Matt Farley has never stepped foot Neenah, Wisconsin, or Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania;.
But that doesn’t stop the Massachusetts native from writing a song about those cities or more than 3,000 other places around the country. It’s a massive project that he plans to wrap up sometime in July, when he records his 50th stateside album.
“It’s always been my instinct to create a lot,” Farley told HuffPost earlier this month, “I usually feel guilty if I’m not creative. I just feel like I’m wasting my time. I’m wasting my time if I’m not in the middle of a project”.
Farley, which offers a catalog of more than 24,000 songs written under more than 80 names, he has wasted no time touring the country—and the world—with his music.
The musician has been making tracks under his moniker “The Guy Who Sings About Cities & Towns” for over a decade, and lately he’s been growing a new audience on TikTok, where users can’t get enough of his music .
“The most prolific songwriter of all time?” wrote user @projectatlanticmusic in a video with more than 4 million views featuring Farley’s song “A Song About Asbury Park.”
“I need Matt Farleytok to become a thing,” user @erikaspondike captioned a video with more than 44,000 views about Farley’s career.
Farley is familiar with his national fame thanks to his performance of “It used to be a Pizza Hut” under the stage name Papa Razzi and the Photogs on “The Tonight Show” in 2016.
Now, nearly seven years later, it’s embracing a growing Gen Z audience despite its lack of activity on the app.
“Sometimes I read it, but I’ve never posted a video or anything,” he said.
“I think it’s better this way. Let the TikTokers do their thing and I won’t hurt it.”
Check here or visit Spotify and Apple Music to see if Farley has written a song about your hometown.
Farley’s inspirations include Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. He said the more he listens to music, the more he finds the comedy buried, pointing to the Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” as an example of the humor of some of his favorite singer-songwriters.
“What’s funny is that I’ve taken the less popular and successful part of the best bands, and I’ve taken that style completely,” he said.
Farley crafts his albums by starting with a visit to Wikipedia, where he goes to a state’s township pages, ranks the places by population from highest to lowest, and gets to work writing songs about at least 50 different places. .
From there, he’ll improvise while reading facts about a place on his Wikipedia page, but he might lean toward a rhyming line he wrote before the recording.
“People will say, ‘There’s no way it’s going to cover the 48th most populous city in West Virginia,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah? Get ready'”.
Kayana Szymczak for HuffPost.
Listeners who fall down the “Cities & Towns” rabbit hole will also slowly notice a common theme in his songs: he tends to focus on the positive parts of each community.
“I think there’s a cumulative effect if you just listen to one after the other. Where you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this guy thinks every place is wonderful.’ He’s out of his mind,” Farley said.
“I like the idea of someone who is so totally supportive and happy. But also, if you live in a town, who wants to hear someone criticize that?
Farley is not the first artist to attempt to record albums about all 50 states.
In the early 2000s, Sufjan Stevens revealed his plan for a “Fifty States Project” before admitting the project was a “promotional stunt” towards the end of the decade.
Farley, who has tackled 46 states with his project so far, said some of his inspiration came from listening to classic odes to places like “Theme from New York, New York” and “California Girls.”
His music isn’t limited to just US venues, though. The singer has albums about places in Australia, the UK, France and Canada.
Farley admits it’s fun to learn new facts about places in America, though she said she tends not to hold on to her new knowledge.
“Frankly, the facts come to my mind and are coming out pretty quickly,” he said.
Farley’s massive creative output is nothing new either. However, he cites his songwriting with friend Tom Scalzo in the 2000s as a testament to his productivity, adding that the duo forced themselves to record an album every day in 2006.
“Under this belief that if you put this athletic approach to creativity, if you just force yourself to create something — fight the bad songs, get rid of the bad songs, that will free you up to write the good songs,” Farley said. .
“When you finish, you listen and realize the bad song wasn’t bad to begin with.”
He said he later noticed how his “weird” songs got a fair amount of attention and started playing this tune.
“People would type anything into a music search engine, so my goal became to have a song to anticipate what people might be searching for and have a song for every possibility,” he said.
Kayana Szymczak for HuffPost
He admits that he has received 100% his share of criticism for his production and maintains that critics do not understand what he has dedicated his life to.
“People worry so much about perfectionism that it’s like they freeze up and can’t finish a project. They say, ‘I worked on this song for a year,’ but the truth is they worked on it for two hours in January, and then they worked on it for 30 minutes in December,” he said.
“So they actually worked on it for two and a half hours. So I avoid those 11 months of procrastination.”
Farley, who has written about his creative process in his book, “The Motern Method,” admits his work is “pretty cool” and acknowledges it’s “a full-time job that pays daily.”
With his newfound TikTok fame in tow, the singer plans to bring his ultimate approach to creativity to his seventh annual nine-hour “Motern Extravaganza” event in North Boston on Saturday.
The singer, who spoke to HuffPost while on the 20-mile walk, attributed his style to “excessive creativity.”
“Like now, it’s like, why do a hike if it’s going to take less than six hours? It’s crazy. It’s on brand, and it’s also true to myself,” Farley said.
“I tell people they’re allowed to leave. They can have dinner and come back. I’ll still be entertained. It’s hard to get people to come to events, so you want to make it worthwhile.”
