Matt Hires

Light snacks and soft drinks will be available, but guests are welcome to bring a picnic or snacks of their own. Guests are also encouraged to bring lawn chairs or blankets to spread, although we will have some chairs for those who don’t.

A Florida native, Matt has called Nashville home for nearly five years now, a move that he says was a big part of the change in his music. “There’s something about moving to a new city, and experiencing new things that helped in opening up my songwriting to new levels of honesty,” In Nashville, Matt fell in with a group of like-minded indie musicians and began exploring new avenues in his songcraft during informal living room sessions with them. His album American Wilderness is an intensely personal and self-revealing song suite that grew out of this time, where Matt contemplates his life and beliefs amid the oft-cacophonous backdrop of modern America.

The material on American Wilderness drew its stylistic inspiration from old and new strains of Americana and contemporaries whose work reflects Matt’s own engaging pop sensibility. Matt cites as influences Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Wilco, as well as Jason Isbell and Brandon Flowers of the Killers.

Read more about Matt at http://www.matthires.com/ and then plan on kicking off the iconic Charter Day Weekend in Basking Ridge with some live music at the Ross Farm!