{"id":383329,"date":"2025-12-31T20:50:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T20:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/383329\/"},"modified":"2025-12-31T20:50:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T20:50:08","slug":"cmat-is-the-peoples-mess-baby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/383329\/","title":{"rendered":"CMAT is “The People’s Mess,” baby"},"content":{"rendered":"

I, like the great singer-songwriter Judee Sill before me, have always been and always will be a cunt. It\u2019s something I\u2019ve always known about myself, and I frame this early realization as follows: at a certain point in one\u2019s upbringing, they begin to realize that they take after one of their parents more than they do the other. Perhaps your father emerges into adulthood opinionated, stubborn, gregarious in social settings, intense, quick to judge, quick to vocalize when he felt he\u2019d been wronged. Perhaps you have inherited all of these traits, but carry on your mother\u2019s hair and stature and, well, gender. Maybe report cards will bear the phrase \u201cindependently minded\u201d and your childhood friends\u2019 parents will sweetly rhapsodize about \u201cthe beat of your own drum,\u201d but we all know the word we\u2019re grasping for here. If my brother had inherited this specific type of intensity, it would just be his way. But me? I\u2019m a cunt. <\/p>\n

With a sweaty palm pressed against my mother\u2019s, for 18 years I would bound up the path to our weekly Sunday mass and drop to my scraped-up knees to creaky wooden pews, begging an all-seeing God for forgiveness for being like this. At eight years old, I sobbed through my first holy confession in those pews, telling a priest deeply unimpressed by my theatrics about whatever innocuous school antics I felt sorry for, but in my head, I pleaded for some kind of total absolution that would force me to behave forever so I\u2019d never have to come back. If he was truly all-seeing, he surely knew the word for girls like me. He knew I was one of them.<\/p>\n

Though I elected not to return to church of my own volition the second my mom gave me the choice, I found myself drawn to art which repurposed the ritual and sound of those incense-steeped halls where I\u2019d been baptized and confirmed, like the pageantry of guilt had carved its cross deep within me and refused to relent. One of these artists I found a kindred spirit in was little-known songwriter and ex-reform school church organist Judee Sill, who had been a prisoner, a thief, an addict, and\u2014by all accounts\u2014a cunt by the time of her death in 1979. Through country-baroque, gospel-inspired love songs doubling as devotional hymns, Sill begged for salvation that a traditional institution of worship would not grant her. The first time I heard \u201cThe Donor,\u201d an 8-minute chorale paraphrasing the \u201cOur Father\u201d from her 1973 record Heart Food, I knew it would be one of those songs I\u2019d hold dear for as long as I could take in breath on this wretched planet\u2014full of sin and suffering and maybe more girls like me than I\u2019d originally been led to believe.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in the Irish village of Dunboyne, Meath, 16-year-old Ciara Marie Alice Thomas fell into a twin romance with \u201cThe Donor\u201d after learning about Judee Sill from a music teacher at school, and still regularly refers to the track as her favorite song of all time. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of the same song over and over again for the two albums,\u201d Thomas\u2014the artist now known simply by her initials, CMAT\u2014told podcaster Adam Buxton about her love of Sill\u2019s brief but miraculous discography earlier this year, \u201cwhich is her begging God for mercy and forgiveness for being such a terrible cunt.\u201d Buxton laughs, and you can hear the grin in her voice when she adds, \u201cwhich is basically all of my music, as well. All the time.\u201d <\/p>\n

