Deep Cut Friday: “Lost My Mind” by Matthew Sweet
Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Matthew Sweet's three most commercially successful albums, released between 1990 and 1995, all featured scorching lead guitar performances by two legends who were each more than a decade older than Sweet. Richard Lloyd was a founding member of Television, the New York City quartet that helped instigate the punk rock movement at CBGB. Robert Quine had been a member of another CBGB group, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, as well as a solo artist and sideman for Lou Reed and John Zorn.
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Sweet's two ace guitarists usually played on separate songs on his albums.You can hear Lloyd on the hits "Sick of Myself" and "I've Been Waiting," and Quine on "Girlfriend" and "Time Capsule." One song on 1995's 100% Fun , however, featured lead guitar by both. "Lost My Mind" is a brooding psychedelic rocker, with producer Brendan O'Brien adding eerie Mellotron textures to Sweet's enigmatic lyric: "You can't stomach the truth and I only tell lies / You don't care if you live, I don't care if I die."
Like many Sweet tracks, "Lost My Mind" is mixed with '60s-style hard panning that makes it easy to distinguish separate instruments, and you can hear Quine's distinctively jagged leads in one stereo channel and Lloyd's unpredictably melodic improvisations in the other channel.
The demo version of "Lost My Mind" features at least one of the lead guitarists and a similar full band arrangement, although it's nearly a minute shorter than the album version and doesn't include any keyboards. Quine died in 2004, and Lloyd reunited with Sweet on two tracks on the 2008 album Sunshine Lies .
Three more essential Matthew Sweet deep cuts:
"You Don't Love Me"
1991's Girlfriend has a well-earned reputation as one of the all-time great power pop albums, but it also contains a couple of excellent country songs with pedal steel guitar by Greg Leisz (Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton).
"Superdeformed"
"Superdeformed" was Sweet's stellar opening track for the Red Hot Organization's 1993 AIDS relief compilation album No Alternative . It was one of the last recordings that legendary British pianist Nicky Hopkins (the Rolling Stones, the Beatles) played on before his 1994 death.
"Write Your Own Song"
"Write Your Own Song" from 1999's In Reverse is a snarky broadside at detractors, but its melody is as snappy and soaring as anything in Sweet's songbook.
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