I think Minnesota is lucky to have Matt Roers (Shiloh, Forever) return home from Berklee College. I look forward to hearing more from him and maybe even catch a live show!
Please tell us more about Shiloh, Forever.
My name is Matt Roers, and Shiloh, Forever is the alias for my solo work. I was raised in Alexandria, MN, but I spent the last five years living in Boston before recently moving back to MN. I put out my first single, “Friend of Mine,” in July ’22 and just released two more songs at the end of February. The songs, so far, have been written entirely by myself and recorded with help from a couple friends. The project started out as a much-needed outlet for personal introspection and has come to form, I think, due to my writing habits. I do a lot of my writing at night, and I think it certainly shows in the songs. I’ve always liked to be isolated from people and distractions when making music, and night is the only time when you can get quality silence in a city. There’s influences from lots of different genres, so it was hard for me to categorize the songs, so I just started calling it “sleep rock” since it has the same instrumentation as a typical rock band, but the vibe is chill and sedating.
I enjoy your term “sleep rock” for your music. I might say soundscape but either way it feels like the songs lift the listener into a dreamy, calm state of imagination. Are you calling the calm into your life or do you live in the calm?
That’s nice of you to say. And I’m absolutely calling the calm into my life, but aspiring to one day live in the calm! My mental health has always been pretty dependent on my creativity. I feel best when I’m progressing and working on new music, and I’ve been at my worst and most existential during creative draughts. That’s kind of how “The Man After Dark” came to be. I was in the middle of one of those slumps, and writing it helped propel me out of it. For me personally, it can be overwhelming trying to balance music and regular life, especially at this stage where it feels like I have to do everything by myself. There’s so much to do and not enough hours in the day. I’m just holding on and working to gain some traction, and hopefully I can start to delegate more in the future.
You moved from rural Minnesota to go to Berklee College of Music. How (if at all) did that transition impact the music you play today?
There was definitely some culture shock when I first moved there. Berklee has so many students from different countries. People come from all over the world to be there. You don’t get diversity like that in small-town America. I was super fortunate to be able to go and see all the ways music-making is approached. You really get to be around the best of the best. What’s exotic and unprecedented to you might be completely standard and well practiced by someone else. I gained some much-needed perspective. Comparison cripples a lot of musicians, including myself. I always told myself that if I wasn’t doing something in a specific way or if my records didn’t sound exactly like what I envisioned, then people would hate it and it would fail. Being in that community of like-minded people and seeing musicians have success being themselves helped assure me to just trust the process and create music I love, and all the big picture stuff will take care of itself.
It seems like creating music is often a solitary pursuit for you. Do you have plans to share your music by performing? Any shows coming up? Or any place you’d like to play?
Yea, I tend to be introverted, sometimes to a fault. If it were up to me, it wouldn’t be that way. Sharing my music online and in person is a muscle I’m building. Going from writing by myself to playing in front of a group of people—it’s strange to have to build two skills that are opposite in a lot of ways. Right now, I’m mostly sharing my music online, but I’m in talks to lock in some in-person spots around Minnesota. I recently returned to the state, and I never really lived in the cities when I was an adult, so the metro area feels new and infinite. We’ll see what happens in the coming months. As far as future places, every MN act wants to play First Ave some day. I always wanted to play at The Whole when I was a student at the U of M. Those are definitely two spots on my bucket list. I’d love to play some spots out-of-state as well. It’ll all happen in time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Please tell us more about the Shiloh, Forever Sheep connection. The t-shirts are great.
Thank you! The sheep came about in a few ways. My girlfriend, Alex, always tells me I look like a fuzzy sheep when I first wake up and have a crazy bedhead. When I was coming up with some initial ideas for the shirts, I had a few I would show my friends, and they would always laugh at the sheep ones, so I thought I’d just roll with it. It’s kind of lighthearted and goofy and doesn’t come across too seriously, so I figured it’d be symbolic of me as a person. A sheep is also a good reflection of the two songs: soft, gentle, and warm. I didn’t realize until recently that a lot of the music I write tends to have a sleepy/nighttime theme going on in it, so I had that “counting sheep” idiom in mind. Plus, good word association, since “Shiloh” and “sheep” both start with “sh-.” It fit too well, and people liked it too much for me not to use it, so here I am as the fuzzy sheep guy.
Mostly Minnesota 