Before I knew about our mirrored love for Sill\u2019s Bach-inspired cry heavenward, I had one of the earliest CMAT singles, 2021\u2019s \u201cI Don\u2019t Really Care For You,\u201d served to me on a playlist, though I can\u2019t for the life of me recall who made said playlist. And in this song, too, I heard a shameful plea to a higher power to forgive so long as we know not what we do. Yet, instead of the ceremonial strife carried by a swirl of voices that ache simply in their harmony, CMAT\u2019s concerns came in the form of a twangy, line-dance-ready backbeat and a lyrical specificity\u2014cutting and wickedly funny\u2014that spun a snapshot of two soon-to-be-ex-lovers hashing our their final goodbyes into a Motown-worthy rave-up. It will stay with me always, the exact moment I first laughed out loud upon hearing a CMAT line, both with delighted surprise and pained familiarity, during the song\u2019s second verse: \u201cI just spent sev\u0435n hours looking at old pics of me \/ Tryna pinpoint where the bitch began \/ Somewhere after the Passion of Christ \/ And before I had an Instagram.\u201d I now realize that this could be a reference to the 2004 Mel Gibson film The Passion of Christ, but in that first flash of epiphany, I felt it had ancient implications\u2014gesturing toward a savior who had perished for the sins of women like us and expected his penance in song ever after. I considered myself an immediate convert to the CMAT cause, and in time, became a vocal evangelist.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy favorite genre of artist is a woman who made one or two things in her life and then was crushed by the world of sexism,\u201d CMAT tells me during what, at least on my end, feels like a long-destined meeting at the end of a 5-year road\u2014during which, as a Paste intern, I stood as the sole editorial voice pushing to include her debut record in our weekly New Music Friday round-up and persisted until it made the cut. She tells me about her penchant for this \u201cgenre\u201d in the upper lobby of her Lower East Side hotel, trying to roll the sleeve of her ruched black shirt up to show me the back of her arm. \u201cCan you see it? You can\u2019t see it,\u201d she grumbles, turning to give me a better view of a sizable tattoo of none other than Judee Sill. <\/p>\n

Upon mention of our shared love of \u201cThe Donor,\u201d she seems to crack open a musical encyclopedia stored solely in her memory, reeling through a list of other women artists active during the \u201870s\u2014Vashti Bunyan, Karen Dalton, and Dory Previn among them\u2014who fit the mold for this favorite genre of hers in one form or another, whispering fairy stories until they were real and then promptly being chased out of potential folk stardom in the peak Laurel Canyon days. CMAT points out where Judee lives and breathes and begs in the tracklist of EURO-COUNTRY, her third album, noting how many questions she\u2019d received since the record\u2019s September release around the soaring final bridge of the song \u201cWhen a Good Man Cries\u201d, breaking from the track\u2019s prior honky tonk swing and into a last devotional cry: \u201cOh, I can feel what I hated in dreams \/ Help me not hate myself, help me love other people \/ Oh, I\u2019ll wear the beads, I\u2019ll read, \u2018Kyrie Eleison.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

That closing Greek-Orthodox expression, translating to \u201cLord, have mercy,\u201d had been key to the text of our shared favorite song\u2014now passed between writers\u2019 hands as a prayer for cunts across decades. I think Ms. Sill would be proud to know that the phrase has landed in the stead of \u201cthe people\u2019s mess, Dunboyne Diana,\u201d as CMAT refers to herself in the same song, who now hears it cried back from the mouths of deeply devoted crowds wherever she plays.<\/p>\n

IT ONLY TAKES A cursory listen to those first two records\u20142022\u2019s If My Wife New, I\u2019d Be Dead and 2023\u2019s Crazymad, For Me\u2014to get a sense of that encyclopedic knowledge I glimpsed in conversation, sweeping everything from outlaw countrymen to the lush \u201cNashville sound\u201d of the \u201850s (think Patsy Cline) to campy glam-pop to contemporary Top 40 (she credits advice she received from Charli XCX at a fan listening event as the impetus to her getting serious about making music) into a singular style. Much of this education and clear obsession with the form seems to have happened in her teenage bedroom, waiting for real life to happen. At one point, we find we shared at least one peculiar childhood hobby: \u201cClocking in after school to fight with random old men on Beatles forums,\u201d in her words. (\u201cWhich one was your favorite?\u201d she asks me, awaiting my sheepish reply of \u201cJohn.\u201d \u201cSame,\u201d she nods, before adding conspiratorially, as if the McCartney camp has eyes and ears stashed in the swanky hotel walls, \u201cand I know that\u2019s not in vogue now, because you know who the algorithm has been pushing these days<\/a>.\u201d) These accumulated sources of inspiration manifest sonically, but also in a reputation for being a powerhouse performer, built upon a storied history of taking the painful emotional concerns of her songs and blowing them up to something worthy of kitschy, maximalist expression\u2014no marking it, ever.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really care about presentation,\u201d she agrees. \u201c[Coming from] somewhat common, middle-class Irish people, you don\u2019t get away with not being entertaining. The whole genre-slash-notion of a guy on stage and a T-shirt and jeans is repulsive to me. I think you can make brilliant, earnest, very serious music, but if I\u2019m gonna pay a ticket to see you fucking live, shake your ass! Do something! I just think you can use power and energy and performance to translate those emotions in the music as earnestly and authentically as [you can] standing there and singing. You can\u2019t just expect me to sit there and be moved by an hour-and-a-half of you, like, pouring your heart out while not moving. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe opera doesn\u2019t even do that,\u201d she continues, letting a scoff escape with each breath by this point. \u201cThey kill each other on stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

