Matt Devine: Everybody’s Gonna Need Some Kind of Ventilator

By Jason Barnard

In Exile on Main St., Mick Jagger drawls that everybody’s gonna need some kind of ventilator. Matt Devine took him at his word: it became the name of the project he recorded alone in a North Hollywood bedroom in 1994, and, three decades on, a fitting description for a record that spent most of its life struggling to be heard.

Reseda Spleen was made almost entirely in private. A Tascam 388 bought secondhand. A Gibson LG-1 strung with electric strings on a friend’s tip. A Tom Scholz-designed Power Soak that let Devine crank a Marshall half-stack without waking the neighbours. The title borrowed, half seriously, from a Baudelaire collection Devine happened to be reading and a patch of the San Fernando Valley he happened to live in. Despite all that, the album vanished almost immediately after its 1996 release. Two reviews appeared years later, by which point hardly anyone had a copy.

Bar/None wanted to put it out at the time. Thirty years and one unexpected phone call later, it finally has. Devine talks about the album’s story.

30 years is a long wait for a record to get a wider release for Reseda Spleen. What made now the right moment, and how did the Bar/None reissue come together?

Glenn Morrow, the founder of Bar/None, reached out to me last fall out of the blue. We hadn’t talked in some time. Apparently, Glenn had recently revisited the record and decided he wanted to see it reissued on Bar/None. This was welcome news to me because I’ve always been proud of the recordings. He had expressed interest in releasing it 30 years ago, and that didn’t come to pass, so I guess this is us making up for that.

You’ve said the split with Michael Quercio came down to “two singers and songwriters” and always having to compromise. What was the moment you knew Permanent Green Light was done for you?

There was no one moment that determined the end of PGL, and I wish there was some exciting story to share. I recall us rehearsing together less and me playing around with the Tascam 388 more. Hanging out at loud clubs socializing became unfun for me, and creating an environment at home to be productive musically had captured my imagination.

You were 25, newly settled into that North Hollywood apartment and you’d just got the Tascam 388. What did those first weeks with the machine feel like after years of group rehearsals and nightclubs?

I acquired the Tascam 388 in May of ’94, and I did record a couple of simple PGL demos with Michael on it. Once I committed to attempting to track a “real” performance on the machine, it kinda happened fast. I had experience with a 4-track cassette recorder, so this was the logical next step for me. I recorded the acoustics for “Lint Duet” in September of ’94, within a week of my quitting PGL. I remember being really pleased with how the Gibson acoustic sounded through this inexpensive Russian compressor I bought. I had found it through an ad in the back pages of a recording magazine. That compressor is a big part of the Reseda Spleen sound. Anyways, Byron and I would connect in January of ’95, and we were off to the races.

The title nods to Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen as much as it does Reseda. Did you know pretty quickly that was the title, or did it take a while to arrive at it?

That title came about after I knew a CD would be pressed. I had recently read that collection of poems, and the idea for the title seemed appropriately absurd. Reseda, CA is about as far from Parisian modernity as you can get. I lived there after I graduated high school, and it was home to Bebop Records & Fine Art, a cool live space run by an artist, Richard Bruland. Richard would make you feel your show was a major event. Bebop turned out to be the first venue I ever performed at, with my first band Lazytown.

“The Tailor’s Lament” was one of the first songs you cut for the album, and that “I’ll hem that coat as I want to” line reads like a statement of independence. Was it written with the Permanent Green Light situation already in mind?

I wrote “The Tailor’s Lament” when I was in PGL, and we performed it once or twice. I owned a Beatrix Potter collection of children’s stories, which included “The Tailor of Gloucester,” and somehow I worked that into this declaration of independence of sorts: a determination to do it my way. It certainly fit how I was feeling recording on my own with the Tascam 388, working at my own speed and making everything “just so.”

“Happy New Year” started life back in Lazytown as an unrequited love song. What made you dig it up again for Reseda Spleen, and did it mean something different to you by then?

“Happy New Year” meant something to me, and no proper recording of the song had been made, only a demo recorded with my first band Lazytown. The lyrics resonated with me: the idea that resolutions can happen any time, and if you stick to them, any day is a chance to celebrate, no matter how awful your days might be going. I felt it was worthwhile to try to get it out into the universe, once and for all.

“Lansdowne” is named after Zachary Lansdowne, commander of the USS Shenandoah. What drew you to that story, and how did it end up carrying your own ambivalence about still chasing music while friends were settling into more “adult” lives?

My good friend Jeff Caruana was leaving for flight school in Colorado, and it really made me think. Jeff was going to “make the flight,” but I wondered if I ever would, plugging away at music on my own. Being an artist isn’t exactly standing on solid ground, so I made a connection to flying, in the aspirational sense. I was taking a risk and moving forward in my own way. I had just read a terrific book on airships that told Lansdowne’s story. Aviation pioneers like Lansdowne and Amelia Earhart, these are some of the bravest humans imaginable, climbing into these newly-conceived machines to ascend high above the earth. Even if they crash, they took a chance.

