LINDEN, NJ — Matt Koziol was always destined to be a musician. He even remembers the first performer to get him curious about music: Elvis Presley.
“Elvis was like the pinnacle. I thought I wanted to be this guy,” said Koziol in an interview with Union County LocalSource on Friday, May 6. Elvis wasn’t the only performer who got his attention. “I heard the California Raisins singing ‘Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ and my parents said I was just singing along with it. I was 3 or 4 years old.”
Growing up in Linden, Koziol didn’t know what his future held — only that it would be in music. His early influences were from his parents.
“My dad bought me the Beatles’ ‘White Album,’ some Led Zeppelin records,” said Koziol. “When I was probably 12, my parents had a cabin in northern Pennsylvania, in a place called Newfoundland. We would travel from Linden, with 40,000 people, to Newfoundland, where I would spend the weekend in a town of 1,200 people … with my acoustic guitar. My father introduced me to Nickel Creek, and then I found a band called the Infamous Stringdusters.”
Although Koziol grew to like country and bluegrass, he said he started out listening to classic rock ’n’ roll, such as Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin. There was something about Elvis, however, that kept him coming back.
“Elvis was working three kinds of music: rhythm and blues, gospel and country, and when you start dissecting those three, you start finding things,” he said. “I had people who sang in choirs in Roselle Park, and they introduced me to Kirk Franklin. And then from there I listened to country or older bluegrass, or my Motown, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations. …
“As I got older, I started looking at Southern rock performers, like Johnny Winter, the Allman Brothers. For me, growing up, I listened to so many styles of music.”
Koziol said his musical interests continued to evolve through his youth.
“I was a middle schooler and I got into James Taylor through my dad. Then I got into Blink-182,” he said. “We all were influenced by John Mayer. It took me a good amount of time to get into Bruce Springsteen,” although he said he loved the way Springsteen told stories that everyone could relate to and understand.
“He just speaks so much of the world we all knew. …” said Koziol. “I have a friend of an uncle who lived that life. Most of it is like painting a picture of the things that have happened.”
It wasn’t long before he had the urge to perform. Not surprisingly, he started in a local venue.
“I played Van Gogh’s Ear in Union,” said Koziol. “That was the first paying gig I ever had. I was 14 years old.”
Koziol said he had started listening to Top 40 music in early 2000 but before long was playing in a bar in a three-piece blues band.
“I played a lot of venues around here, from Butch Kowal’s (Tavern)
in Rahway to the Crossroads in Garwood,” he said. “I played in New York City, Boston.”
His musical interests slowly began to change, leaning more and more toward country. “I was listening to what was on Top 40 at the time in 2006,” said Koziol, but country music kept reappearing in his life. “There’s way more country music fans in New Jersey than people give it credit for. I worked at the PNC Bank Arts Center parking cars. I remember seeing Zac Brown come in, Rascal Flatts, Darius Rucker, and the parking lot was filled.
“And I remember watching them and going, ‘This is so cool.’ There’s something that clicked with it.”
Although he went to college, Koziol knew that wasn’t where he was meant to be. Finally, at one of his shows, fate stepped in and gave him a little push.
“I had met a guy who was my former manager, one of my great friends, Ryan Kravotka, when I was playing at Wagner College in Staten Island,” Koziol said. “He was moving to Los Angeles to manage a band and I was 20, maybe 21 at the time. I was still in college at Kean University in year five with no direction, but it wasn’t for me. He said he was going to introduce me to people. He had a small apartment in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where I slept on a fold-out bed. I went to my first writing session ever.”
What he quickly discovered was that people everywhere were more alike than he had realized. Koziol said he began to understand where the stories in songs by people such as Springsteen or Jackson Browne came from: everyday people, just living their lives.
“We had this 7-Eleven on Wood Avenue (in Linden) and we all had the places we went to, and when I talk to people in Nashville, they say the same thing,” he said. “We might dress a little bit different, but it’s all the same.”
As he grew older, Koziol put in a lot of hours flying back and forth between the East and West coasts, learning to be a songwriter and a musician.
“I would be home in New Jersey playing and doing shows, fly out to L.A., and just write with people,” he said. “They call it putting in the 10,000 hours. Even though I thought I knew what I was doing, it wasn’t until I moved to Nashville that I met people who knew what they were doing. It was like the greatest masterclass.
“In L.A., you learn how to hustle in terms of entertainment,” he continued. “L.A. to me was always entertainment. You learn the good, the bad and the ugly from the entertainment industry. In Nashville, I started meeting people, and I said, ‘Oh, these are my people.’”
Not surprisingly, Koziol was influenced by many of the musicians he was exposed to in Nashville, including Cody Johnson, Hardy, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kacey Musgraves. He periodically covers Musgraves’ song “Rainbow.”
Now that he has a record label, RED Creative Group, Koziol said he feels as if his dreams are finally coming true, but he doesn’t want to forget how important it is to stay in touch with fans.
