I’ve had questions for Matt Sharp since 1994. Hell, I had the guy’s visage on my wall back in the mid-90s, in the form of a blown of poster of the Blue Album, the first pop record of the era that really tapped into sensibilities of an indoor kid growing up amidst piles of X-Men comics. And if Weezer was the quintessential geek rock group of the mid-90s, then Sharp was its quintessential geek, an image he fully embraced for Return of the Rentals, the Moog-drenched debut of the newly band that would establish the bass player as a songwriting force in his own right. I’m not sure what I would have asked Sharp 20 years ago, but these days my questions revolve largely around notions of success: namely, how the musician’s multi-decade career has been impact by his early successes. After all Weezer’s first album put the band on the map almost immediately, and Sharp managed to strike gold yet again with The Rentals’ scoring their biggest hit to date with the their very first single, “Friends of P.” But while the band would never manage to recapture that success, subsequent albums have found the group’s rotating cast of players evolve into something far more exciting: a beloved and ever-evolving indie rock band, reinventing itself with every subsequent release. And Sharp has evolved right alongside them, severing his ties from the music world and moving to the rural south following the release of The Rentals’ terrific but moderately selling sophomore record Seven More Minutes.  Over the years, he’s release heart wrenching solo work, played synths for indie darlings Tegan and Sara and even managed to reconcile things with Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo in the face of mounting legal concerns over songwriting royalties. But all the while, the Rentals have represented a sort of homebase, a safe place to which Sharp could return even after years of absence to produce something beautiful, most recently with this year’s understate Lost in Alphaville. We sat down ahead of the band’s triumphant return to New York City to discuss the musician’s idiosyncratic career.

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