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Matt Nathanson Credit: Jaron Schneider<\/p>\nMatt Nathanson Credit: Jaron Schneider<\/p>\n
Matt Nathanson<\/a> is ready to eat. The 52-year-old songwriter has the world\u2019s kitchen in front of him at home in San Francisco, but cannot wait to be in front of an entire field of teams vying for first place at Tampa Pig Jig<\/a> this year.<\/p>\n \u201cI like to still be pretty deliberate about what I eat,\u201d he told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, admitting to being a kid who was heavyset and still struggles with his body physically.<\/p>\n \u201cBut dude, I can\u2019t say no to barbecue. So I\u2019ll probably just sort of curate a masterful plate, and then I\u2019ll probably eat it and then take the rest of it back to the hotel and then eat it later again.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019ll have home turf advantage as he takes it all in, too. Nathanson\u2019s front-of-house engineer and production, Erick \u201cOtto\u201d Celeiro, is the president of Tampa\u2019s revered ESI-Productions, where Nathanson\u2019s band has spent many years practicing before hitting the road.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery tour we start in Tampa. Just as humans like, we\u2019ll go to Tampa, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and then get on the bus and drive somewhere else,\u201d Nathanson explained.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a good time to welcome the songwriter, who has one of the most-encyclopedic fan brains in pop music, to our neck of the woods.<\/p>\n The Buccaneers and USF football Bulls are playing well, which opens the door to talk about one of the greatest things that ever happened in sports: Whitney Houston\u2019s 1991 performance of \u201cThe Star Spangled Banner\u201d ahead of Super Bowl XXV at Tampa Stadium (aka \u201cThe Big Sombrero\u201d). The late pop icon was singing to a pre-recorded track, but the spectacle was delivered as George H. W. Bush\u2019s Persian Gulf War raged on and is widely recognized as one of the greatest moments in American entertainment history.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was such a force, and that version of it is just so exceptional,\u201d Nathanson told CL, before explaining his fascination with how a country that loved Houston when she was on top and then turned on her as she publicly descended into the throes of drug addiction.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPeople love to see people fall, but it was a fame thing. People love to see people get dinged and knocked down. She really struggled in her last bunch of years, and no one gave much of a shit,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Nathanson\u2019s 2025 album, King Of (Un)Simple, includes a collaboration with Indigo Girls called \u201cWhitney Houston\u2019s National Anthem.\u201d<\/p>\n The opening verse paints a scene all too familiar in modern politics: a couple finding a shred of joy as the world starts to burn, and the division of families torn apart at the hands of a president beloved by ex-hippies who\u2019ve run out of empathy for anyone they don\u2019t agree with.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI liked it when your hair was long,\u201d Nathanson sings on the cut, \u201cand the last thing we agreed on was Whitney Houston\u2019s national anthem.\u201d<\/p>\n King Of (Un)Simple by Matt Nathanson<\/a><\/p>\n In the tune, Amy Ray sings about America as \u201ca country club at best, safe harbor for the famous and the blessed,\u201d right after Nathanson\u00a0 invokes Houston with this lyric: \u201cWe\u2019re still pretending we\u2019re not who we are. America\u2019s sweetheart, we tore her apart.\u201d<\/p>\n Lines from the song were written a decade ago when Eric Garner was killed by New York City Police officers. The completed version didn\u2019t really get to its final recorded form until well into the pandemic. The country club lyric gets heavier as the days progress, Nathanson explained, and there are places in the U.S. that get amped up when they hear it.<\/p>\n Just don\u2019t expect to test that theory out in Tampa.<\/p>\n Nathanson\u2014who rose to fame on the 2007 song \u201cCome On Get Higher\u201d after years spent on the club circuit opening for the likes of John Mayer and Tori Amos\u2014played \u201cWhitney Houston\u2019s National Anthem\u201d on his last tour, but is skipping it at Pig Jig, which is more like a tailgate concert that raises a shitload of money to research and defeat rare kidney disease<\/a>.<\/p>\n For one, it\u2019s an upbeat gig, and for another, there\u2019ll be a bunch of people in the crowd who might only know him from \u201cRun,\u201d the song he wrote with Sugarland\u2019s Jennifer Nettles (the duo performed it at the 2011 CMA Awards). But mostly because that country club lyric is one of the more self-referential lyrics in a canon that features poppier tunes better suited for the party.<\/p>\n \u201cThat line comes up in my fucking brain all the time,\u201d Nathason admitted. \u201cI don\u2019t know how other people feel about it\u2026 but it\u2019s just true.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"YouTube](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/hqdefault.jpg\")
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