An Evening with Matt Costa

It was an unusually cold August night when my good friend and Niche co worker Emily Wells and I went to grab coffee at a favorite local café in their hometown of Orange County.

When we arrived our waiter informed us that Matt Costa would be playing an improptu show.  Surprised that he just happened to be playing in our hometown we soon learned he is from a city not too far from the coffee shop we were at. As Costa began to set up his equipment, we seized the oppurtunity to invite him for drinks and an interview after his set.

Costa played some of his new soulful folk music with his bandmante Danny Garcia. The set was an impressive display of the complexity and passion of acoustic music which we were very lucky to randomly catch.

Costa and Garcia played with a passion and vigor not often seen in today’s indie/folk singers. Costa dedicated this to the fact that he “easily gets lost in music.” Both former pro-track skateboarders, Costa and Garcia agreed that they most enjoy playing spur of the moment low-key events with each other, even more so than being on tour. “All of the best things to happen to me in life have been spontaneous.” says Costa.

This whimsical mentality held true when we asked Costa one of our favorite interview questions for musicians- if you were to hear three songs before you die, what would you want them to be? His response- “My worthwhile experiences have always been unplanned. If I answered that, I could be ruling out the best thing to ever happen to me.”

Costa also displays an incredible range of versatility in his passions. Being bibliophiles ourselves, we loved talking about our mutual love of John Steinbeck- “I’m reading a collection of his letters right now. He has a rawness that you don’t see in many authors today.”

When discussing computer choices for graduate school, Costa displayed a charming groundedness. “You have a computer? I have a computer. The delete key doesn’t work anymore. Now I have to really mean everything I say.” Costa isn’t one to spend extraeneous time allowing his mind to rot. “It’s up here”, he said, pointing to his brain. “That’s all that really matters.”

What’s next for Matt Costa? “I can’t really say. I’ll be playing as much as I can for as long as I can.”