Balancing an acting or music career and being a parent is no walk in the park for any Hollywood celebrity.
But being a single parent makes it a whole new ball game, especially for Nada Surf’s singer/guitarist Matthew Caws. He loves his three-year-old son more than life itself, and says it can be difficult leaving him to hit the road on tour.
“Touring is harder and harder, and I don’t want to be gone from home as long anymore. It’s very difficult,” Caws tells Metro. “Yet we should be enjoying every step of the way because we’re alive — I’m always looking for that feeling of it seeming simple again or seeming doable again or seeming hopeful again. And I think that’s the unspelled out theme of the record.”
Lucky, the group’s latest album, was released earlier this year. Here Goes Something, one of the new tracks, is about Caws’ relationship with his son.
While in Los Angeles putting on mini-concerts in film studio boardrooms, a Fox Films executive asked Caws if he would be interested in writing a song for the John Cusack film Martian Child. The movie was about a single guy who rescues a kid from foster care and learns about parenthood.
“I wasn’t married, and the child that I had, I guess came as a bit of a surprise, so I came to terms with fatherhood as well,” he says. “So it really appealed to me — and what was so great was that I had written so many melancholy songs and here was someone asking me to write about a father falling in love with his child, and it was so great.”
Months after submitting the song, it was turned down, which didn’t disappoint Caws one bit since now he could keep it for himself and put it on their new record.
“The part that goes your majesty in the chorus at the end — to me, having my son, I felt I was in the presence of this prince,” says Caws.
“You absolutely serve this person and you love them unconditionally, and so that’s what it felt like.
“And also majesty in its pure sense of the word in that it’s just something magnificent.”
