For M Ross Perkins' third album, What's the Matter, M Ross?, everything began with the title.
"I started writing songs based on that kind of theme that I knew I wanted to to explore on this record. And so then at this at the point when I had all of the songs written, then the next stage is the production stage. And at that point, then, yeah, it's all really visual. I have this big white board in my studio. It has all these, it's like a big chart. There's still all kinds of spontaneous creation of stuff that happens in that process but it's also orderly. It's how I can produce an album from start to finish every instrument in a way that doesn't take years and years to do."
Perkins has grappled with being intimate with listeners on his previous releases, and while this album is his most personal, he's still able to maintain a healthy separation between songwriter and songs.
"I realized that I really had to think about identity, and I knew that that would be a major theme of all the songs and also the album as a whole," he said in an interview with WYSO music director Juliet Fromholt. "There's this theory of identity that I like which is that your identity is this series of stories. It's like a story that you tell about yourself, but that story is based on all the stories you think that other people are telling about you. And so then you compile all these stories about you that you imagined, and you synthesize them, and then whatever comes out is this thing that you call yourself."
Storytelling became an integral part of the album with Perkins using grant funding from the Ohio Arts Council to conduct short interviews with people in public spaces around Ohio.
"I had this little stack of photographs, and I was showing people like, you know, it'd be a photograph of maybe a celebrity or maybe a stock photo or some random person. Each one I would hold up and I would just say what's the matter with him? And then they would have to give me their speculation about what's the matter with..whatever that means, you know, what's troubling the person? So it's part of the different kind of double entendre of the the meaning of the title is like what's the matter with you? Why are you upset? Why are you sad? Also, what' s flawed about you? What's the matter with you, and then also like what is matter? You know, there's also there's that interpretation which I like, what is all this matter around me?"
