Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Belle Mt.

Belle Mt. is the ever-evolving alt-pop project and brainchild of front man Matt Belmont. Over the years, Belle Mt. has manifested itself in various forms, from Matt performing his most intimate songs on guitar or keys to its current incarnation, which features long-term collaborators Chris Burgess on drums/percussion and Ben Worsley on guitar, bass, and backing vocals. Whether a solo artist or trio, one thing has remained consistent: the music. With breakout hits like “Hollow” and “Loving You,” Belle Mt.’s sound and message have connected with millions of listeners around the world. We caught up with Matt to learn more about this exciting project, their new single, and the success of “Hollow.”

PC: How did you discover your passion for music?
Matt: My uncle was a singer. He would sing in bars, restaurants, and pubs and we’d go and watch him. I remember being five or six years old and watching him. Then my parents got me and my sister a karaoke machine, and we’d get whichever songs that we wanted, and my uncle would burn them on CDs and bring it to us. We’d drive our parents mad singing those terribly in our dining room.

Then I got into actually playing instruments. When I saw a music teacher at my school play a piece on piano in an assembly, I don’t think I’d ever paid attention to anyone playing their instrument before. But when it was there in front of me, happening live, and I was in the front row and I could see the keys moving, it really inspired me.

I drove my parents crazy for months asking for a piano. Eventually, they got me a little Casio keyboard thing, which wasn’t built right at all. It would trigger the drum demos and stuff while I was trying to play it. [laughs] It wasn’t great.

Then they found a rickety, old upright piano and moved it into our house. I would just sit there for hours. I knew I had to do fifteen minutes a day practice, but I would sit there for hours just mesmerized by being able to hold down the sustain pedal and play the keys. It sounded nice. I didn’t really know what I was doing at that point. Then I wrote my first song when I was about sixteen, and I wrote terrible songs for a good few years while I was trying to work it out. It’s continued from there.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Matt: I was a busker in London. I would stand on the streets and I’d play my guitar to anyone who would listen. I’d go out whenever it wasn’t raining, even when it was freezing cold. I’d stand and play for hours, lots of covers. Then I’d put my originals in whenever I had a crowd. I’d sell CDs and things.

I did that around London for a few years, and I got some attention from someone from a label. He walked past and liked my voice. He gave me their number, and then I had a meeting. It wasn’t someone senior enough. It wouldn’t lead anywhere until I started cowriting a bunch of songs for other people. Prior to that, I’d only ever written on my own.

I wrote with this girl who happened to go to Nashville on her honeymoon after getting married. She sent a list of songs she had cowritten and who were her favorites to write with while she was there. One of the writers was Femke Weidema, who’s now my most consistent collaborator, and a really big part of this project. We write and produce stuff together. Femke reached out and said, “I heard this song on a playlist. I love your voice. I love your writing style and sound. Can we get together?” It was a challenge because Femke was in Nashville and I was in London. I was like, “Look. I’m going to book a ticket and come over.” That was after our first Skype session.

I went over and we hit it off. We wrote a bunch of songs together. Being in Nashville, I knew this is where I could make it happen. I met a bunch of people that were making things happen in a way that I hadn’t really seen in London, which sounds strange because London obviously has a big music scene. Nashville was just on another level. The work ethic was at a different level than I had previously experienced. I always want to be in the place where I have to reach the highest bar. I don’t see the point of working really, really hard to meet a bar that isn’t the highest bar. You need to aim so that you reach that highest level. That place has had a massive influence on me. In the beginning, it was just the two of us. We made some doors open that we shouldn’t really have been able to make open by just bothering people. [laughs] That was huge.

I met my manager, Bruce Kalmick, after maybe a year of working with Femke. He helped find those people in the right positions of power who liked my stuff because you’re never going to be everyone’s cup of tea. You’re never going to be everyone’s taste, so you need to find that one record label executive—out of the however many there are—that loves what you do. That really helped.

