Mat Kearney grew up in Eugene, Oregon kicking a soccer ball. He became an English major in college, picked up a guitar somewhere along the way, moved to Nashville, and spent the next two decades writing songs people can’t shake. “Nothing Left to Lose.” “Closer to Love.” “Ships in the Night.” All certified gold. His 2011 album Young Love is still his most-streamed record. He’s played the Ryman. He tours every other year, fifty-plus shows, gone maybe two months total.
He also makes a dutch baby every week, walks his three girls to school every morning, and pulls the early shift so his wife gets a slower start to the day.
The thing he wishes someone had told him before all of it? “Who you are as a husband is actually more important to your kids than who you are as a father.” He said it plainly, like it took him a while to figure out and now he’s not letting anyone else miss it.
His girls are 9, 6, and 4. He says the hardest part of raising them is the tension between being nurturing and letting them struggle — “trying to fall on the right side of that line” is how he puts it. It keeps him up at night. That honesty feels right coming from a guy whose songs have always been about the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
When a big touring year ends and he comes home, there’s no grand homecoming. “You can headline a show at the Ryman, come home and no one cares. It’s beautiful actually.”
He resets with workouts, the occasional hike, and baths — magnesium flakes, water hot enough to sting, a fiction book. His wife converted him. Now he swears by it.
He’s gotten into woodworking lately, and the way he talks about it says something. “Making something with your hands feels very different from making music. Music is not something you ever get to hold in your hands. It exists in time. You finish a whole record after a year and it’s just wav files on your computer.” After two decades of making invisible things, there’s something to being able to pick it up and set it on a shelf.
The non-negotiable is dinner. Not every night, but as often as he can pull it off. “Butts in seats,” he says. Question cards, highs and lows, faces instead of screens. Ten or fifteen minutes. He calls it something worth fighting for, and he means it.
Follow Mat at @matkearney.
