Story & Lesson Highlights with Matt Graham of Echo Park

Matt Graham shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.

Matt, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: When was the last time you felt true joy?
The last time I felt true joy, was when I bought my car – a 1975 Lincoln Continental Mark IV. It’s a beast with a V8 engine. I’m not sure quite how or why, but its also an expression of who I am. If a Renaissance Artist was working in America in the 1970s, they’d be working in car design – those mid 1970s American cars are some of the most beautiful things ever created. The strange thing is that most of my life I didn’t know how, or have any interest in driving.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m a TV and film writer based in Los Angeles and the High Desert and I’m currently working – which is a big deal in Hollywood right now. I also write short stories and a novel is forthcoming – my second. You can read my newest short fiction: “High Desert” upcoming in the Brussels Review, or listen to Buzz – a podcast which I cowrote – and which was originally a pre Covid TV series with multiple stars attached. I’m kind of a nomad – and I’ve called many places outside LA my home at some point, including various parts of the South Western United States, New York City, South America, New Orleans, and the Caribbean coast of Mexico.

“Matt, there’s something that both of us have to understand”, a close friend of mine once remarked to me over the phone in the aftermath of a devastating house fire that I survived in the Mojave Desert in 2023: “Our Brand is Chaos.”

Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?
Seneca said something to the effect that “its not that life is short – it isn’t, but the problem is that we waste a lot of it.” The cover of the 1995 Chemical Brothers album Exit Planet Dust shows two people, a man and a woman, both young and attractive, walking down the side of a road in what’s clearly California. The album had a huge effect on me, coming as it did in the middle of the extra ordinary 90s music boom that I grew up in, but what had a bigger effect on me was the image of the two people themselves. The two of them walking together in the lush, light bathed-landscape of what I know know is clearly California. They were living their lives to the full, probably in love. That was exactly the kind of life I wanted back then, and the same is true now – its never changed for me. Stagnation is my greatest fear. I could never handle a family life in suburbia – I’d wake up at 5am, wondering if should drive to Holbrook, Arizona or Baja California. I’m not judging that kind of life though – it just isn’t for me, that’s all. I didn’t much care about anything else other than this, and still don’t. A friend of mine paid me a wonderful complement the other week “You’ve really live life,” he said. It was one of the most unexpectedly nice compliments anyone has ever paid me.

If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
Don’t give up. Giving up is the easiest thing you can do. And by Give Up I don’t mean at Life – I mean stop trying to make your dreams a reality. When you do that, when you decide to stop — everyone rushes to your aid. After all you’ve been making them feel bad: they gave up on their own dreams long ago.

Its when you’re still trying to make them happen that people do everything they can to oppose you, whether consciously or not. It sounds like a cliche, but perhaps that’s why I like America so much.

My younger self, like my older self, was a deeply troubled guy, directed by emotion and passion above all, and rarely restrained by practicality. He would really appreciate this advice. That said, my current self is also deeply troubled, unstable and irrational and so advice from him should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What’s a cultural value you protect at all costs?
Long ago, I was British. It’s my birth country, but I have little to do with it now – I don’t understand it, or what people think there, or what makes them tick there. People still ask me about the Royal Family though, as if I have anything to say on the issue. I’ve been over here too long. I’ve become too American, too crazy, too addicted to the desert, to the rush of Life.

There’s one thing I retain from that culture however, that I will always protect: tea at 4pm. Every day, no matter what I’m doing, I’ll have a cup of tea. The day is structured, as much as it is around coffee in the morning, around that 4pm cup of tea. On my last day on the planet – I’ll have had a cup of tea at 4pm.

Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: What is the story you hope people tell about you when you’re gone?
In late September of last year, at a small house in the desert, I was attacked by a deadly variety of rattle snake – the Mojave Green. I engaged in a twenty five minute struggle with the creature, who was enraged by my existence. I had no protection – and no weapons with which to fight it. It was just me and them. This would have been dramatic enough, had it not come in the aftermath of my survival in the wake of a Dust Devil – a Mojave tornado – which had destroyed my house one afternoon further out in the desert, and yet somehow, left me alive (you can read an interview I did with the Smithsonian about the experience actually). That in itself, had come in the aftermath of something else, something even darker, that I won’t get into here. What I really hope people will tell this story about me, and at least smile a little. It honestly would have been way to go, and after last year… well, because although going through it was Hell, there’s nothing like a good story. That’s that whole “living life thing” again – not all of it is pleasant. Some of its often a nightmare, but its supposed to be that way – you can’t appreciate the Good without knowing the Bad. After I found the snake a new home outside in the creosote, an old friend of mine from Brooklyn (actually an Englishman from Southhampton that I met while living in Buenos Aires and who’d helped cleanup the 2004 Thailand tsunami, and with whom I once got lost on the Ute Reservation in Southern Utah) called and asked how I felt: “I feel alive,” I told him. I was on a plane 24 hours later, stepping off in New York, everything speeding up as the dream continued. I went on to live with my amazing aunt in New York who taught me all about cold water swimming and is really the true hero in my 2024 story, but that’s another tale…

Contact Info:

• Instagram: IG Muzurphulus

Image Credits
Andreea Paduraru