That was the final piece of the jigsaw. He was like, “I know he’ll love this publishing. I know he’ll love this. On the label side, I know which agent you should work with.” I would meet with a few and it would always be the one he suggested in the end. The person that he suggested would be right. He has this incredible ability to make things happen and put pieces into place.

Also my parents.

PC: You’re the frontman of Belle Mt. and you’ve been experimenting with this project for the past five years. What’s one thing that you know now that you wish you knew back then?
Matt: That’s a great question. I guess I wish I knew how long it takes. I had a bit of frustration along the way, just from how long things take. Like I was saying earlier, the pieces have fallen into place, but I’ve been frustrated at times that they haven’t fallen into place right away, but there’s this sense of relief when it does work out.

The fact that it’s taken those five years has meant that I’ve been able to vet the process in a way, like who we’re bringing on board as team members. I now have a team that fully supports my artistic vision, which is rare when I speak to friends in the industry. They’re constantly frustrated with reps trying to make them do something they don’t want to do or their publisher. I haven’t really had much of that at all. The people who’ve been brought in have been brought in for the right reason. Nobody is trying to make Belle Mt. a different thing.

So yeah, I guess just to trust the process and trust people, which is really hard to do. You have to trust your own instinct, and your own judgement. Then you need to give yourself the luxury of then being able to trust the people around you. It results in a better product.

Another point is that you don’t have to control everything. Find good people and allow them to shine as well, which sounds super business-y. I’m talking about Ben Worsley, our lead guitarist in the band, and Chris Burgess, our drummer. I’ve been able to allow them in a lot more because I know that they do what I love, and I know that. When I trust them, they come up with things that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.

PC: This project has taken different forms throughout the years. How has that flexibility influenced the project’s sound and creative process?
Matt: It’s been great actually. As someone who previously was a guy with an acoustic guitar, of which there were a million in the last decade, I felt really trapped by that. I love the Band’s sound. I love Bon Iver. I love Fleetwood Mac. I love Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. I don’t just love bands and I don’t just love solo artists.

It’s an exciting moment when it’s like, “Oh sh-t. We don’t have a song that sounds like this.” That’s a great thing. Rather than before, we would be like,”Does this sound enough like the other songs? Will this fit?” We released “Hollow” first and then released “Let Me” second. “Let Me” was more of a band sound, led by an arpeggiated electric guitar. “Hollow” is this singer-songwriter, moody, deep, dark, ambient track.

We had other songs that could have followed “Hollow,” but I was like, “No, let’s set that expectation right from the start.” We’ve continued to do that. I write from melancholic places, really. They’re always quite dark, but you’ll get this big, dark ballad, and then you’ll get an indie alternative pop banger after that. Fans that we’ve picked up along the way, they expect that. Nobody says, “That doesn’t sound like you anymore.” Because we found a few ingredients that can carry through all these evolutions of the sound and make it sound like Belle Mt.

I’m really glad we focused on that from the start because it allowed us to have that freedom in the writing room and studio. So it’s been huge. I’d like to experiment with that even more, as well with the format of how it can come across live. Sometimes it can be just me and a cellist. Sometimes it’s me, Ben, Christian, and another drummer and a brass section. It just depends on what serves the music the best.

PC: Speaking of “Hollow,” that became a breakout hit for you all. When you were writing that song, when did you realize it would strike a chord with listeners? Has that success added pressure to future releases?
Matt: “Hollow” was the second song that myself and Femke wrote together. It happened on day two of working together. All I knew was that I was pouring a lot of my own experiences into this song. I knew that, but I always try and do that. But when writing the song, we were excited. But I’ve come out of every writing session thinking it’s the best song I’ve ever written. [laughs] Oftentimes I’m wrong. [laughs] I was excited about that one though, but I wasn’t sure it was going to be anything until maybe five or six days later. We went in to demo all the songs that we’d written, and when we demoed it, we tweaked a few lyrics and wrote a bridge. It didn’t have a bridge at that point, and we started to lay it down.