The question of operatics is an appropriate one to raise, seeing as EURO-COUNTRY stretches the first two releases\u2019 thematic concerns and soundscapes into a widescreen exploration of everything from ever-shifting Irish identity amid financial crisis over lilting pedal steel on the title track (which boasts what is perhaps the most affecting bridge of any song released commercially this past year), to the playfully biting soul singalong of \u201cTake a Sexy Picture of Me\u201d (which finishes the line with a winking \u201cand make me look 16!\u201d before lowering the age with each repeated chorus, as if tightening a vise), to the wind-tunnel rush of \u201cThe Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,\u201d marking what might be the record\u2019s biggest sonic leap forward. Unraveling in a firestorm stream of consciousness, all stemming from the songwriter\u2019s petty dislike of the titular English chef, the latter song gradually morphs into an untethered, anthemic primal scream, returning to a \u201cmantra\u201d dutifully repeated like the refrain of a psalm preaching best behavior: \u201cOkay, don\u2019t be a bitch \/ The man\u2019s got kids \/ And they wouldn\u2019t like this.\u201d <\/p>\n

Each arrangement across the tracklist thrums with immediacy, frequently veering into the unexpected\u2014a melodic idea you thought the song had abandoned will return, or a screeching fiddle will introduce itself in the final turn of a verse, or stacked vocals will emerge to tower over an already stirring chorus. However, if you ask CMAT about the writing and recording process, completed in partnership with producer Oli Deakin, the final version you hear of any given track is the product of hours spent agonizing over it, trying out different ways to perform or arrange the song or tweaking each detectable intricacy in the sound until the team decided it fit. She retells a story she had told a sold-out crowd at Webster Hall after the album\u2019s release, where initial frustrations came to a head while writing songs in Brooklyn and she began hallucinating, believing bugs had infested the Bed-Stuy apartment she\u2019d been staying in. <\/p>\n

In hindsight, she references the incident as a turning point, vowing to rely on instinct in order to finish the work with everyone\u2019s sanity in tact: \u201cI know where I\u2019ve made mistakes before, and I know what not to do, but I also know that you can\u2019t over intellectualize or know too much when you\u2019re making [the record], so you\u2019re fighting that [impulse] the whole time,\u201d she elaborates. \u201cIt\u2019s like, I both know too much, but know that knowing too much is bad for the music, so you kind of have to be stupid and smart at the same time. It\u2019s a really difficult thing to pull off.\u201d She points to \u201cTree Six Foive,\u201d a brooding breakup track that morphs into a square-dance shuffle in its choruses, as an example where she and Deakin tinkered at least \u201csix different versions\u201d of the song, constantly returning to the concern of \u201cthinking about it too much.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cNobody knows anything, so you have to try and get everything out of your head and go on gut instinct in a musical way,\u201d she reveals. \u201cThis is a part of performance, as well. I think performance is a very underrated part of recording an album. It\u2019s not just that you write and produce an album and Bob\u2019s your uncle, and then you sing at the top of it. You have to become the song, and you have to be you have to reproduce the moment that you wrote the song in the studio in order to pull it off correctly. That\u2019s also true of live music. I can always tell when I see a musician and they\u2019re thinking about something else, or they\u2019re not fully in the song.\u201d<\/p>\n

