Where do you begin with Matthew Smith? A fixture in Detroit’s indie music community for over 20 years, Smith has produced and played with a dizzying array of names, from T-Model Ford to Rodriguez to Damo Suzuki. He’s released close to 20 records with Outrageous Cherry and the Volebeats—two very different bands without a single weak moment between them, both stubbornly lodged in the realms of cult worship.

Smith reports that Outrageous Cherry is currently at work on its 12th album of succulent, psychedelic bubblegum pop. This is a band that once recorded 17 songs in a single day, and its leader, by legend, is a songwriter of terrifying prolificacy. A therapist might pin Smith’s obsessive nature on some sort of distant trauma.

“Well, that could be true of anyone that lives in Detroit,” he suggests, chuckling, in a call from his Motor City home. “For me, I got addicted to playing music early on. But the deeper I got into it; the more bands I played with; the more I experimented with recording; the more I started finding that I had a capacity to do things that constantly surprised me. And it continues to surprise me.”

One wonders how his partners keep up? Smith laughs, and explains that the creative dam seemed to burst after the first OC record emerged in 1994. “Suddenly, I just found that I was writing hundreds of songs; just filling notebooks with songs, and it just got completely crazy. It’s harder to find musicians that don’t get worn out in the presence of that sort of energy.”

Smith proudly notes that he at least could keep up with the “most electrified” guy he ever worked with—his friend, the late Kim Fowley—offering a nice departure point for some discussion of his wild catalogue of collaborations. As a Detroit kid, he remembers bumping into various Stooges around town and spotting the MC5’s Rob Tyner pottering about across the road from his friend’s house, and he ended up working with Scott Morgan of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. Bridging generations, Smith also produced the late-’90s underground masterpiece Whatcha Doin’ by the Go, featuring a young guitarist named Jack White.

“It was kind of a high-pressure situation with lots of weird emotional energy going on,” Smith recalls. “It wasn’t a happy experience for him.” The album is a stone classic anyway, but arguably no more so than any of Smith’s own. When he hauls himself up to Vancouver for a rare solo performance at the Bottleneck this weekend, we’ll likely be hearing a lot of Outrageous Cherry numbers; not so many from the more acoustic-friendly Volebeats catalogue. Smith cheerfully describes the 26-year-old alt-country outfit as a band that “just refused to break up” and a “prolonged dysfunctional relationship between two high-school friends”.

“It’s more difficult for me to play the Volebeats songs on my own because I don’t have this guy staring at me with this look of disapproval, waiting for me to finish so he can start singing again,” Smith explains, laughing again. “And it’s sort of hard to convey that when you’re doing it solo.”

Georgia Straight, April 2015