Matthew Phillips finds Instagram success with a waterfall effect

Matthew Phillips has his grandmother to thank for starting him on his musical journey. “She had a piano at her house,” he recalls. “I would go and play when I was a young kid — four, five and six — and she picked up really quick that I was picking out melodies at that age. So she told my parents, ‘You need to get him in lessons, he has it. He has the gift. He has that talent. Put him in lessons so he can actually do something with it.’” By the time he discovered guitar in late junior high, Phillips had years of piano lessons behind him. “Within a week, I was just like, ‘This is it. This is my voice. I can really make something more unique than a piano, which seems very static.’ You can bend notes and do things with the notes on a guitar that you can’t do on a piano. That really drew me in, and it became my voice, because, at that time, I didn’t sing.”

Phillips picked up his new instrument at such a rapid clip that by his junior and senior years in high school, he was spending his summer breaks working as a hired-gun guitarist, playing primarily with gospel acts and rap artists and occasionally rock bands. “I would just fill in where I was needed,” he says. “As someone who could play the blues and was familiar with Clapton and Prince, I kind of filled a lot of holes that I guess a lot of other guitar players wouldn’t fit into.” The tours were usually west coast runs, which meant playing gigs in Arizona and up the coast of California. “It was never really too far, but it wasn’t local. They were actually tours. I learned a lot in that phase. I learned that if you want to be successful in the music industry, it’s better to have a brand and to be the person who is in charge, instead of having a band with four people. Then, you have four different opinions.”

Performing under his own name: Matthew Phillips and band

Even so, Phillips chose to take a stab at the band life during his college years, with a group called The Elevation. “We tried and tried and tried. We got some shows and some traction, but it’s essentially being married to four dudes,” he says with a laugh. Eventually, he said to himself, “I’m bringing in all the tickets. I’m doing all the promo. I’m doing everything, and the other guys are just showing up to play. What am I doing?” And that’s when he decided to try the solo artist thing.

Since the late 2010s, Phillips has been playing gigs under his own name. He’s backed by a drummer (Adam Graham), a bassist (Reese Morin), and numerous backing tracks which have been programmed in Ableton and inserted into the mix to give the gigs extra oomph. “Taylor Swift, Metallica, and Beyonce are all doing, somewhat, track rigs. I’m very happy with our presentation, because it’s how I wrote the music, and it enables me to perform the music how I wrote it without having to pay 20 people to be on stage — because I just can’t afford that. We’re all in-ears and everything is synced. It feels like such an incredible show.”

The live sets are generally 35 to 55 minutes long, which is a bit surprising, since Phillips currently has only two songs on Spotify. It turns out he’s sitting on a large backlog of unreleased material, dating back to the Elevation days. Some of that music had been slated for release back in 2020, but those plans, like so many others, were derailed by Covid. (His first single, “So In Love,” was actually recorded that year, but was not released until 2023.) His current plan is to release five singles, which will then be part of a larger ten-song album. “We call it The Waterfall Effect,” he says.

The most recent single, “Till It’s Over,” is an anthem about being able to break out of a toxic relationship. The full video for the song (shot at downtown’s House of Blues) currently has 15,000 views on YouTube, but it’s the shorter clips on Instagram that seem to be garnering the most eyeballs. “I really kind of found my groove on Instagram. That’s where I picked up a lot of sponsorships,” including Fender, GHS Strings, and Taylor Guitars. “People were, like, ‘He really knows Instagram. He knows how to network there. He knows how to get reach and get in front of people.’”