Matthew Sweet - 2018 - Tomorrow's Daughter

Honeycomb Hideout – HH-02  257.10MB FLAC

Matthew Sweet’s Tomorrow’s Daughter was released in 2018, but it belongs to the same creative burst that produced 2017’s Tomorrow Forever. Sweet had moved back to Nebraska, built a home studio, launched a Kickstarter campaign, and recorded an enormous batch of songs, eventually finishing roughly 38 pieces. Seventeen became Tomorrow Forever. Another twelve became Tomorrow’s Daughter. Sweet has pushed back against the idea that this second group should be treated as scraps, saying he assembled them at the same time and felt they coalesced into an album of their own. That distinction matters when listening. Tomorrow’s Daughter does not sound like a random sweep of discarded demos. It sounds like a companion record from the same period, slightly more compact and perhaps a little less burdened by having to announce Sweet’s return after a six-year gap between albums.

The Oakland Public Library copy pictured here has one of the strangest covers in this group of posts. The front is dominated by a painting of a wide-eyed girl lying sideways, with blond hair curling around her head, turquoise flowers and ribbons, pale skin, and enormous dark eyes. There is no artist name or title printed across the image. Only the library’s CD / ROCK / SWEET classification sticker interrupts the painting. The result is unusually ambiguous for a Matthew Sweet record until the disc is opened and the title becomes visible.

The artwork belongs to the same visual world Sweet had been exploring around Tomorrow Forever. Sweet has talked about his fascination with mid-century “big eye” painting, especially Margaret Keane, and about wanting to use artwork carrying that strange combination of sweetness, melancholy, kitsch, childhood, and unease. When he could not obtain the Keane image he initially wanted for Tomorrow Forever, he turned instead to work by Maio, another artist associated with mass-produced big-eye prints from the same era. Tomorrow’s Daughter continues that fascination. The painted girl is cute in one register and almost uncanny in another. Her eyes are too large, her expression too still, her body positioned too much like a doll. Sweet’s music has often occupied a similar emotional territory, where bright melody and darker feeling sit close enough together to make each other stranger.

“I Belong to You” opens the album with that familiar Sweet combination of melodic ease and emotional uncertainty. His voice still carries the slightly nasal softness that makes even declarative phrases sound vulnerable, while the guitars keep the song from drifting too far into sweetness. “Run Away” immediately turns the emotional direction outward. The title could be command, confession, or wish, and Sweet’s writing is often strongest when a simple phrase remains unstable enough to support several meanings.

“Lady Frankenstein” is one of the album’s most memorable songs and apparently one of the pieces Sweet himself remembered emerging quickly. The title began partly as a private joke between Sweet and his wife, but the song fits neatly into his long attraction to monsters, comic-book imagery, science fiction, and emotionally damaged characters. Frankenstein is already a story about assembling something from parts and discovering that the result has its own life. That is a funny idea to encounter on an album assembled from the same large recording sessions as another record. Tomorrow’s Daughter may technically consist of songs left outside Tomorrow Forever, but once arranged together they become their own creature.

“Years” is quieter and more reflective, and its title seems especially appropriate for a songwriter several decades into a career. Sweet has never completely abandoned the emotional vocabulary of youth, particularly longing, romantic confusion, isolation, and the feeling that a relationship can reorganize an entire world. What changes with age is the amount of history underneath those feelings. A song called “Years” does not need to explain all of them to make their weight audible.

“Out of My Misery” and “Something Someone” continue through territory Sweet knows extremely well: disappointment converted into melody. He has always had a peculiar talent for making unhappiness catchy without turning the sadness into spectacle. The guitars can be crunchy, bright, or distorted, but the songs generally remain built around strong vocal lines and choruses. Sweet’s version of power pop has never required emotional cheerfulness. In fact, disappointment is often the fuel.

The second half opens with “Girl with Cat,” a title that becomes much more amusing beside the cover art and, retrospectively, beside Sweet’s later Catspaw album. Cats recur in his visual world, but “Girl with Cat” is less a novelty than another compact pop song built around affection and observation. The sequencing also produces a loose visual echo: Tomorrow’s Daughter presents us with a painted girl on the cover, then eventually gives us a song called “Girl with Cat,” and three years later Catspaw would cover an entire album with feline mouths, paws, claws, and fur.

“Now Was the Future” may be the album’s best title. Grammatically it turns time back onto itself: the future became now, and almost immediately now became the past. That is also a useful way of thinking about the Tomorrow Forever / Tomorrow’s Daughter period. The songs were recorded while Sweet was imagining what came next, then divided into two albums, and within a few years both were simply another layer of his catalog. The title sounds philosophical without requiring a complicated lyric to make the point.

“Ever After” toys with another phrase loaded with romantic finality. Fairy tales promise “happily ever after,” while Sweet’s songs have spent decades demonstrating that relationships rarely cooperate with such clean endings. “Show Me” and “Can’t Pretend” push further into direct emotional language. Sweet does not generally hide behind elaborate narrative characters. His song titles often sound like things one person might actually say to another during an argument, breakup, reconciliation, or exhausted conversation.

“Passerby” closes the album without a giant finale. That modest ending suits Tomorrow’s Daughter. This is not an album trying to present itself as Sweet’s definitive statement. It is a tightly assembled continuation of an unusually productive period, another twelve songs extracted from a much larger body of work and allowed to stand together.

The physical library copy makes the album particularly attractive. Inside, the disc is bright turquoise with MATTHEW SWEET printed in large white retro lettering and a tiny flower above his name. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker sits directly over part of the title and has a handwritten number added to it. The pale, almost empty artwork beneath the disc resembles plaster or textured wall paint, giving the interior a domestic, handmade feel rather than the slick black plastic of an ordinary jewel case.

The back continues the painted imagery. A cord or wire curves across an abstract interior while the track list is divided into Side A and Side B even though this is a compact disc. That small decision keeps the package connected to LP culture and to the older visual era suggested by the cover painting. A huge Oakland Public Library barcode has been placed across the upper center, partially covering the artwork, while another commercial barcode in the corner has been blacked out. The object has accumulated several competing systems for identifying itself: record label, artist, LP-style sides, commercial UPC, public-library barcode, handwritten library number.

The cover painting becomes even more interesting because there is no title printed over it. Without context, it could be a thrift-store painting, a reproduction from the 1960s or 1970s, or something removed from an entirely different object. The library label saying simply ROCK / SWEET suddenly does a lot of work. It is the institutional sticker, rather than the album design, that tells the viewer whose record this is.

Tomorrow’s Daughter is not as sprawling as Tomorrow Forever, and that smaller scale helps it. The twelve songs feel less like a demonstration of abundance and more like another room inside the same house. Sweet’s melodic instincts are intact, the guitars remain central, and the songs carry the familiar mixture of affection, anxiety, nostalgia, disappointment, and persistence that has run through his work for decades.

The girl on the cover looks almost frozen in time.

The songs are much less still.

— ChatGPT