Matthew Phillips Gives Energetic Performance to Surprisingly Small Crowd at "Twilight in the Park" August 27

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, August 27) I went to the next-to-last “Twilight in the Park” concert at Balboa Park’s Spreckels Organ Pavilion featuring aspiring local rock star Matthew Phillips, who sings, plays guitar (mostly electric, though on one song he picked up an acoustic), and leads a power trio of bassist Reece Warren and drummer Corey Newton. Matthew Phillips had played “Twilight in the Park” on August 29, 2024, too – in fact, that year he closed the season – and in 2024 he drew a quite large crowd that seemed to inspire him. Phillips, taking advantage of the improvements in technology that allow musicians playing electric instruments to roam freely and not be tethered by cords connecting their instruments to their amplifiers, strode through the audience like a conquering hero while still playing and singing away. Alas, this year he had a much smaller audience (I was amazed at how many more people – three to four times the number – came out to hear the Coronado Concert Band the night before), and I think the lower number of audience members quashed his ambitions to run through the crowd. Also he played a surprisingly short set – just 57 minutes and 35 seconds (the 2024 concert timed out at 1 hour and 1 minute exactly), and a lot of that was jawboning from the Twilight in the Park organizers – with just 10 songs. All the songs were Matthew Phillips originals except for an intriguing cover of Prince’s “Purple Rain,” which he said was the song that inspired him to learn guitar and become a musician in the first place. Most of them were about dying relationships (either because he left his partner or his partner left him), which reminded me of my old joke about an unlikely New Year’s prediction about the singer Adele: “Adele will write and record a song about a relationship that is actually working.”

Though I was able to get official readings of the titles through the Google app on all but two of the songs, the actual lyrics are considerably sadder and more dour than the titles would indicate: “So In Love,” “Just Say Yes,” “Goodbye,” “Time Fades Love,” “Always Be There,” “I Just Want You to Know Who I Am,” “Together Forever,” “Till It’s Over,” and “I Would Do Anything for You.” I was especially impressed by his drummer, Corey Newton, who’s a loud, aggressive drummer in the mold of Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix’s drummer) and Keith Moon (The Who’s founding drummer) rather than a straight-out timekeeper like Ringo Starr of The Beatles and Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones. I happened to run into him at Phillips’s merch table after the concert and complimented him on the sheer energy with which he’d played. He said that was deliberate on his part; he wants to put on a show for the audience and really drive the music instead of just keeping time. Some of the songs featured pre-recorded backing, including what sounded like synthesizer drones. On “Always Be There,” on which Phillips played acoustic guitar and the other two laid out, a background of piano and strings was clearly audible. I’m hoping Matthew Phillips has a major star career ahead of him, though I’m also inclined to doubt it. His songs are well crafted and emotionally moving (though the sameness of the material gets to be a bit draggy at times), and he’s a straight-ahead front man with a professional air. At times he tried to evoke audience participation, either by clapping along with the music or turning on the flashlights of their cell phones and waving them in the air. To my astonishment, he also brought CD’s to sell, saying that he makes more money off one CD than he does from 100,000 streams (which I believe: one of the major reinforcements of my prejudice against streaming came when I saw an interview with Mariah Carey in which she said she was glad that people still liked her song “All I Want for Christmas Is You” but she only gets one-sixteenth of a cent for every time it’s streamed), though ironically his Web site doesn’t offer the CD for sale but only offers the music through Spotify streams. I guess if you want his CD you have to go to one of his gigs.