MATT WERTZ COUNTING ON UNIVERSAL APPEAL

Matt Wertz is trying to take his wildly successful independent music career mainstream via Universal Records, but will it work?

Matt Wertz is now readying his new album Under Summer Sun for release on September 16. Although he’s missed the summer, he certainly is grateful that Universal Music saw what was going on with his independent career.

The album is a collection of some of his earlier work, and Wertz talked about how the pairing came about.

“The thing with Universal came about basically as I’ve been kind of doing my own thing, and it started getting enough momentum and enough attention that I became a blip on the radar and they kind of took notice; ‘Hey, what’s this kid doing over here? It’s working. We should, we could probably help. We could take what he’s doing and expand it to a new audience.'”

Wertz is holed up in Nashville and he was asked how much of that city has rubbed off on him.

“The Nashville influence probably just comes in crafting the songs. There’s a real sense of songwriting as a craft, and I think I’ve learned from my environment. I’ve seen from my time there that I’ve really been able to kind of hone in on that a little more than when I was writing songs out of my dorm room, you know?”

He added that the city is all about music.

“It is. The history of the town is in song, and not to mention that Nashville is such an easy city to be in. It’s laid back. It’s ideal. I really love it. The pace of life is right up my alley.”

Wertz has a fantastic single titled “5:19,” and it’s currently hitting the charts. Matt has garnered a huge fan base thru the college and internet communities via his self-scribed Handwritten Records, on which he issued three records with the most successful being 2006’s Everything In Between and 2003’s Twentythree Places.rn