal-intensity fans.
Sounds like she should be on the Substack.
I’m sure she’d love to talk about it, yeah. She would definitely. I’m sure she would have things to say that are pretty distinct from me, even though we live together and have talked about GBV a lot. She’s made a lot of observations that I had not thought to make.
My wife Brenna Ehrlich is the Chief Research Editor at Rolling Stone and covers true crime and music, including GBV. I’ve been upstairs writing about them while she does it downstairs.
We’re definitely a house with a lot of GBV merch. A lot of the shirts that Kate’s gotten me are kind of worn out. I have the “Pollard Throws a No-Hitter” shirt, I’ve had other shirts — and they just kind of die eventually, you know?
I forget what led me to that tangent, but I think the first one that clicked for me was Not in My Airforce, which I heard in, like, ‘99. That was the first I was like, Oh my god, I get this. I get it now. That, to me, is a particularly fertile time period. Not in My Airforce was ‘97, and then Mag Earwhig! was ‘98 or something. They were contemporaneous, I think.
Some Pollard albums are like siblings.
Yeah, yeah — Waved Out, Kid Marine. But then all of this was at the same time as Do the Collapse, which is kind of wild to me. That’s when I first saw them, at TLA [Theater of the Living Arts] in Philadelphia — I forget if it was 2000 or 2001, but I remember seeing them when Do the Collapse was new. They probably played 50 songs. He kept saying “kids”: “Alright, you kids need to learn!”
They ran out of beer onstage, so they switched to the whiskey — to drinking JD — and then passing around a joint onstage. I’m thinking, Jesus Christ. But if you were to listen to it, you would hear no aural evidence of the fact that he couldn’t stand up.
In your mind, what are the central messages of Robert Pollard and GBV? What do you learn as a creative person?
The power of work ethic. Like, if you have this creative bent — I believe that everyone has the ability to be creative, and if you can kind of just decide you want to be, then you will be. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be immediately perfect. It doesn’t mean there’s going to be immediate profundity to what you do.
Parenting can be a creative act. Plumbing.
I guess, I guess. What I’m saying is, if you have a propensity for making creative art and making things, I would say it’s a little incumbent upon you to do that. He discovered gradually that he was good at writing songs, and then he just kind of did it, and he just does it incessantly — the idea of committing to doing something and really, really doing it to an extreme amount.
I’m not saying, “Be unhealthy about your work ethic.” I’m just saying that if you find that you can do this, it’s only going to be more fun for you the better you get it. And the only way you’re going to get better at it is to just do it as much as you possibly can.
Not that there aren’t dark aspects to the songs here and there — you go through turmoil in your life, so it will sometimes show up. There have been different parts of his output that kind of show that. But on the whole, he seems like an optimist to me.
The songs are very optimistic to me. About being brave and powering through your circumstances.
Yeah, I think the second song on [Pollard’s 2009 solo album] Elephant Jokes is called “Johnny Optimist.” I think it’s about a dude who was in a car accident or something else horrible befell him, but he’s just a positive guy.
And not to be all namby-pamby about it, but I think it’s one of those things where he seems to want to project that. I mean, he’s only interested in being cool in the sense of knowing, Well, what I do is fucking cool, because I’m doing it, not because he’s trying to be cool in any particular way. Some artists and bands are a little bit more self-consciously trying to be cool.
The coolest people are the least concerned with anyone thinking they’re cool. Seems to be a universal law of coolness.
It seems like it. It seems like with a lot of the people that I think are cool, you just have it or you don’t. He definitely does.
But that’s not even the point so much as it’s really earnest. I like people who are earnest, and he seems like a pretty earnest guy amongst all the other sorts of stories in the legend that seems to have come up around him. He just seems like an earnest guy who just fucking loves writing songs and singing them and playing them.
I think that’s why he’s inspired a certain kind of devoted fanbase. I think a lot of people see that, consciously or unconsciously. It’s one of those things where when you meet a GBV fan, they’re really, really a GBV fan.
It’s over the top.
And it’s not just the realm of the music obsessive who is like, Oh, I’m going to get every record, even though that’s definitely, absolutely [happening]. I mean, we’re talking about it. You’re doing this Substack because of this phenomenon.
And I think people connect to that earnestness, the positivity, and just the creative unstoppability — the sort of inexorable aspect of it. And it’s super melodic, and it just sounds great. And then on top of that, I’ll nerd out on the songs and structure.
I think you don’t even have to know about the nuts and bolts of music, too. I think people want to hear music that is novel, whether or not they could articulate exactly why. They just know.
It’s tough these days, because a lot of music — especially super popular music has nothing to do with the music, in a way. Everything is like a giant PR machine or whatever. Which is fine. People can like what they like. But it’s a little rare to me — maybe it’s always been a little bit rare — to find people who seek out unusual things.
I have no problem with hype around new indie bands. But when everyone’s lining up at the same time almost compulsorily, it no longer feels like mine. GBV feels like a little musical hideaway I chose.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you find out, Oh, here’s hundreds of other people in the hideaway with me.
Amazing! Matt and Kate are two of my favorite current musicians, making knotty gnarly uncompromising post-jazz that's still super communicative. I wouldn't have guessed that there were many other listeners who were giant fans of both them and GBV, much less that they were big GBV fans themselves.
Thank you, thank you for this series. Almost makes up for no live shows anymore!