‘I Had the Stroke, and It Was All Over’: Matthew Sweet’s Road to Recovery

(via msn) by David Browne

When one of his eyes doesn’t feel as if it’s wobbling up and down, or he doesn’t feel so depleted that he has to nap, Matthew Sweet still has moments of hope. Until last fall, one of the downstairs rooms in his Omaha, Nebraska, home was his music room, filled with guitars, a recording console, and assorted gear. But since he can no longer climb stairs for the foreseeable future, he now spends a good deal of his time in that room on a newly installed king-sized bed. What remains of his musical setup is still visible, reminders of a life and career on pause.

I guess I have a feeling that I will make music with all of it,” Sweet says, in his first interview eight months after he was rushed to a hospital. “In that way, it’s positive. It’s a vision of the time when I’ll be able to use everything. I don’t feel like it’s that far away. I don’t feel like it will be an impossible thing for me to write songs. Then again, I don’t really feel a burning desire to figure that out, because there’s just so much stuff making it difficult right now.”

For Sweet, 2024 was shaping up to be a reset. After several years off the road after the pandemic, the man who almost single-handedly kept power-pop alive had put together a new band and played shows in the spring. He was in the early stages of prepping his first album since 2021. In the fall, he started another round of gigs, this time opening for Hanson, whom he’s known and worked with for more than 20 years, and doing his own separate shows. “I really felt very positive about it,” he says. “I was doing two-hour-long acoustic shows playing songs from all during my career.”

Then, last Oct. 12, Sweet and his crew – his small acoustic band, his road manager – arrived at their hotel in Toronto. His tour with Hanson was into its second week, and Sweet had just driven up from the previous stop in Baltimore. As they were checking in, the singer, who had turned 60 a week before, felt a sensation he’d never experienced before. “The first thing I felt was really cool, like cold sweat,” he says. “And I remember saying to one of my band members, ‘Feel my arm. It’s freezing cold.’ Something wasn’t right.”

Slumping into a chair behind the front desk, Sweet began hearing what he calls “this kind of tinnitus, more like white noise, and that became really, really, really loud, in both my ears. And that’s the last thing I remember until I was in an ambulance and I heard a guy say, ‘Sir, you’ve had a stroke.'”

Every Moment Has A Song