Dooda by Matty Frank

Dooda, my first album, is my nature album, my moth album, my “leaving a big city for the country” album, the big city being NYC and the hyperbolated country being the small city of Durham, NC. I never thought I would live anywhere considered the south, and really enjoyed the pace and riddle of navigating the four important boroughs (you know which), but the pursuit of love for the person and nicknamesake of this album led me to evaluate what I really liked about where I was living and what I was excited for about where I was moving to.

Quicker access to greater outdoors was the absolute top of my list, and this threaded a couple anti-folk (and pro-folk!) songs I wrote with the new fantastical forest realms I was as excited to write about as I was to pretend to live in. Of course, the album retains my classic melancholy musings of occasional dysthymia (my therapist said I may have a ‘melancholy bent’, which I’m thinking of as an artsy astrological sign) and some mockery of straight people, but I’m most excited for the world building I’ve done with these songs.

I used to want to make video games when I grew up since I loved developing fantasy worlds with rich lore and characters, and I think that’s manifested in my much less lucrative job of making this album and sharing its world with you. We’ve got bird sounds, we’ve got omnichords, we’ve got moths!

Moth album? Yes, I did say that, didn’t I. My whole life I’ve been a fan of butterflies and moths, but moths represent the more elusive part of the winged insect fandom. They’re nocturnal, lunar, at times muted, but always sooo cute. Much of what I write lyrically comes out naturally elusive, darker, foggy, a thing you thought you saw below the still surface of a pond but easily could have been something else. But moths still contain so much intricacy in their wings, sparkles in their scales and in their eyes, literal fur coats, and these sparkles are sprinkled in the composition and production. I have got to get a moth tattoo to celebrate. Moths are the central character of this world, both in humanoid and nymph forms; at times they are the set dresser and other times, the judge presiding over a court. They help you out of bed when you’re sad and then eat your blanket once you’re happy.

As a listener, you’re going to be doing a lot of walking through the woods, but also walking through a junkyard. We’re stepping in elder swamps we spawned from, the ruinous wastes that formed after the mall we built upon them stopped being profitable, and the rich grasslands and meadows that reclaimed everything. I love flowers woowwwww.

And through all of these transforming settings in this fantastical fantasy world, you would still need to - you guessed it - get a job and survive, and you’re going to listen to me scream about how stupid that is. Like, food grows from the ground, why do I need a car? Why do you need my money, why can’t you just be nice?

Dooda tackles and beats the crap out of all this and more, set to release in 2024.

Self-taught in almost all of his musical and engineering skills, multi instrumentalist and vocalist Matty Frank combines pop and r&b vocal runs with introspective indie folk rock sound palettes inspired by the genre's saddest of lesbians. With lyricism at once infinitesimally specific and boundlessly universal, Matty Frank shows that queer people have more to talk about than same sex attraction.

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