“The idea of tangible things is so important to me, so we were going to do these handwritten notes to go with my first album,” he said. “When was the last time someone sent you letters?”
Koziol explained why this is so important to him. “I think that’s one of the coolest things that I love about my label. I’m 34 years old, so we’re the last generation who had dial-up internet, who had the corded phone on the wall. I still have that sense of tangible things. When I was in high school, 2003-2004, there was this place, Izzy’s Records, in Linden … that me and my buddy Mike would cut out of school and walk down to the record store and I would buy Stevie Ray Vaughn, Billy Joel. … I would sit and read the lyrics.
“And now life is all very fast and loose. That was one of the great things back then. You could look at the album and look at the foldouts.”
Koziol said he’s hoping his new 10-song record, “Wildhorse,” which was recorded at Gray Matters Studio in Nashville, Tenn., will appeal to a lot of people, but said he knows it’s the people he worked with that helped make it as good as he thinks it is. He said one of the biggest influences is his record producer.
“My record producer is Matt Odmark,” said Koziol. “He was in a Christian rock band called Jars of Clay. They were very revolutionary about changing the sound of Christian rock. We both understood the idea of bands, of people in a room playing live and enjoying it.
“A lot of friends who I’ve played with in other bands just came to the studio, and it was a great experience, and I hope it translates,” he continued. “We’re going to do some vinyl pressings and obviously CDs, and I think it will translate well.”
“This is the first album I’ve got out on a label, and I’ve been playing music for almost 20 years. I’ve released music before, but this is the first time I was signed to a record label to have a full album out.
Koziol admits that much of his album has a personal touch and is reflective of him and things that happened in his life.
“The first single was ‘Work All Day,’ which was out in November of last year,” he said. “For ‘Work All Day,’ it was obvious it was just a fun song.
“‘House To Build a Home,’ I wrote that back in 2014. There’s a lot of the folk influence of James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen,” he added.
“Some of the songs are 10 years old and some are three years old. ‘House To Build a Home’ was just one of those songs I wrote by myself,” said Koziol. “It just had a theme of here are the things that you always get told that you want. It’s a reminder that the things you want out of life, you can still have them.
“‘Slow Burn’ is a perfect example of me listening to the 2001-2003 punk bands like Taking Back Sunday, Saves the Day, Jimmy Eat World,” he said. “‘Slow Burn’ is single No. 2. ‘Slow Burn’ has so much energy. Every time I played it, I loved it. It just seemed to connect with people. I could put it in the same vein as Jason Isbell.”
Some of the story behind “Slow Burn” comes out in the video that Koziol made for this track.
“‘Slow Burn’ was the ending of a relationship. … I remember going to the director of the video and I told him I wanted to do a 30-foot burn pile. … When that relationship ended, I burned something, and I said I kind of want to recreate that, but with a large fire. I went to a hotel that was renovating and they threw away a bunch of furniture, and I rented a U-Haul and picked it up and for the video they let me break it up with a sledgehammer and, at the very end of the video, I threw a couch into a fire. The flame went probably 25 to 30 feet in the air.”
Koziol said the coronavirus pandemic slowed the process down for him a bit, but that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“During the pandemic, the time I was alone gave me a lot of time to reflect if I wanted to put it out,” he said. “Then I got in touch with RED Creative Group.
“The record had been done for about a year and they heard it and picked it up in August 2021. There was a lot of doing, getting the record together, doing the music videos. It’s been really cool and it’s been so quick.”
Koziol acknowledges the help that friends and other songwriters gave him to turn this album into a reality, and he made sure people were credited on every song to which they contributed.
“When you see a name secondary to mine on a song, it was a solid 50-50, either hashing out a story of my own or they told me they had an idea for a song title like this,” he said. “We were looking at songs that made sense, where they fit in my life and it’s changing, whether it is a story that’s for me. ‘Work All Day’ is about someone that we knew. It became very indicative of living in New Jersey.
For Koziol, it’s no surprise that his life and the lives of those around him find their way into his songs.
“Time after time, I’d go to a bar and see people who lived these stories,” he said. “‘House To Build a Home’ was very personal. ‘Slow burn’ was very personal.”
As for his future, Koziol admits he put all of his eggs in one basket.
“I didn’t really have a Plan B. I never wanted to give myself a safety net,” he said. “If I live like there’s no safety net, I don’t give myself the option to fall.”
Now that he has signed with Creative Artists Agency for booking, Koziol said he will be on the road, opening for Kip Moore on June 23 in Delaware and June 24 and 25 in Virginia. He said a possible fall tour with him as a supporting act is in the works.
“My hope is that I can get on a really cool show that comes back to Starland Ballroom (in Sayreville) or something,” said Koziol.
“I will always want to play here. I needed the education of Nashville. I needed 20 years to learn how to do that.”
Matt Koziol’s album, “Wildhorse,” will be released by RED Creative Group on Friday, May 20.
Photo Courtesy of Olivia Del Valle