New York, NY
Jason Matu, the folk-singing lawyer of Bushwick, has lived many lives. After a highly successful initial foray into lawyering and politicking, Matu gave up both to become a rock star (a highly recommended career move). He played bass and wrote songs in Kentucky and Brooklyn’s dream rock legends, Candidate. While in that group, he first started working with long-time producer and collaborator, Justin Craig. After Candidate failed to make him famous, Jason teamed up with Adam Kruckenberg to make music in the band Shapes on Tape.
A series of medical issues and an intervening global pandemic has kept Shapes on Tape on hiatus for quite some time. With nothing else to do, Jason went on bike rides and wrote song after song. All the practice and free time made Jason’s voice far better than ever reasonably expected and Craig's prowess for all things musical—producing, mixing, and playing—helped lift Matu’s creative process to even greater heights since then. Thus, in 2021, Matu released his debut solo album, “Dumb Ecstatic Bliss,” and in 2022, his second album, “Different Love.” Matu’s music has been described as “a 2022 version of Tom Petty meets Flying Burrito Brothers meets The Byrds!” He is presently working on recording his next release, a series of acoustic songs about real and fictional people called, “Character Sketches.”