Matt Lovell is Bulletproof
By: Thomas Gerbasi
Tags: Features, Interview, Singer Songwriter, Music, Nashville

Matt Lovell

What would you think of in the moments before you died?

We can all speculate, but no one has ever come back to tell us. That’s the nature of dying.

Unless you’re Matt Lovell, who took a bullet to the chest in the middle of a carjacking in 2017 and lived to tell about it. And as he looked for someone to help him after the Nashville shooting, his thoughts were clearer than he ever could have imagined.

“Two things were on my mind — one was I might not see my mom again and the other was, I might never release this damn record.”

He laughs now, and he can afford to. He not only made it out the other side, but that “damn record,” Nobody Cries Today, has finally seen the light of day, four years after it was recorded.

“It’s certainly been a long time coming,” Lovell said. “I’m just trying to let it be what it is and be present for that. When something happens more quickly, you don’t have this much time to anticipate it and wonder what it will feel like. I’ve certainly experienced a lot and changed a lot as a person over the course of all that’s transpired, but here we are.”

And while not many things fit this description, getting the album was worth the wait, as Lovell emerges on his debut as a singer-songwriter who brings something a little different to the table than most of his Nashville peers because from top to bottom, he’s bringing it. There’s no filler here, and while it should do well for him regardless of it being released now or a few years ago, there has to be some playing of the ‘What If’ game. But the way Lovell sees it, this is happening precisely when it’s supposed to.

“I recorded the album in 2016 and I was shot just as we were finishing up the final mixes and getting ready to send everything off for mastering,” he said. “Trauma didn’t hit me right away. I didn’t know it at the time, but trauma after an acute incident like that, it can take months or even years to really settle in for someone. For me, it was about six months. It was really devastating for me to move away from releasing everything, but I was in no kind of head space to really be able to do this the way I wanted to do it. So I had to take a big step back for about a year and a half to close to two years. Coming back to it, I really returned to getting ready to release things about a year ago. It just takes some time to get everything in order. But I’m just so thankful. I nearly didn’t live at all.”

He’s not exaggerating. Taking a bullet point blank in the chest and surviving is, for want of a better term, a miracle. He’s not denying it, either.

“I’ve heard a couple stories, doctors basically said that what happened is the bullet entered on the right side of my chest and they don’t know how, but it did ricochet down into my abdomen,” Lovell recalls. “I believe it must have ricocheted off of my sternum and that ricocheting is what saved me. For a lot of people, that’s what kills them because it will hit everything. Somehow for me, it bypassed the worst. It missed my heart by inches, it nicked one of my lungs, but didn’t puncture it. It missed my spine, so everything that it hit organ-wise, it was either something you could lose or something that would repair itself, like my liver, which regenerated within a few weeks. So I was very fortunate. I have no idea how.”

Following the shooting and his recovery, Lovell was not just grateful, but he was feeling a little bulletproof, at least for the first six months.

“Before PTSD hit me, which was a six-month window, I was on a bit of a high,” he said. “It knocked away a lot of what I always call flaky pain and self-doubt or lack of self-acceptance. Everything felt very simple and my priorities definitely realigned pretty quickly. I realized a wave of love that came at me from friends. It was kind of attending your own funeral but getting to live through it and realizing that, ‘Hey, people actually like me and maybe a few of them actually love me,’ which was refreshing. (Laughs)”

Then came the dark days of not just dealing with the aftermath of almost losing his life, but the possibility that all the years he dedicated to writing his album and being involved with music might all be for naught. Even more frightening was the idea that maybe he was just going to walk away from what he loved.

“It was really scary,” said Lovell. “Music is something I’ve cared about for so many years, probably most of my life. And I had worked for so many years to write this record that I really cared about and felt that said the things I wanted to say and sounded the way I really wanted it to sound. I made it with people I really love and had really gotten close to. So it was really scary to finally have something that I was ready to put out there and, for a while, I was wondering if I even wanted to do it, and that sensation was a weird one. Today, my value system is totally different, but I’m thankful that music is still a part of that. It’s really great to be able to do anything at all, to be honest.”

Eventually, Lovell began to ease back into the music world, and if you’re wondering, yeah, he’s been putting together the songs for album number two, which we’re guessing won’t take another four years to see the light of day.

“I’m definitely writing,” he said. “Like any writer in a dry spell, I kept sitting down to figure out if the pump was back on, so to speak, (Laughs) and it wasn’t for so long. But I would say about a year and a half ago I started returning to writing, and the songs that I’m writing are full of a lot of hope and a lot of my ideas about love — not romantic love, but person to person, friend to friend, human to human, and I’m really excited. It hasn’t materialized how I’ll get to record that yet, but I’m really excited to do that, to keep telling the story.”

It’s already one of the most compelling stories you’ll hear, and that’s even before he cheated death on a street in Tennessee. Just listen to Nobody Cries Today for proof, take in what happened in 2017, and follow along for a ride. That may be tough for Lovell to re-live every night on stage and in any interview, but he’s handling it just fine.

“I don’t think I had the degree of self-acceptance that I have now,” he said. “I grew up gay in the south, so that’s gonna come with its own challenges. It was very different and a little frightening for someone trying to sort themselves out in that way. But I really found my people, I really found my tribe and music helped quite a bit with that, so in my world in my adult life, I wasn’t dealing with present-day battles trying to fend for myself in this world, but I was still left with some scars. And I think one of the gifts of the shooting for me was it gave me the opportunity, by way of kind of a mandate, I realized that if I was gonna get through that, I was gonna have to dig a little deeper. They call trauma a chameleon in the therapy world and it shows up and wears whatever mask it wants to wear and it will attach to whatever other kind of monsters might be lurking under the surface. It’s gonna find them and they’re all gonna team up at once, which was very hard going through it. But on the other side of that, I feel very cleansed. I feel like I’ve done a lot of that work and a lot of these songs that were written out of a place of pain or uncertainty, I feel like I’m just honoring that era. And it still feels familiar enough that I can access all of it.

“But I’m more ready than I’ve ever been for life in general,” Lovell continues. “Sometimes it’s a little boring living that way, but I’m thankful that it feels sustainable. I’m just excited to see what this next era might be like. I’m hoping to find people to hear the album and connect with it and we’ll see what happens.”

For more information on Matt Lovell, click here