Matthew Good: Canadian Rocker Goes International After Only Two Decades of Domestic Success

Controversial veteran Canadian rocker Matthew Good is going worldwide.

The 40-year-old multiple Juno Award-winning musician has just signed a worldwide deal with eOne Entertainment-distributed Frostbyte Media, home to the likes of Nelly Furtado bestie Saukrates and Japanese metal legends Loudness. Almost 20 years into a career littered with multiple gold and platinum-selling albums in Canada, this will mark the first time Good will be afforded the proper chance to perform in a number of other countries.

"One of the big positive things for me was these guys are really kind of committed to going, well, we know that you do this here, but they're like, what about Australia? What about England? We know that you're not 25, but that doesn't mean that you can't go open for whomever in Australia acoustically, or in the UK, and then go back with a band," Good tells Spinner. "One of the big things was they're willing to underwrite tour support, which for me has never existed overseas.

"For me that's cool. I get tons of emails from Australia. My records have been released there before but I just never went there because I could never afford to. I get a lot of email from UK, which doesn't surprise me at all. It's all about timing, I think."

Good, whose works fall in the same literary range as the Weakerthans, or perhaps as less outwardly protest-singer-y Tom Morello or Billy Bragg, has been demoing music for a new, as-yet-untitled album he figures will be released in 2013.

"I haven't even gone into the studio to record anything yet," he says. "I've been demoing stuff. I've got about five songs now. They're not totally done, but the music for five or six is totally done. I've written the music and the melody, but most of the melodies are me just rambling words or me just saying things, so I have to go back and actually write lyrics for some of them."

One song Good does have ready has biblical inspiration.

"There's one tune on the record called 'Via Dolorosa,' which I like," Good says. "It's a Latin term. In Catholicism via dolorosa is the path that Christ took to calvary -- it's pretty gruesome -- and the meaning of the term is that it's also a path of sacrifice. And I just kind of use it as an interesting juxtaposition in regards to how we in a modern day and age... its disconnection to those things.

"The first verse is 'there's a spider in the kitchen sink, turn the tap on, stand there, watch it panic... via dolorosa'."

Over the years Good's music has encompassed the likes of lush orchestration in 2003's Avalanche, bristling rock for 2004's White Light Rock & Roll Review, and a narrow-focused concept record in 2008's Vancouver. 2011's layered and expansive Lights of Endangered Species album was particularly bold for Good with its focus on horns, strings, piano and other less rock instrumentation. The difficulties of touring such a complex record has provided a clue as to what his next album will sound like.

"For the last record I found out when we went on tour it became really demanding," says Good. "Like, because I had to reproduce it and bring five people out, for me it was very expensive. I lost a lot of money because of my overhead on that thing. So it was one of those things that I looked at it and I went, y'know, I think I want to write a record that gets back to the roots of that kind of mid-'80s psyche of a band in a room, not say live-off-the-floor, but that kind of mentality of a band in a room, playing a song. And so I've been kind of focused on that."

While many of Good's peers from the first Canadian alternative wave in the '90s have been reduced to reunion shows and nostalgia appearances, Good is poised to not only survive, but thrive. It's not really about that for him, though.

"I've never had a problem [getting shows]," says Good. "I play regularly in the States. I can put a thousand people in a room in New York. As Tom Waits says, if you can put 500 people in any room in any part of the world you've got a career for the rest of your life.

"I don't even look at [this new deal] as a worldwide shot. I don't think I'll ever be that person. I don't think that in a relatistic sense you can be a 41-year-old and break worldwide. Like Dave Grohl, he's older than me but he had Nirvana. You know what I mean? I don't have that. I have Canada and a cult following in the United States. I don't have that and it's not something where I'm going to have a song go on Triple J or something in Australia and have a number one record. And that's not my goal. My goal is just to go and play for folks and go to some places where I've been receiving emails from people and stuff for more than a decade saying, 'OK, well, when are you going to come?'"