V. THE MUSICAL THEATRE’s real name is Matty Studivan. I first met him at a BBQ in Chelmsford, where we shared our first bill at one of Olivia Dynamite’s house shows. The Quiet split early and drove back to Cambridge; I hung out and watched Matty wend his way through a dozen songs on his acoustic guitar, which he ran through a board of effects and into an amplifier. The songs, raw at the time, just voice and noise, were surprisingly touching and honest. Robot Love stood out from the rest—a song about the impossible love of a Robot for a Sears Tower. “It would never work,” Matty kept muttering, as he explained the song to a crowd drinking 40 oz jars of malt liquor with finger-paint all over their fingers. As if it needed to be said. But the metaphor rings true with all of us: we all love what we can’t have. And those of us afflicted by this terrible disease we call music know that all too well. The quest after sound, the endless chase after something real, innovative, something you can call your own is often so misleading and so frustrating we really might as well be that robot in love with the a concrete edifice.

In the past months I have watched this sensitive, caring artist turn into someone so important and integral to this thing we call ‘the scene’ that I can scarcely imagine what my life in music was without him. It’s easy for those of us who are comfortable with our place in the world to take someone like Matty for granted, but we should—and I am fully aware that this obscure block of text is the perfect place to say this—recognize his importance to a score of people who are still working through their nervousness—terror, even—when they get up on the stage. There he is, dancing alone to a beat only a handful know, ready to offer a pat on the back when the set is done and the microphones are packed and the amps are loaded into a trunk on top a pile of handmade demos no one will ever hear. There are pats on the back, and there are pats on the back. His are the latter category: that lone voice in the dark that echoes your own self-consciousness, with an honesty and love that many people spend their lives without.

When we asked Stud to play a show at our October residency, opening on the pub stage of the Abbey Lounge, he jumped at the opportunity, offering to bring the then unknown (to us, anyway) Health&Beauty along with him. He opened at eight o’clock and did his thing. The old Abbey had a number of town drunks and their fellow douchebag accoutrements, and they talked all the wetbrain nonsense they could muster. I actually felt like apologizing for them, and did. His response? “I don’t give a fuck,” with a big, sweaty grin across his face. And here’s the catch: He didn’t give a fuck. At all.

To not appear like I’m going overboard, I should say that I told him all this. He was reaching in his pockets, finding nothing, on his fucking birthday no-less, at the close of a Musical Theatre show at the End of the World, and I bought him a round. I grabbed his shoulder and offered some blurry version of these words, and he got a little misty-eyed on me. But I got it wrong; this is right.

The track heretofore presented is his cover of Christie Road, by Green Day, a band I hate. It should serve to illustrate exactly what the fuck I’m talking about. Take a some commercial nonsense band like Green Day, acknowledge they’ve somehow stumbled onto something worthwhile, rethink, re-record: but, this time, hey fellas, why don’t we put some love into it? Whachoogawt?