Matthew Sweet returns from six-year hiatus with Tomorrow Forever

You can blame the long wait (six years) between Matthew Sweet albums on the expectations generated by a Kickstarter campaign.

“That’s why it took so long; I was trying to do multiple batches of real recording and be able to pull from it something ostensibly stronger than if I didn’t have as much to pull from,” Sweet tells Billboard about Tomorrow Forever, the follow-up to 2011’s Modern Art. The album comes out June 16, with 17 tracks culled from an estimated 38 Sweet worked on for the set.

“I was really just looking to do a whole lot of songs and pick favorites,” says Sweet, who, as the body of work grew tapped others for feedback about which songs to include on the album. “I gave the music to a lot of people around me, more than I usually do. It made putting it together in the end slightly easier ’cause all of us, including me, pretty much agreed on all the top stuff.”

From the crunchy opening riff of “Trick,” Tomorrow Forever is another of Sweet’s power pop-leaning gems, with plenty of garage and psychedelic flavors in the mix. The music is fleshed out by an impressive roster of guests, including Rod Argent of the Zombies, who plays piano on two tracks, the Bangles’ Debbie Peterson, who drums on four, Jayhawks’ frontman Gary Louris and members of the Velvet Crush, the Orange Peels and Jackson Browne’s band.

Tomorrow Forever also includes a salute to Sweet’s mother, who passed away shortly after he returned from Hollywood, to Nebraska, in the track “You Knew Me.” “I think we both were pretty similar kinds of people,” Sweet says, “but because of that we sort of were at odds a lot… We were great with each other by the time she passed away. But that song in particular makes me think about this level of discomfort she had with the course of my life. It came from this idea where I’m saying ‘I’m afraid of myself and afraid of you/ And you’re afraid of yourself and afraid of me.’ It’s slightly sad, could make me cry kind of feeling.”