Check Out Matt Laurence’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Laurence.

Hi Matt, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m from New York, I was born on Long Island and my mom moved us upstate to the Hudson Valley (an hour north of NYC) after 2nd grade. I got the Guitar Hero games and I couldn’t keep my hands off of it. I decided to play real guitar and my dad showed me some beginner chords and some picking, and I became pretty obsessed.

I would play alongside my friends while they played the game. I’d say “hey, I learned Hit Me With Your Best Shot, play that one!” I was playing probably 80% of all the songs on Guitar Hero 2 and 3 and about 50% of Rockband. I played full time for about a year locally before I moved to Nashville in 2016 and learned how to really be a sideman/hired gun.

I played full time for about a year locally before I moved to Nashville in 2016 and learned how to be a sideman/hired gun. I’ve ended up working with a bunch of different artists: the War and Treaty, Wyn Starks, Tiera Kennedy, Dre Scot, Sarah Reeves, Amythyst Kiah and lots of others. I’m the guitar co-ordinator for Soul Vibes GLOBAL – that’s been a great opportunity for me to meet tons of musicians and also to help me connect other guitarists with each other.

In 2020, I started teaching remote guitar lessons and I started collaborating with producers remotely. I ended up doing pretty well with selling tracks on Beatstars/online marketplaces. Since then, I’ve learned how to record/produce/mix and I have a bunch of projects that are in the works. So be on the look out for new music this year.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
There’s been a lot of challenges and sacrifices in the beginning, and especially after my move to Nashville. I’d say the biggest challenge for me at the very beginning was not knowing how to get involved in the industry. I spent thousand of hours playing guitar before I met anyone who performed full-time, I didn’t know anybody that I was doing what I wanted to – but it’s not so much of a thing now with online communities. But for the most part, I really wasn’t around the music industry at all until I moved to Nashville.

For the Nashville move, starting over and learning how to get booked in town was the hardest part. You don’t email/call your way into gigs in Nashville, you get calls from your friends or people you know. I needed to be available to rebuild my network by going to jams 4-5 nights a week for 2 years. I was dedicated to learning how to make money playing music.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Right now, I’m primarily known as being a guitarist in Nashville. Most of the calls that I get are to play music with my friends. Usually R&B music – the classics (Stevie Wonder, EWF, Al Green, MJ, etc) and also new stuff. The guitar playing on those records felt really good. The thread of the older records really is the session musicians: David T. Walker, Paul Jackson Jr., David Williams, Steve Lukather, Cornell Dupree (so many others) – and I’ve studied a lot of them to the “T”. Pop and country artists call us when they’re looking for a sounds that aren’t specifically “Music Row”. I do like the country classics too though and have done lots of country gigs.

In the last few years, I’ve fallen in love with the way recorded music hits you when you listen to it and why it hits you, it’s a whole new expression that’s so different from performing live. A studio is the opposite experience of a live show. When you see a live show, you’re seeing one unique, unrepeatable performance from one “perspective” or viewpoint. There might be more shows but you’ll never experience the same exact show. But when you listen to a studio recording, you’re listening to the exact same performance, captured in a very deep way but you listen to it from multiple perspectives, both physically (in the car, on nice speakers, terrible speakers, etc) and emotionally (different emotions at the time of listening). The currency of a good recording is the emotional content and how well you can capture/bring out the emotion of the performance. A successful recording is felt.

I’m lucky to be surrounded by a lot of incredible world class singers/artists because of this town. I know many professionals who have so much potential and that do what I do (hired guns) and who use their talents to uplift the artists who hire them. Yet they’ve possibly never had the opportunity/funding to be in the spotlight of the studio and have never been on the receiving end of the effort that it takes to make a really great sounding record because of money.

Last year, I started collaborating with people that I admire (and am fans of), with people that I know have put in the work, and that maybe deserve to have a little more spotlight on them, while also pursuing my own artistry. I’m working on 3 EP’s with various artists, slated to all be released before the end of the year.

My first release will be a version of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” sung by Jannelle Means and it’ll be released on July 3rd, 2025. Wait til you hear it – she did an incredible job. It’ll be my first fully self-produced release. I played electric/acoustic guitar, bass, percussion, programmed strings and mixed it. It started as a selfish excuse to learn and record Steve Lukather’s signature electric guitar parts but once we got started it, it ended up being way more. As a producer, I challenged myself to finally get a song to the finish line that I was happy with, instead of just adding another song to my unfinished-demo-filled 2TB hard drive. We started working on it last year so it’s been a long time coming! We’re both really excited about it.

Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
Your mentor won’t find you sitting in your house. Be interested and open to other people’s stories. Let them share their own experiences and knowledge. One sentence can change your whole mindset and the whole trajectory of your life.

A lot of those classic records have also indirectly mentored me in a sense, I’ve always had a really high regard for “the record”. Especially when I was learning, the session musicians on the recordings had a lot more experience than me, they picked those notes for a reason, so I should honor the part as a whole. In a performance, “doing my own thing” would be to put my own ego before their experience. Sometimes doing our own thing IS what the gig requires, but the record is the home base that you start from.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mattlaurencemusic.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattlaurencemusic/