Matthew Phillips's Relentless Rock 'n' Roll Assault Closes "Twilight in the Park" Concert Series August 29

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 29) was the final concert in the 2024 “Twilight in the Park” series, featuring Matthew Phillips. I’d assumed he was a folk-style singer-songwriter; instead he’s a hard rock singer-guitarist who reminded me of the short-lived early-1980’s artist Rick Springfield. I said “short-lived” because Springfield’s career peaked early (with the enormous 1981 hit “Jessie’s Girl”), even though according to Wikipedia he was born in 1949 and is still alive. Like Springfield, Phillips is boyishly handsome, and he’s an immense beneficiary of the wireless technology that has allowed electric guitarists to roam free around the venue, untethered by the long cords they used to need to connect their guitars to their amps. Phillips moved around the Organ Pavilion unencumbered by any need to stay physically connected to his equipment, and though his on-stage band featured only himself, bass guitarist Reese Warren and drummer Corey Moore (or was it “Lewin”? Phillips’ on-stage announcements aren’t always the clearest), he also used pre-recorded backing tracks for the keyboard parts (piano and synthesizer mostly). Phillips is an excellent, if unoriginal, lead guitarist, and his songs are almost all about incipient or actual romantic breakups.

He opened with a song whose title I guessed as “I Would Do Anything (To Have One More Day with You),” and the theme of malfunctioning relationships ran throughout the evening with “Don’t Break My Heart Tonight,” “Goodbye,” a song called either “Time Takes Love” or “Time Fades Love” (once again, Phillips’ intro was difficult to decipher), a song he announced as “The Movie Song” because it’s been featured in two films (though he didn’t say what they were and imdb.com lists a whole bunch of Matthew Phillipses but none of them appear to be this one) but was yet another mopey breakup tale, “I Just Want You to Know Who I Am,” “Together Forever” (don’t let the title fool you; it’s yet another breakup song and the title expresses the singer’s wish for his relationship, not its reality), a surprise cover of Prince’s “Purple Rain” (with all Prince’s catalog to choose from, he would choose one of Prince’s most doleful songs!) and the two big signature pieces, “Till It’s Over” (winner of a San Diego Music Award) and “So in Love.” He’s done tours in support of the last two and T-shirts advertising them were available at his merch table.

Though he did one slower, slightly softer song on acoustic guitar (he had a roadie swap out various guitars for him during the evening, though he mainly played a gold-painted electric), most of his set was a relentless assault on the eardrums. I mean that as at least partly a compliment; Phillips’ music was a throwback to what used to be called “hard rock” in the 1970’s and 1980’s before it morphed into heavy metal and rock fell from its long-standing perch at the top of the music world, replaced by rap and disco’s even more annoying offspring, “EDM” (“electronic dance music”). I was a bit disappointed in this concert, especially as a season closer, but I liked it for what it was and I especially liked the way Phillips was working the audience. At times he walked through the crowd while continuing to play, and for one song he announced that he wanted the audience to stand in front of the stage so he and his crew could shoot a music video of the song he was about to perform. Then he asked them to turn the flashlights on their cell phones on and wave them back and forth in time to the music. Matthew Phillips is a young man who’s been able to parlay a considerable if limited talent and a great bod into something of a rock-star career, and it’s only unfortunate that he was born too late to achieve true superstardom in his sort of music. It also doesn’t help that he’s picked song titles like “Goodbye” and “So in Love” that were also classics from the Golden Age of American songwriting (“Goodbye” by Gordon Jenkins and “So in Love” by Cole Porter), though at least his “Together Forever” is a good deal better than the horrible song of that name by Rick Astley, a brief phenom of the early 1990’s who worked up a surprisingly successful career based on a great bod and a foghorn voice considerably worse than Matthew Phillips’s!