We kept looking at each other like, “This is really good, isn’t it?” This is really getting more and more exciting. Then I played a couple of showcases for industry people and it was the song that people kept mentioning afterwards. They’d always say that they love that song.

My manager would get texts saying “‘Hollow’ is the one.” So we decided to release it first. But again, it was a brand-new project, and I didn’t expect things to go as quickly. I’d spent years busking on the streets, playing in bars, having people say, “I love your voice. I love that song.” But nothing would come of it. So I expected a slow burn. But day one, it was on New Music Friday in the US on Spotify. It was on the home landing page for the US for Apple Music. We had a brilliant distributor, a guy named Shawn Fowler at Tone Tree Music in Nashville. He’s worked with the Civil Wars and people like that. We were so lucky to get him on board. He hit an absolute home run.

I remember waking up in the UK and being excited that it was released there. I was checking Spotify UK for the New Music Friday playlist because that was my highest goal. It wasn’t on there. I was like, “Maybe next time.” Then I got a text later in the day from Femke saying “We got Spotify New Music Friday in the US.” That’s ten times the size of the UK playlist. I was like, “Sh-t. It’s unbelievable.” We didn’t know, but I’m so glad that it went the way it did. Our whole mission is to find the people that the music connects with as much as it connects with me when I write it. You need to reach a lot of people to find those people. I’m so glad we found that exposure so far. I hope we can build on it.

PC: Tell us about your new single, “This Kind of Heavy.” What inspired the song?
Matt: “This Kind of Heavy” is the heaviest subject matter that I’ve ever written about. It’s a song that I wrote about a year after losing one of my really good friends, who was a drummer. We went to university together. We both went to Leeds College of Music and hung out together and stuff. He had an eccentric, amazing, electric personality.

He passed quite suddenly, and our whole friend group was completely rocked by it. I don’t want to get too much into it, but months passed and I found this cloud hanging over everything, particularly in my songwriting. I would try to write songs and if they didn’t match the emotions that I was feeling, I would throw them out halfway because what’s the point? What does this matter when this giant thing just happened? What does this little nice, pretty love song that I’m writing matter? It really stifled me.

I tried to write about the actual experience a few times and I couldn’t. I didn’t have enough distance from it to live up to it yet and reflect on it. And I went to watch another band who is under the same management called Cadillac Three. They played at Wembley. My manager, Bruce, was there and we went for a meal afterwards. He was like, “How’s the writing going?” I was completely honest and said, “Terribly. I’ve experienced this loss and I’m struggling to write about anything. Nothing matches up to it.” He said, “Nothing compares to that kind of heavy.”

We carried on in the conversation but that sentence stuck in my mind, which is often the case with songs that I write. There’s a key lyric that everything comes from, which is just something I’ve seen or heard somewhere. It stuck in my mind. Then I had a writing session with Femke in Nashville and I said, “This thing happened. Bruce said this thing while we were having a conversation. He said, ‘Nothing compares to this kind of heavy.’” She was like, “We should write that song that you haven’t been able to write yet. Let’s do it! Let’s break through those walls.” We tried and we wrote “This Kind of Heavy.” It feels like one of the most important things I’ve ever written.

Now that it’s finished and about to go into the world, I don’t know if it’s as commercially viable as “Hollow.” Time will tell. But it couldn’t be more real, and it couldn’t be more reflective of something that I lived through and went through. Although we don’t talk about it specifically, I don’t mind saying that I wrote about him in that moment because I feel it’s good enough. I hope it is. One of the key things we tried to do is not make too much about that because we wanted to make it something that could apply to whatever you’re going through. Everyone has difficult times in their lives. We wanted to make it something that you could apply to your own situation and you wouldn’t have to feel like you’re listening to me talking about what I’m going through. I wanted it to be more for you, the listener, to be able to heal like it healed me.

Follow Belle Mt. on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify. Pick up or stream “This Kind of Heavy” today.

Photo Credit: Sara Lincoln