MATT BISSONETTE

ON THE (NARROW) ROAD

www.mattbissonette.com

You can talk about it at church and go down front at a Billy Graham crusade and accept Christ, but the real change happens when one or two believers do their work, you know?

Hopefully, you know by now that Modern Disciple gets worked up about guys that are out in the mainstream, being real and living the Gospel in their lives. Guys who are not terrified of other belief systems or opposing views, but who are jazzed by the opportunity to be a Disciple in the Modern day.

Bassist Matt Bissonette is one of those guys.

Even if you don't recognize his name, you have heard his music. In a very short period of time, that began with playing jazz in his hometown of Detroit, Matt has developed a musical resume will floor you.

From his live work with Joe Satriani, Rick Springfield, Ringo Starr, Ty Tabor of King's X and more, to his studio and television score work ("Friends") to his own recordings with The Mustard Seeds and The Squirts, Matt has been anything but dormant, often collaborating with his brother, Gregg, a renowned drummer.

When Matt made a stop in his hometown of Detroit with Rick Springfield on "The Day After Yesterday" tour, he graciously cleared his schedule to sit down with us, and it was much appreciated.

Actually, our time was first spent answering our cell phones. First things first. Then we turned them off.

MATT: (As we both hang up) My wife says hello. She's in music ministry at our home church.

MODERN DISCIPLE: Thanks. Wow. Are your kids musical, too?

Matt: Yeah, my son's a drummer, and he's gonna be a baseball player. He's an amazing player, and he and I travel across the country to all the Major League baseball diamonds. We started that quest when he was four.

MD: I read about that. One of our new features is called "The Sixty Minute Father", which documents different and unique ways for dads to spend time with their kids and create memories with them. What prompted you to take your son on a Major League baseball diamond quest?

Matt: It started when I first moved to Los Angeles, when I was not working a lot. It's a bad analogy, but at the time I got a dog, and had all this time to spend with the dog and train her. She was eighteen years old when she passed away a few years ago. I felt like I was a really good parent to that dog.

I had always said that if I ever became a parent, I wouldn't want to just spend quality time with my children - I didn't want to only do the bare minimum. When my son was born, I decided I was going to spend as much physical time with him as possible. I have been on the road with bands a lot over the last six years, which has been kind of frustrating. Whenever I am home, once a year, he and I will get in the car and drive from state to state to see games at all the ball parks. We started in California, drove to Colorado, then up to Michigan, and started seeing all the fields. Every year, we'll see five or six more stadiums.

A couple of weeks ago, we finished our last run, to Minnesota and Washington, and we'll just drive and talk about…what color the sky is. It's that time for me, that's the stuff we'll always remember. I asked him the other day, "do you remember this certain thing about this stadium?" He said, "no, but I remember when you turned left in Cincinatti at the Louisville sign and you were so mad!" He remembers that stuff, and I know that it's making an impact on him growing up. We've found something in common, baseball, that we're both interested in. It's not even the games that are important - it's just getting there and hanging out. I bought him some cotton candy at the end of the last game to celebrate our road trip, and he completely wigged out on it. That stuff's evil. It took three days to calm him down.

MD: That's cool. Once a month, I take my kids on an "adventure". They never know where it's gonna be until they get there. Sometimes it's a Thousand Foot Krutch concert, or Chuck E. Cheese or whatever. It also covers me, in case the plans have to change midstream, I can find another "adventure" and avoid disappointing them.

Matt: I remember when our son was born, I started taking him to sessions, when I was recording with my band, The Mustard Seeds. We would drive an hour each way, and I am so glad I did that.

When my wife and I got married, she had a son that is now seventeen. When he was born, he weighed about a pound - he really is a miracle child. So we had been told by our doctor that we would never have a child. Two weeks later, my wife got pregnant, and it changed everything, my whole perception of life changed with our son. You know - the career thing and how important is music? I feel now that I can spend time writing and performing music, but I'm no longer chasing that perfect song that will change the world and be the number one hit. That stuff is so long gone, it's nice to be able to write songs without that pressure.

Now, we record CDs at my house, my brother and I and a bunch of guys, and we'll write music for TV and movies. We have hooked up with some publishers, and we'll just write whatever we want, jazz, rock, and they will take it to filmmakers looking for music. It's so much more fun, and it's nice to have a place to go with songs, instead of the treacherous record deal. The Squirts, which is made up of Rick Springfield's touring band (Roger, George and myself), first got together in my home studio and just wrote ten songs. The music publisher loved it, and within a few weeks, got it on Dawson's Creek, CSI and all these shows. And we started getting these checks. Then we went to Rick and asked if we could open his shows, which he graciously agreed to. He was like "whatever you want to do". So we get to play our own stuff live, sell some CDs and have the benefit of another source of income. We now put out Squirts records every year, and it's funny how it has led to more work in the music industry. You go from spinning your wheels chasing a record deal. When you do the math, you can make a better living doing music for TV and film than selling songs on a CD. It makes me wonder why we didn't do this ten years ago. It's been a real Godsend.

Christians often say to me, "How can you play with non-Christians? Or someone who swears, or whatever? How can you play in clubs?"

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