It’s mid-March and Chad Matheny is doing a lot.
He’s running a music venue in the German countryside, an hour outside Berlin.
He’s finishing a master’s thesis in philosophy of science from Leibniz University Hannover.
And he’s revving up for a 32-city U.S. spring solo tour, as his musical alter-identity, Emperor X, including an all-ages Missoula show this Saturday, April 6, at the VFW.
“I always do this before tour,” Matheny says. “I set myself unrealistically short deadlines and that’s when my best work happens.”
As Emperor X, Matheny’s music is equal parts eclectic, heartfelt, and brainy.
Imagine a boppy tech-folk mashup of They Might Be Giants and Sufjan Stevens—with literary forebears like the postmodern short story writer Donald Bartheleme—and you’re on the right track.
His last three albums showcase his talent and breadth.
The Lakes of Zones B and C (2022) opens like a Broadway musical, with a young man singing about singing.
“I wrote a song about boxing/but I’m better at avoiding a fight,” Matheny croons.
“I never gave or received a punch/and I’m singing songs about freedom/on the cheapest PA I could find made in some sweatshop/with no way out and no break for lunch.”
A later verse rhymes “napalm to the bourgeoisie” and “weed bought with Face ID.”
“That’s the fun stuff,” Matheny says of crafting catchy lyrics and complex rhymes. “I feel like a rapper more than I do indie rock musician sometimes because I pore over those lines.”
His next album, Suggested Improvements to Transportation Infrastructure in the Northeast Corridor (2023), was even more high-concept.
One song, “Bullet Train to Worcester,” imagines a hipster hyperloop between Worcester, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, “departing every 5 minutes/automated for the good of all.”
Another, meanwhile, is a genuine earworm with lyrics taken exclusively from the Wikipedia entry for the Passaic–Bergen–Hudson Transit Project.
When you are non-ironically rewinding to shout along with the “NOT” in the line “The Passaic–Bergen–Hudson Transit Project was NOT included in NJ Transit’s 2020 ten-year capital plan,” you know you’re in the presence of something special.
The latest Emperor X album, ДУЖЕ ЧУДОВЕ РІЗДВО (VERY EXCELLENT CHRISTMAS), keeps the changes of pace coming.
Released this January 1, following Matheny’s own live multi-city tour through Ukraine, it opens with five tracks of lo-fi techno beats inspired by Christmas classics, interspersed with Ukrainian lyrics.
However, a later song on the same album, “Last Christmas (I Gave You Five Bucks),” is a searing, self-aware, banjo-backed portrait of a person panhandling on the highway.
And it’s masked as a Wham! parody, culminating in Matheny bellowing: “Last Christmas I gave you five bucks/And the very next day I forgot you existed.”
The last song, ”Regarding the Unknown Status of Kseniya’s Couch,” reverses that heartwarming-to-heartbreaking narrative arc.
It juxtaposes a young couple’s aspirations to get better jobs and move in together with the bombings that turn every day in a war-torn country into an emergency.
By the time Metheney sings—beautifully—“I’ll meet you after your shift/Once we get an all-clear,” the sense of resilience is fully earned.
“I consider myself very much of the left,” he says, “but I took all the proceeds from that album and I donated them to buy [the Ukranians] a recon drone.”
Metheney, 44, is from Jacksonville, Florida, and only made it to Germany after two decades of ping-ponging across the United States looking for somewhere affordable and artistic—and with high-quality public transit.
“I’m not legally blind, but I’m nearly legally blind,” he says. “That means that I can’t get a driver’s license, but I also don’t qualify for social benefits as a disabled person.”
Picture a map of the United States, he suggests, and then shift the location of every city based not on distances, but how long it takes to get from one place to the other on a Greyhound bus.
“Things that would make sense for a lot of other bands,” he says, “it doesn’t map for me.”
His side hustle in analytic philosophy comes after a bachelor’s degree in physics and several half-finished master’s programs in physics, aerospace engineering, and music composition.
“In my thesis, I’m trying to see if there’s any measurable quantifiable way to evaluate aesthetic value from one piece of work versus another,” Metheney says.
It sounds—and is—extremely intellectual, but the education is as meaningful to him as making music.
“I’ve always yammered like an uncertified preacher about these kinds of things, and I want to certify myself,” Metheney says.
Missoula is one of the smallest cities on Emperor X’s U.S. tour—and one of the few the artist won’t be reaching by bus.
A former Brooklyn College music composition classmate, Drew Iaderosa, now lives here, and lured Matheny with the promise his Montana debut would be a blockbuster.
“It feels really big,” Metheny says. “This beautiful but very out-of-the-way town in the mountains.”
Overscheduled or not, between the tour, the thesis, and his cultured, rural, transit-served existence outside Berlin, “Life’s pretty damn good,” Metheny declares.
“If you’re able to devote more than half of your waking energy to creative projects and not be destitute, you’re a lucky human being,” he says. “So I cannot complain.”
Emperor X performs Sat., April 6, at 8 PM, at the VFW. Get tickets here and find more information about the show here.
