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I interviewed a musician named Matthew Schwartz once, if you can call it that.
Cropped black hair. Thick-framed black glasses. Quiet and unassuming. In 2015 I ran a short fill-in-the-blank Q&A article for my blog called Meet Me In The Sound. The headline was “Getting to Know Pacifico”—the obvious one, the kind I still reach for more often than I’d like. That blog is gone. I went looking for the piece recently out of some late-life nostalgia I won’t pretend to explain, and found nothing. The Wayback Machine never cached the page. Eleven years of internet history, and the only copy left of that exchange is in my head, which is not a reliable archive. Here goes nothing.
Here’s how we met. Downtown Baton Rouge. I was ordering a crepe at Go-Ya-Ya’s, a lunch counter in the marketplace a block from where I worked. He was behind the counter, spinning the crepe spreader across the hot plate. A stack of postcards with the cover art for his 2013 album Without Heroes sat next to the register. Same black frames in both places. I asked if I could take one. He said sure, and there was a small, easy kindness in the way he said it—like it wasn’t the first time someone had asked, and he didn’t mind. That was the whole introduction. Simple. Friendly enough to stick with me.
A couple years after the article posted, I was a guest at a recording session while Everest was coming together. I stood around while a band did the unglamorous work of building an album one take at a time. I remember it mostly as a young man’s world—energy and self-regard, the kind of room where you’re either fully in the current or you’re furniture. I was closer to furniture. That’s fine. I wasn’t there to be his friend. I was there because he knew I was interested in the behind-the-scenes work. We shared a tenuous religious background, but we never bonded over it. From what I can tell, his early soundtrack came more from his brother’s records than from the pew. Still, that kind of upbringing stays with you. You either carry it quietly or spend years trying to set it down. I’ve done some of both.
None of that makes us close. I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because this is not a reunion piece and I have no interest in writing one. I haven’t spoken to the man in a decade. I don’t know where he lives now. What I have is some tunes on Apple Music I streamed as I wrote this, a genuine fondness for a guy I mostly remember as talented and centered, and the honest opinion, formed from actually sitting with his 2023 album Self Care for the first time this year: that his music has gotten better since the last time I paid close attention. That’s the whole case I want to make here. Not a tribute. Just a listener, noticing the work grew up. Years ago I mentioned to him that I might write something like this someday. I’m finally getting around to it.
Who this guy is, if you’ve never heard of him
Start here, because most of you haven’t. Schwartz tells the story that Pacifico began in Atlanta around the turn of the century as a side project for a preacher’s-choir kid who taught himself guitar off Nirvana records. For a few years it was an actual band, but then it came apart, the way bands do, and he rebuilt Pacifico into something looser: one songwriter, a rotating cast of collaborators, whoever the moment calls for. Same guy at the center, different players every time.
The pop model, which is where I left him
By the time I talked to him after that crepe order, Schwartz was solidly in what I term pop-rock territory and clearly comfortable there. Without Heroes drew on dancy indie-pop sounds. A concept about heroes, mostly written about the people around him rather than himself. Good work, catchy in the way it was built to be.
That’s the guy I knew a little. That’s the record I had an opinion about because I actually lived with it.
What happened between then and now
What happened, as best I can tell listening from a distance, is that he let the format go slack. Not abandoned it. Loosened it.
Self Care came out in 2023, and it’s a different animal entirely. Schwartz has said the record was, plainly, self-care for him—written coming out of a rough stretch. Of the opening track “Feel Alive” he has been direct: it is “about addiction,” and he described writing it as imagining what it would be like to lead his first AA meeting. The unglamorous work of not quitting on yourself runs through the whole thing. Aaron Sprinkle (Poor Old Lu) mixed it; an experienced hand that shows. This year is the first time I’ve sat with the album front to back and paid close attention to both the words and the sound.
