Cut from the same cloth as songwriters like Ben Howard, the Floridia singer/songwriter Matthew Fowler is a talent that has been a long time coming. Fowler’s debut album, aptly titled Beginning, contains songs that he had been writing since the age of 14. At 20 years old, Fowler is now six years the wiser, but it’s clear that the songs on Beginnings are just that: a promising start to what is likely to be many more years spent writing songs.
While recently visiting friends in Nashville, Fowler recorded a live performance of the song “Rooftops” for the GemsOnVHS video series. Fowler and the folks at GemsOnVHS walked about until they found a good spot to record the song, which turned out to be a scaffolding outside an old brick manufacturing plant.
Fowler tells PopMatters more about the video: “We were just walking around Nashville looking for a good place to shoot a video. Anthony saw the scaffolding, and we just started climbing! Definitely one of the more interesting places I’ve played my music. The song is called ‘Rooftops’, so that’s the excuse we gave ourselves for scaling four stories of scaffolding in the middle of the night to shoot a video.”
Beginners, which was self-released by Fowler, is available now. You can stream it via Bandcamp below: