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You may not be familiar with Matt Rollings’ name, but odds are good you’re familiar with his handiwork. Over the past four decades, the GRAMMY-winning producer and piano virtuoso has performed on thousands of recordings across a wide swath of genres, contributing to releases from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Mavis Staples, Billy Joel, Dolly Parton, The Dixie Chicks, Metallica, and Sheryl Crow among others. On top of his astonishing resume as a session player and sideman, Rollings has also written, produced, and arranged for a whole slew of icons, from Willie Nelson and Lyle Lovett to Keith Urban and Mary Chapin Carpenter, taken home the ACM Award for Pianist of the Year on ten separate occasions, and earned widespread acclaim for his 1990 solo debut, ‘Balconies.’ Now, Rollings is turning the tables, stepping into the spotlight for the first time in thirty years and inviting some of his big-name friends to lend their talents to his remarkable new record, ‘Matt Rollings Mosaic.’

“I’m a piano player,” says Rollings. “I’ve made a career out of listening deeply and supporting other artist’s visions, and that’s brought a lot of joy and meaning into my life. With this record, though, it was time for me to explore my own vision.”

Recorded raw and loose in studios from California and Scotland to Nashville and Muscle Shoals, ‘Matt Rollings Mosaic’ is a master class in simple elegance, a refined, unassuming collection that showcases its namesake’s deft touch as a writer, producer, arranger, and interpreter of song all at once. Featuring guest vocals from an all-star cast including Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Alison Krauss, and Vince Gill among others, the album mixes Rollings originals with timeless classics and some of the more famous tunes he’s performed on over the years. It’d be easy for a record with such a varied roster of singers and songwriters to feel scattered, but Rollings’ gifts both at the piano and in the control room manage to keep the music astonishingly cohesive here, blurring the lines between gospel, country, folk, and soul and drawing out unexpected connections between Johnny Mercer and Paul Simon, Stephen Foster and The Police. The result is a record that refuses to be bound by tradition even as it demonstrates a deep and abiding respect for the past, a spare, deliberate album that, despite its considerable star power, remains always in service of the song.

“When I first started this project, I only set one rule for myself,” explains Rollings. “Make something beautiful. That was the guiding principle behind every decision.”

Born in Connecticut, Rollings got his start on the piano after a family move to Chicago, where he began taking jazz and blues lessons from renowned instructor Alan Swain. By his high school years, he was living in Arizona and already gigging professionally, performing almost every night of the week with a country cover band at the biggest honky-tonk in Phoenix. 

“Our repertoire was a mix of classic and contemporary country, but the band itself was full of these amazing jazz and rock and blues musicians who could play anything,” says Rollings. “They showed me how to write out charts and learn new songs in a hurry, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was unwittingly learning how to be a Nashville session player.”

When a chance encounter landed the band a month-long gig at Luxembourg’s annual Schueberfouer fair, Rollings packed his bags and headed to Europe, where he met another young American musician named Lyle Lovett. Fresh out of college, Lovett was performing as a solo acoustic act and struggling to be heard over the boisterous festival crowds, so he asked Rollings and his bandmates if they’d consider backing him up onstage. 

“He’d never really played with a band before,” remembers Rollings. “He already had all these classic songs written like ‘If I Had A Boat’ and ‘Give Back My Heart,’ but it was a revelation for him to perform them with a full rhythm section.”

Back in the States, Lovett hired the band play on a series of demos, and roughly a year later, he called Rollings to announce that the tracks had helped him land a record deal. By that time, Rollings was living in Boston and attending the Berklee College of Music, but Lovett insisted he come to Nashville to play on his label debut. The experience was eye-opening, both for Rollings, who’d never made that kind of money for a day’s work in his life, and for storied A&R man Tony Brown, who was so impressed that he began hiring Rollings to record on session after session. The rest, as they say, is history, and Rollings would go on to become one of Nashville’s most prolific and sought-after players and producers, working on upwards of 1500 albums, including many multi-platinum and GRAMMY-winning releases.

Busy as he was touring and recording with others through the decades, Rollings often found his thoughts returning to his own music, and in the summer of 2018, he began making plans for an instrumental album, something akin to the improvised jams he enjoyed playing with drummer Jay Bellerose during their downtime on the road with Alison Krauss. Those plans took an unexpected turn, however, when Rollings and his wife ran into a mysterious stranger one foggy night on the California coast.

“We were on vacation in northern California and decided to grab dinner in this tiny little town off Highway 1,” says Rollings. “While we were waiting for a table, we walked down to this old boathouse with a wood-burning stove and an upright piano. There was a sharp-dressed guy there, just sketching by himself, and when I played some ragtime on the piano, his eyes absolutely lit up.”

The stranger turned out to be Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Rollings developed an instant kinship with the folk hero that night. They made plans to record together, and soon a much larger project began taking shape, one that found Rollings inviting a series of his favorite artists to join him in the studio for a wide-ranging collection spanning across genres and generations. Some of the guests are obvious given Rollings’ history (Lyle Lovett, for instance, takes the lead on a playful version of Johnny Mercer’s “Accentuate The Positive”), but often they’re paired in unexpected ways. The War And Treaty and The Blind Boys of Alabama combine to stunning effect on the turn-of-the-century spiritual “Wade In The Water,” while Lovett, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Willie Nelson team up for a riveting rendition of the 1949 classic “That Lucky Old Sun,” and Lukas Nelson, Molly Tuttle, and Buddy Miller all join forces on a soulful performance of “I’ll Come Knocking” by Americana godfather Walter Hyatt. Alison Krauss and Vince Gill, meanwhile, tackle a tender version of the Rollings original “Stay,” and newcomer Charlie Greene sings on a radical reimagining of The Police’s “Spirits In The Material World.” While no two songs on the album feature the exact same lineup, every track is built around a core live performance from Rollings and Bellerose, whose chemistry both ties the entire collection together and infuses it with a palpable electricity.

“The approach with this album was all about documenting performances in the moment,” says Rollings. “Nearly all of the vocal takes here were captured live in the studio, as well. It was a new way of making a record for me, but it brought so much life to everything that it really reframed my whole approach as a producer.”

Four decades and thousands of recordings into his career, Matt Rollings is still a student at heart, listening and learning and growing with every song, and that’s just the way he likes it.

“I called this album ‘Matt Rollings Mosaic’ not only because it’s a mosaic of styles and genres and artists, but because I feel like I’m a mosaic myself,” he concludes. “I love being a performer and a writer and an arranger and a producer, but so often, you’re made to feel like you have to pick just one. With this record, I got to choose them all.”