She pauses for a second, before paraphrasing a Josh Groban interview she\u2019d heard while listening to the radio at some point years before (\u201cThe best advice comes from the worst places,\u201d she assures me) where he claimed he knows he\u2019s delivering a bad show for the people who paid to see him when he\u2019s reaching the setlist\u2019s final stretch. \u201cAnd he\u2019s singing \u2018Nessun Dorma,\u2019 which is a song about his lover dying, and he\u2019s thinking about what he\u2019s going to have for dinner after the show,\u201d CMAT recalls. \u201cAnd so you have to, in the studio and on stage, reproduce the instinctive moment of creativity and inspiration that you had when you were making that really good song. If that doesn\u2019t come through at some point during the songwriting process, then you\u2019ve written a shit song, and it\u2019s not worth bringing to the studio. It\u2019s really hard. It\u2019s why so many musicians are so fucking woo-woo, and I\u2019m not woo-woo. And so, knowing that I\u2019m not woo-woo and knowing that I still have to be woo-woo is really difficult.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

SO HOW DOES CMAT tap into that spirit with every single show she performs, especially on her recent run of U.S. shows, where she fell ill over the course of an extensive travel itinerary? \u201cSometimes, you have to find something else that\u2019s true, and for me, it\u2019s about putting on a show,\u201d she looks up at me, eyebrows raised, \u201cbeing, dare I say, a showgirl.\u201d We let the reference to a certain artist hang in the air before she throws a completely different name into the mix: \u201cLike, Bruce Springsteen is a showgirl! There\u2019s a guy who takes songwriting seriously, takes live music seriously. I love live music and live musicians and live performers. We don\u2019t use tracks or anything in our show. He\u2019s the most popular Irish artist, even though he\u2019s American. They had to just start building things for him in Ireland every time he came around! The last time, he played a field in Kilkenny that they had to make just for him! 500,000 people went to see him over the course of a week and there\u2019s only five million people in Ireland.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really care about attention to detail and actual authenticity, not earnestness, not anything saccharine, but then also like putting on a fucking show and giving people their money\u2019s worth,\u201d CMAT continues. \u201cPeople don\u2019t have that much fucking money. People spend time and effort and energy and money to come and see live music. I\u2019m not just gonna sit there and be like, \u2018You\u2019re so welcome for me playing you my songs. You\u2019re so welcome for me coming.\u2019 I\u2019m grateful for them and you\u2019re supposed to fucking show it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As someone who\u2019s seen CMAT live at least once every time she\u2019s made the trip to New York on tour\u2014from an acoustic set supporting the first album in a 150-cap room to a sold-out, full-production, high-energy show at the aforementioned Webster Hall gig\u2014I can confirm that any set she performs is well worth the price of admission, winning over even the most reluctant members of the press section in the balcony, some of whom had likely only heard a snippet of the singles while scrolling their TikTok feed. As the crowd on the floor rustled with palpable anticipation over the opening piano notes of EURO-COUNTRY\u2019s bleeding-heart, hotel-room-missive of a closer, \u201cJanis Joplining,\u201d you could almost hear the collective whip of heads when the spotlight suddenly whizzed to the back of the room, catching CMAT standing on the bar at the very rear of the showroom to sing her opening lines. An electricity seemed to pulse like a current through each body as she made her way through the crowd and up to the stage, re-contextualizing an isolated ode to a writers\u2019 yearning for true connection (\u201cI don\u2019t need to touch you, just speak to me like I\u2019m your wife or a part of your soul \/ If we keep these thoughts in our head, babe \/ They\u2019ll never hurt us, no\u201d) and turning its longing gaze to a group gathered who understand\u2014dancing without touching, knowing these human frailties, no matter how despairing, can be beautiful and worthwhile if only written down and screamed through a live microphone for all of Fourth Avenue to hear.<\/p>\n

