Matt Costa gets a boost from good buddy Jack Johnson’s record label for Songs We Sing

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON APRIL 6, 2006

By Steve Newton

You don’t hear much about Matt Costa these days without hearing a bit about his good buddy Jack Johnson as well. Johnson has been a major motivator behind the 23-year-old singer-songwriter’s career, releasing Costa’s latest CD, Songs We Sing, on his hugely successful Brushfire Records label, and then making him the opening act on Johnson’s recent European tour.

So when Costa hooks up with me and says that he’s calling from his home in Huntington Beach, California, the first question concerns his actual proximity to the beach. If he’s at all like Hawaii-raised surfing ace Johnson, Costa will be spending every available second riding the waves. Has he talked his feel-good folk-pop friend into showing him a few tricks of the hang-10 trade?

“I’ve gone surfin’ out there once or twice,” replies Costa, blowing my theory all to hell, “but I’m not really that good at it.”

Okay, so maybe surfing isn’t Costa’s bag. Turns out he’s actually more of a skateboarder-or at least he was until he “landed wrong” while doing a trick on a flight of stairs and broke his leg.

“I take it easy on all those things now,” he points out wisely. “I got my arms to watch out for now.”

Yeah, those upper-body appendages sure do come in handy for strumming guitars, which Costa does plenty of on Songs We Sing, the easygoing collection of poetic melodies that he’ll showcase at Richard’s on Richards on Friday (April 7). He takes some lyrical inspiration from the novels of John Steinbeck; his song “Ballad of Miss Kate” is loosely based on the character of the same name in East of Eden.

“Living in California, John Steinbeck hits close to home,” he says, “’cause he wrote a lot about the history of the central coast, all up and down it.”

On the musical side, Costa has been gleaning some pop influence from the early works of T-Rex, even though he was born well after Marc Bolan’s fatal London car crash of ’77.

“I do my research and kinda dig deep,” he explains, “getting into the ’60s and ’70s music, and then digging even further into the past, like early folk and blues recordings, where he [Bolan] got all his influences from. You gotta get back there to the roots to really understand where it’s comin’ from.”