{"id":973688,"date":"2019-11-22T13:47:50","date_gmt":"2019-11-22T20:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=915167"},"modified":"2019-11-22T13:47:50","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T20:47:50","slug":"song-you-need-to-know-mattiels-nico-esque-millionaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/music-news\/song-you-need-to-know-mattiels-nico-esque-millionaire\/","title":{"rendered":"Song You Need to Know: Mattiel\u2019s Nico-Esque \u2018Millionaire\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/MATTIEL_045.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"><\/div>\n<p>Nearly 30 years ago, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=mHTyUHOYxSQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">Jonathan Richman asked<\/a> how the Velvet Underground got their sound. The band <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/t\/mattiel\/\" id=\"auto-tag_mattiel\" data-tag=\"mattiel\">Mattiel<\/a> seem to have cracked the code on \u201cMillionaire,\u201d the latest single to be released off the Atlanta group\u2019s excellent <em>Satis Factory<\/em> album. Amid brittle guitars, laconically Lou Reed-esque \u201cbah-bah-bah\u201d backup vocals, and a thwapping backbeat, singer Mattiel Brown channels Nico with her gorgeously yearning, full-voiced alto range, as sings about her poor lot in life.<\/p>\n<p>Brown has said that the song was inspired by \u201chigh expectations and empty promises,\u201d the exact mathematical formula that adds up to big disappointment. \u201cTook a hundred years to get this microphone,\u201d she sings at the start of the song, \u201cNow I want to sell everything I own.\u201d She never fully articulates just what caused her to feel so bemused, but the tone in her voice when she sings the refrain, \u201cMight as well be a millionaire,\u201d says it all: She has no hope.<\/p>\n<p>She plays up that sense of desperation in the song\u2019s video, in which she visits what should be a happy place, a fair with a rodeo, but fills the clip with closeups of people looking disappointed. (The one girl smiling early on is wearing a confederate-flag cowboy hat, so make of that what you will.) By and large, though, there\u2019s comfort in seeing so many people sharing in Brown\u2019s displeasure.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDid you expect a guarantee, working in that satis-factory,\u201d she asks in the bridge (apparently she\u2019s not so crestfallen as to avoid wordplay) but it\u2019s the tone in her voice, not her lyrics, that expresses this feeling of what the Portuguese call <em>saudade<\/em>, a sort of longing for love you know you\u2019ll never get, that makes the song so irresistibly melancholy. It\u2019s something we\u2019ve all felt and can share together, like the people in the song\u2019s video, and it\u2019s the inexplicable quality that Jonathan Richman so badly wanted to define. It\u2019s a good thing Mattiel figured it out.<\/p>\n<div class=\"pmc-contextual-player\">\n<h3> Popular on Rollingstone <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em>Find a playlist of all of our recent Songs You Need to Know selections&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/user\/rsedit\/playlist\/4z2ebTTKukc34eMDlqrnW4?si=mwZhc_Q_TeeZkOYCOwBiXA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">on Spotify<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/music\/music-news\/mattiel-millionaire-song-you-need-to-know-915167\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly 30 years ago, Jonathan Richman asked how the Velvet Underground got their sound. The band Mattiel seem to have cracked the code on \u201cMillionaire,\u201d the latest single to be released off the Atlanta group\u2019s excellent Satis Factory album. Amid brittle guitars, laconically Lou Reed-esque \u201cbah-bah-bah\u201d backup vocals, and a thwapping backbeat, singer Mattiel Brown [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-973688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-13 23:56:03","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KFMU Solar Powered Radio","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=973688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=973688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=973688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=973688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}