Despite her hard-won reputation as a touring musician, what those attending the shows for EURO-COUNTRY have reflected back to CMAT has continued to surprise her\u2014in ways distasteful and morbidly funny, or both at once. She\u2019s performed every song on the record live, save for the unlikely fan favorite \u201cLord, Let That Tesla Crash,\u201d a devastating ballad recalling the death of a friend and the impact they had on her life: \u201cThat song is actually very real for me, because it\u2019s about grief,\u201d she admits. \u201cIt\u2019s very easy for me to tap into the actual emotion of it, because it\u2019s so black and white about what it is, that the minute you start performing it, you go back to the moment that you find out your friend died. I always knew I was never gonna be able to do it live. I tried once, and I broke down and couldn\u2019t finish the song.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, on a later tour date in Newcastle in the U.K., the song crept up on her again through the prism of a fan in the front row. \u201cSome poor girl,\u201d CMAT remembers, \u201cshe was, like, 15, holding up a sign like she was at a wrestling match, the whole time\u2014gel pen, glitter, and a little illustration of a car saying, \u2018Lord, Let That Tesla Crash right into the setlist!\u2019\u201d She takes on a jokey voice, relishing her chance to recall the poster text as if she\u2019s told the story before, clearly amused by the absurdity of the situation as I feel my own jaw drop for a second and have to will myself to close it. \u201cI think it\u2019s so funny. Like, it\u2019s deeply offensive and traumatizing and disrespectful, and I actually love that. I will never perform it live, and they\u2019re like, \u2018Time to play the song, diva boots!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is something deeply true, maybe, of the CMAT fan base there,\u201d she muses. \u201cI say that because the people that are obsessive and come to my shows\u2014I find them very easy to get along with. I haven\u2019t had any weirdness, really. I think they\u2019re all deeply comfortable with the worst parts of the human experience, and [have found] coping mechanisms like humor and camp and performance and all this. As I\u2019ve gotten older, I\u2019ve tried to allow myself to become more sensitive, because I was very, very, very, very, very bad at earnestness and talking about my actual emotions. Even though that [jokiness] is really good on stage and for touring and press and being a pop star, it\u2019s actually bad in your personal life. I got in trouble in a couple of dating situations because I was like, \u2018I don\u2019t fucking care about anything,\u2019 and you hurt people that way. The fan base is still desensitized in the way that I was, and I\u2019m hoping that maybe, in a couple years, they come along with me and they\u2019re willing to be a bit more sensitive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut right now,\u201d she continues, with a genuine, affectionate smile on her face, \u201cI just think it\u2019s really funny.\u201d Surely, an action so misguided coming from someone so young is done out of love\u2014the fumbling, cockeyed movements we make before we have full command of our bodies, in an effort to make contact with anyone that will understand or move to make the same fumbling motion of love in return\u2014I assure her. <\/p>\n

\u201cOh, of course. They understand me better than I understand myself,\u201d she agrees. \u201cYou can never assume that you know more things than the audience. That\u2019s what I\u2019ve learned, because the thing is,\u201d her eyes widen, looking around again like someone might be listening, might be on to her game, spinning our daily terrors into songcraft worthy of the Great American Songbook and sending it skyward into a tower of song, \u201cI think maybe they know that I\u2019m gonna roll right back into being the Joker no matter what.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can only assume these fans at the barrier, covered in glitter and perhaps once caught under an all-seeing deity\u2019s thumb and deemed one of them, have fallen to their knees in all different versions of my creaky wooden pews that held the weight of my stain, gnashed their teeth at the altar of something that did not recognize their plea. These people, too, may have come to our shared version of evangelism through the gesture of a friend passing one of these songs on as a branch of understanding, of knowing this Irish songwriter\u2014who is now truly the pop star she had once joked about becoming\u2014holds our divine passion in the form of the written word and the body in constant motion, if only to stave off the crush of a world that deems a cunt like me unholy. We have histories of song behind us, carried over with each sigh of \u201cKyrie Eleison,\u201d so I can feel those women breathe within me and with me. All we have to do is crowd the barriers. All we have to do is open our mouths and scream.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I, like the great singer-songwriter Judee Sill before me, have always been and always will be a cunt.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-383329","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}