Here's an interview with Matt Sumrow for a recently deceased publication called Music Insider. This interview appeared in hardcopy for the magazine's last issue and was intended to go up on their webpage. Unfortunetly, the magazine never made it to the internet and has thus seized to be entirely. Our good friend Adam Koisor who conducted the interview has preserved it for us all. This took place at the beginning of the tour with Mando Diao.
-------------------------------------------------
MI: So, I read on the internet that The Comas were driven by certain bands such as Spiritualized and music of that genre. Do you have any other influences than that genre?
Matt: Definitely, that’s a main one, that’s one that like a lot of us have had separate of each other and come 
together and had something in common with. But the Comas have so many different influences it’s hard to really say. There’s just a lot of different areas, just touching on songwriting, sound, creating sort of the music elements of Spiritualized, how they have, use a lot of effects, really concentrating on how the sound sounds, the guitar sounds, the keyboard sounds, pulling that in, but then also just tons of other bands.
MI: How do the keyboards fit into the band?
Matt: Well, it’s hard to say. I think live, definitely what it does is pull everything together, just creating sort of a plane of sound, sort of like a linear sort of unwavering sound. So the guitars can do what they gotta do and be moving around that. The thing the keyboards are good for is being a steady tone within the song.
MI: Do you have any plans for another mini-movie?
Matt: Huh. Well, that’ll all sort of happen by chance if so, because the movie that occurred on the record now was done 
by Brent Bonacurso and he, we just sort of randomly met him and he sent us a video from the song on A Def Needle in Tomorrow, our last record, just through the mail randomly and we got it, and weren’t expecting anything great, I mean, you know you get something in the mail randomly, but it was actually amazing, it was all still animation, all stills, just creating a 3-D landscape, which is unbelievably beautiful. So we struck up a relationship with him and got that done.
MI: Is he from North Carolina?
Matt: No, he was living in Austin when we first met him and then he was in New York when we did the videos for Conductor, all the videos for it. Now he lives in LA, he works for a production company called Notorious Pictures.
MI: What can we look forward to on the next album?
Matt: Well, I think the next record, we’ve already got some live stuff worked out, some of the songs. It’s probably gonna be touching on the last record and just sort of building from there. Definitely being different, but continuing in the same vein and continuing developing sounds. Andy’s songwriting is developing all the time, and the band’s really playing a lot now so it’ll probably be like a rocking record, just the fact that we’re playing a lot live and touring a lot now. But you know, hopefully, the last record will be a touchstone for it, and we’ll take off from there.
MI: Do you still have any major label ties, or is the band done with that?
Matt: No, no, you might have heard the whole saga, or whatever.
MI: You went to London and recorded something, but you never released any of that.
Matt: Right. It was just a different process of trying to record the record that Conductor is. Like, there was three or four different sessions to try to record us in a vein that the record label wanted it to sound like and they signed us specifically to sound a certain way.
MI: I heard that there was a lot of name-dropping like the Vines, and the Strokes.
Matt: It was right when that was happening, was like just when the Strokes and White Stripes hit, and Hives and all that was just coming out.
MI: And they wanted you to sound like that?
Matt: This was a brand new subsidiary of Warner Brothers in the UK and they were trying to do various things,
they got the Polyphonic Spree signed, and the Stills and some bands like that. You know, they signed us, we started recording stuff, and they just…it didn’t sound how we wanted it to sound, so we ended up taking it to Sound of Music in Richmond with Alan Weatherhead, a good friend of ours, and just doing the record we wanted to do, and not trying to go according to the line of what the record label wanted us to do. They ended up shelving it, but it’s probably for the better, just to get away from that. But Yep Roc, it’s a label that we’re friends with the owners and everybody that works there, we’re from Chapel Hill.
MI: Is that where you grew up?
Matt: Me personally, I grew up, born in Atlanta, grew up in New Jersey, moved to North Carolina and went to college at Chapel Hill.
MI: And that’s how you met everybody?
Matt: Yep, I was a sophomore in college, and met the Comas, met Nicole and Andy, like 1998, I guess, I met them. Immediately we struck up a relationship, based on music.
MI: How did you initially sign to Yep Roc?
Matt: For Def Needle in Tomorrow? I think the first record, Wave to Make Friends, was put out in ’98. The first record wasn’t Yep Roc, it was a smaller record label that was started by a couple people around town. Actually Cameron, the drummer, was involved in putting it out before he was in the band. But eventually, I think, just being around Chapel Hill, they started a record label and they were starting to put out a lot of great Chapel Hill bands, and they just put it out and it was a small-town type of thing. Like, they knew who we were, we were playing around Chapel Hill, there’s a lot of great rock, they just put it out, and that’s when the relationship started. But now they’re at the point now, they’re putting out a lot of great stuff, so they’ve definitely grown.
MI: Do you guys have any relationships, good or bad, with any of the North Carolina bands, like Superchunk, bands like that?
Matt: I couldn’t name a bad one, Chapel Hill’s such a small town that you end up becoming great friends with everybody, 
it’s such a nurturing community. All the bands, you go to each other’s shows, buy each other’s records, listen to each other’s records, so it’s nothing but like camaraderie. We know Superchunk, I’m good friends with the guys from Polvo, some old bands, you have the whole history, bands that aren’t still around like Polvo, they do still live in Chapel Hill. But, even growing, there are constantly great bands there that never see the light of day there, and it’s just such a great town for that. Now we’re in New York, but we still play there, we still are friends with everybody there, it’s still our home in a lot of ways.
MI: Do you think that the band might experiment with alternate tunings like Polvo have used, on your next album?
Matt: I don’t know about that. We’re more of a traditional sort of, just like, rock band. Polvo is so unique, trying to create middle eastern sounds, doing their own thing. We’re more in the vein of just creating rock songs, for rock songs’ sake. Alternate tunings might be a thing, you might have to ask the guitarist, it’s be kinda hard to do alternate tunings on a keyboard.
-Koisor, April 30,
2005