The band name comes from The Rolling Stones’ “Ventilator Blues” on Exile on Main St. What is it about that song, or that record, that felt worth naming a project after?

My understanding is that the ventilator in the song is the electric fan that was bringing the Stones some relief while they were recording in their dirty, filthy basement. “No matter where you are, everybody’s gonna need some kind of ventilator.” Exile’s my favorite rock ‘n roll record. Inherently, every double LP is imperfect in some way, as the format stretches a band to its limits in a medium originating from 3-minute singles. Because of that, you get to see different sides to an artist, and more risks taken. And much of Exile was recorded at Keith’s house. The mountain came to Muhammad. My hero.

You strung a 1950s Gibson acoustic with electric strings to get some of the record’s textures. How did you land on that trick, and do you remember which song it first showed up on?

Jeff Caruana used to string his Yamaha acoustic with electric strings, and so I followed suit. This was in 1989. I used GHS Boomer 10’s at first, but quickly moved on to Ernie Ball Regular Slinky 10’s. The acoustic is a Gibson LG-1 from the early 1950s. The first released recording I used the LG-1 on was the Permanent Green Light tune “The Ballad of Paul K.” When we recorded Against Nature with Earle Mankey, I used a pickup with it for “Fireman,” running the signal into an amp to bleed in with the miked guitar. The Beatles did this. I repeated this trick later on my own recordings, subtly on “Lansdowne” and more extremely on “Winter Song” (a bonus track on streaming).

Brad Laner invited you out on guitar for Medicine’s final tour, then came back and played bass on “Earthquake Song” and took a different pass at mixing “Schadenfreude,” the one track Earle Mankey didn’t touch. What was it about that song that needed a different set of ears?

I tried to mix “Schadenfreude” on my own, and the mixes sounded flat. It was a recording experiment, something Brad Laner excels at, so I asked him if he wanted to give it a try. He took a different approach, using an Eventide processor to give it a subtle wall of sound in the background and muting elements at times. Brad gave the recording the dynamics it has. Earle Mankey and I edited the beginning and end and we reversed a portion halfway through.

I understand that Earle Mankey encouraged you after you kept asking him questions while making Against Nature. What’s the most useful thing he taught you about recording that you still do today?

Earle Mankey explained how a compressor works to me, how to clean the heads on a reel-to-reel tape machine, but he’s an inspiration beyond practical advice like that. He put together a studio in his back house while having a family. That’s not uncommon now, but back in 1980 when he did it, it went against the grain. I’ve never recorded in my home studios at the professional level Earle has, but I recognized I can do it in my own way. I must say though, Earle did turn me on to the Tom Scholz Power Soak. It’s one of the first guitar amp attenuators. Attenuators sit between a head and a cabinet and let you crank an amplifier to the max while lowering its volume. Because of this, I was able to record a Marshall half-stack in the apartment without waking the neighbors. Reseda Spleen could not have existed without the Power Soak. I’ll give the credit to Earle instead of Tom Scholz though, if that’s okay.

The record came out on Delmore in 1996 and pretty much vanished despite its quality. What was it like watching that happen at the time, versus how you feel about that silence now?

It was a drag, but I moved on pretty quickly. I continued recording Ventilator songs for what later became the Rock Folk Suicide record. That stuff had way more tape vari-speeding, track bouncing, and treatments, including much heavier use of the Akai quarter-track that’s on “Schadenfreude.” I really went to town making those recordings, psychedelically speaking. To be honest, Earle and Brad seem to like that Ventilator era more than Reseda Spleen. I was pushing the 388 harder and experimenting more. Playing guitar on the third Possum Dixon record with Ric Ocasek producing helped a lot, too. But I have so many good feelings about making Reseda Spleen and the friendships around it that its unceremonious release in 1996 is all water under the bridge.

Between finishing this record and Rock Folk Suicide (which finally surfaced in 2008), you did a year with Possum Dixon and ended up at Electric Lady with Ric Ocasek producing New Sheets. How much of a jolt was that, going from a bedroom and a Tascam to a New York studio with a producer like that?

I had recorded in several studios by that point in time, so I was ready to make the jump. I played a ton of guitar on New Sheets and there would be times where it was just me and Ric, talking while the engineer was finishing up bounces or something. He was very warm and open. I remember Ric advising early on that people often waste time talking about ideas instead of simply trying them out. It was that kind of encouragement that really made me feel comfortable stepping up, and I was happy to oblige. And it was fun. Ric let me use his pink Jazzmaster on a couple songs – that’s the clicky rhythm guitar on “My Best Friend’s Girl” – and once, in between takes, I played the opening of that song on it. I said, “Total Buddy Holly, Ric.” To which he replied, “My biggest influence!”

Having heard the LP again in the context of the reissue, what surprised you most about the person who made it aged 25?

That I instinctively recognized what I needed at the time for my well-being. I created an environment of my own where I could be me, get creative, and stay centered. Like McCartney says in “Fixing a Hole”: “Where I belong, I’m right.”

Further information

Ventilator – Reseda Spleen released October 9th 2026 on Bar/None Records