And that room has gotten a lot more interesting. “Feel Alive” opens the thing as a steady, dance-beat rocker, but there’s nothing empty-headed about it. It’s the first sign that his sense of structure has grown a good deal since the jumpier meter changes he was working with on Everest. The lyric is plain and direct: “I just want to feel alive / For once feel something real inside… I’m climbing / I can’t/won’t stop fighting.” “Comatose” rides that signature falsetto croon of his over a dancing bass line and some tasteful guitar distortion—a good fit for the mood he’s chasing. “Hearts on Fire” is more reflective, melodic, with a guitar break worth stopping the car for, fiery and brief. “Lola” leans full Beatlesque, the kind of pop Pacifico’s always done well, and there’s a sax break in there that made me smile. “Afterglow” is where the record’s introspective streak really opens up: strings under the vocal, a restrained guitar break arriving right on cue at the midpoint.
“Agoraphobia” and “Run,” both co-written with Vincent Cellucci, an MFA from LSU, are where I hear the real leap—and where the emotional weight of this record lands for me. The sound and the melodies carry most of it, but the words reward sitting with them too.
“Agoraphobia” is a quiet refusal dressed as everyday detail: friends having drinks, a show on Ellis Street, free beer at Chelsea’s, a block party with magic and art. The narrator loves them all and still can’t be swayed to move his feet. “Even if the phone rings / Even if you send a text, two or three / I will never leave.” It’s specific, local, and unapologetic about needing the quiet. The melody holds that tension without forcing it into drama.
“Run” is the other pole. “And we run / Though we’re in pieces… / Not once retreating.” The dead-slow, elegiac drum and bass work lets the lyric breathe. These are songs of confession that still land on the side of hope rather than wallowing in the dark. If Schwartz was ever thinking about hanging it up, this track alone should have talked him out of it. Both are worth favoriting on your stream of choice, which, coming from a nobody writer working out of the piney woods of Louisiana, is about as high a compliment as I’ve got to give.
“Don’t Play Dead” stays firmly in the pop lane—“Honey don’t hold back, no, don’t play dead… None of this matters anyway we all make mistakes”—and it’s a lane Schwartz seems most at home in. No complaints there. “I’m So Gone” opens on a tricky time signature and a plucky guitar with a little brass kicking things into a shuffling start; one of the tracks that best shows off his voice and his range. The record closes on “Leave,” growling bass and drums marking a slow-burning churn while the melody unwinds in an appealing drawl. A strong song, and the right note to end an album on.
Twenty-five years in
Most of what I used to know of Pacifico amounted to that postcard, a thin bio on his Bandcamp page, and a handful of scattered articles I managed to dig up online. Now the picture’s a good deal fuller. Pacifico hit the 25-year mark in 2024. These days Schwartz’s world includes a boutique label called Pacifirecords, a podcast called Moontraveling he co-hosts with Sprinkle, dates across Europe, and a Bandcamp catalog thirty-some releases deep. In a recent interview he named patience, collaboration, and organization as what he’d tell a younger artist to build. That’s a long way from the guy who told a college paper back in 2012 that he took time off from music because he wanted to be “a little selfish.” Maybe that’s just what twenty-five years does to a person. Wears the self-regard down into something closer to stewardship.
He’s since described himself as sympathetic to people deconstructing their faith and said he’s done a lot of talking about it with a therapist. I’m not going to pretend to know what that means for him now, or force it into a tidy arc. I’ll just say I recognize the starting point. Anybody who grew up singing solos they didn’t ask to sing knows exactly the pew he’s talking about. Given the press he’s done around Self Care, it’s clear he’s on a spiritual journey—one that involves deconstructing the upbringing he was given. I’m on one too, though mine these days is more about refining and refocusing as I get older. We never talked about any of that. Still, maybe that’s why I felt like writing this piece. Different places on the same kind of path. Connected by that, even if the paths themselves don’t look alike.
So, eleven years on
I don’t have the old interview anymore. I don’t have a close friendship to speak of, and never really did. What I have is a record I finally sat with, start to finish—more attention than I’ve given most things that cross my desk lately—and the plain opinion that it’s the best thing he’s made. The pop hooks are still in there when he reaches for them. But the songs that matter now are the ones where he trusted a quiet sound to stay quiet and let a feeling be exactly as small and true as it was. That’s not nothing. For a kid who started out writing songs a band he was in didn’t even like, twenty-five-plus years of getting more honest with the format is as close to arrival as most of us get.