Time, Feel and Function: Matt Rollings on a Session Musician Career (Episode 89)

Reliability beats virtuosity.

Matt Rollings is a Grammy-winning composer, keyboard player and record producer, best known for playing in Lyle Lovett's Large Band. He won the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album in 2016 for producing Willie Nelson's Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin, earned more nominations for Willie's Sinatra album My Way, and has toured with Mark Knopfler and Alison Krauss. He also produced Blues Traveler's Hurry Up & Hang Around.

Nomad remembers being nervous to meet the A-list session players when he first moved to Nashville, and Matt turned out to be the nicest guy in the room. In Episode 89 of The Career Musician, Matt explains how a session musician career used to get built, what still works, and how he backed into being an artist after 30 years.

The old apprenticeship, and what replaced it

Matt moved to Nashville in 1986. Back then, he says, there was a middle class in the music business. Publishing companies had staff songwriters, song pluggers pitched their songs to producers, and every one of those songs needed a demo. Hundreds of musicians made their living on demo sessions: show up at 10, cut five songs in three hours, one run-through, then the red light.

It was a training ground. You learned to read a chart right the first time and craft an effective part fast. Then a producer would hear a demo, ask who played that piano part, and you would get the call. Before that, you went to writers nights, met songwriters, and offered to play on their demos.

That system is mostly gone. But Matt's advice for newcomers is the same at heart: meet people at the entry level as much as you can, and be the guy they want to hire.

Time, feel and function

When Matt teaches clinics, he boils the job down to three things.

• Time: the inner metronome. Making it feel good at 100 bpm, 150 bpm and everywhere in between.
• Feel: how you play with the drummer and the rhythm section. Every great drummer puts it somewhere different.
• Function: what your job actually is. Piano on a country record is not piano on a pop record or in a jazz club.

"How do I get out of my own way enough to actually be a part of the conversation that's actually happening?"

Matt Rollings, 11:41

Then the through line he sees in nearly every successful musician he knows: they are nice people who get along with others. In a studio there is a lot of money being spent, and bad energy will kill a session. That is Low maintenance / no drama, and it is why Reliability beats virtuosity.

Say yes, then figure it out

Matt moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to pursue composing and film scoring. Film turned out to be a different game than he expected, but LA taught him something more valuable.

"Almost everybody is expecting you to do great... and if it's not what they want, they can just say do this different."

Matt Rollings, 28:12

So he said yes to arranging, music directing and theater writing he had never done before, and those opportunities pushed him out of his comfort zone. That is Luck = preparation + opportunity: the prep was decades of time, feel and function. The yes opened the door.

Backing into being an artist

Matt made a jazz trio record in 1990, Balconies, with John Patitucci and Carlos Vega. Then 30 years passed. Like a lot of session players, he could do many things convincingly, and his own voice was hard to find.

It came back two ways. On the Alison Krauss tour, he and the drummer started jamming at soundchecks and recording little snippets. Then, on a family trip in Northern California, Matt played an upright piano in a boathouse for an old man with a sketchbook who turned out to be folk legend Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Matt's producer brain wanted to produce a record on Jack. His wife suggested something better: make your own record and ask Jack to sing on it.

So he did, with friends he had built relationships with for decades, including Lyle Lovett and Willie Nelson. Piano and drums cut live in the same room, the artists singing live. Their only rule: make something beautiful. And when anything got too hard, they took it as a sign to ease off the gas.

"If I start pushing too hard, it's getting to be about me, and that's rarely the right way to go."

Matt Rollings, 26:10

Nomad pointed out that Matt executed a perfect business plan without trying: organic collaborations with artists who know and respect him. That is Work begets work, decades deep.

Where should you live?

Nomad, then in LA for 15 years and considering a move, asked the question a lot of players wrestle with: LA, Nashville or New York? Matt moved back to Nashville in 2015 for family, school and a home studio. His advice: straight out of college, it is fine to move strictly for the business, ideally with some friends and community already there. Later in life, you have to like living there, because the longer you go, the less location-specific your career gets. Any move is a leap, and there might be a dip.

The takeaway

Matt worked with Larry Carlton for years, and he passed along Larry's hardcore advice to young players: if you have a plan B, take it. For the ones who can't, Matt's path is the map. Show up, play for the song, be good to be around, say yes, and let the relationships carry you. You can find more of his work at mattrollings.com. When an audition comes your way, prepare like a pro with the free Audition Secrets guide.

Get the gig. Keep the gig. Build the career.

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