Lost Lakes

It’s a warm but windy evening on the lawn of the East Side Club, where the after-work crowd is chattering over beers, strolling up to food carts, or watching their children play tag between the picnic tables.

Then Corey Mathew Hart and his band take the stage — and the outdoor conversation starts to quiet in waves. With each song, the casual audience’s attention grows. The lake wind is still blowing, but Hart’s pure, folksy voice rises above it.

On Friday, Hart’s voice will be center stage at Capitol Theater. The singer-songwriter is one of two winners of the Overture Center’s 2014 Rising Stars contest, a regional talent competition that last year drew an initial 160 acts of all sorts vying for the local spotlight.

Part of the winners’ grand prize is playing Capitol Theater as part of Overture’s mainstage season. Hart will share the bill with another act that tied with him for first place, the genre-stretching band the Madpolecats.

Friday’s evening of music at 8 p.m. is a prelude to the Rising Stars competition for 2015, to be held Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Close to two dozen acts chosen for the finals will try to out-entertain one another and win the judges’ votes.

“It’s my favorite sounding room in Madison,” Hart said of the Capitol Theater. “I’m excited to play the show (on Friday), but also excited to go back the following night to hear what else there is.”

Born in New Orleans and raised in a Milwaukee suburb, Hart grew up in a family that loved listening to the likes of singer-songwriters James Taylor and Paul Simon.

“My first concert that I ever went to was Paul Simon’s ‘Rhythm of the Saints’ tour,” he recalls.

At age 8, he was smitten by the guitar, but when his mother took him to a guitar teacher he was told he was too young and his hands were too small. In grade school, he studied violin, then sax, then in middle school returned to the guitar and also joined the school choir. He started writing songs, and in high school formed a “rootsy-rock” band.

After short stints at UW-Madison and Berklee College of Music in Boston, Hart returned home to Milwaukee.

“That’s when I really started playing more — doing open mics in Milwaukee,” he said. He also made a point of getting to every show that he could by well-known Wisconsin musician Willie Porter.

“He was a really big influence, at least early on,” Hart said of Porter. “He’s an incredibly talented writer and singer. To be able to see him many times a year was really great — someone to look up to and something to aspire to.”

Hart eventually returned to UW-Madison to finish up a degree in conservation biology.

“It wasn’t until my last year of school that I started playing open mics again,” he said. In 2007, he won Madison’s Songwriter of the Year competition.

One of the prizes was recording time at Smart Studios, where he recorded his first EP, “Words Like Wildfire.”



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“Recording was such a learning experience. We recorded everything in one day, five songs,” he said. “That really got me excited.”

Hart took a job at REI, where he worked for six years and met his future wife — a long-ago friend from youth summer camp. Today, Hart works in quality assurance at Epic Systems Corp. in Verona and his wife Ambra is the lead kindergarten teacher at Woodland Montessori School in Madison. They live in rural Iowa County with their two sons, ages 4 and 1.

Hart built the Koa-body guitar he plays in his shows — based on a Thinline Telecaster — while attending a luthier school in Red Wing, Minnesota. In 2011 he recorded his EP “Winter Bones” at Smart Studios just months before the recording studio closed. “Winter Bones” went on to win two 2012 Madison Area Music Awards in the best male vocalist and best folk/Americana album categories. That same year, he was nominated for a Wisconsin Area Music Industry (WAMI) award for best male vocalist.

The album introduced Madison to Hart songs such as “Blue Mountain Thistle,” a touching but cheery tune with influences from his travels in the Blue Ridge Mountains: “Blue Mountain Thistle, the scent of magnolia / Is strong when I hold ya’ all through the night / My heart’s like a soldier, don’t forget what I told ya’ / Blue Mountain Thistle, we’ll be all right.”

“I’m constantly writing music, which is kind of always the way it’s been,” he said.

“That stuff — guitar parts, chord progressions, (tunes) on guitar or piano — that stuff seems to flow out of me pretty easily. If I’m smart, I record the ideas when I have them, because I don’t always have time to sit down and flesh out an idea. I tend to spend a lot more time over the lyrical content. I think when it comes to that, I’m too much of a self-editor.”

Hart is now collaborating more with his bass player, Paul Mitch, on songs for an upcoming record (last fall, the two made it to the New York finals of a national songwriting competition). Other band members are familiar faces on the Madison music scene: Ben Wolf on drums, Rusty Lee on keyboards, and vocalist Anna Vogelzang.

Vogelzang and her husband, Andrew Young, produce the annual Madison folk Christmas concert “Wintersong,” which Hart played in last year and will be part of again in December.

Vogelzang calls Hart’s songs “super-approachable, and really beautiful.”

“He’s a great supporter of other local musicians, and has a really great following in town,” she said. “Everybody brings their own unique aspect to the scene. On the music scene, he’s a dude playing a guitar. But he can bring it to a really beautiful level, where every song is hooky and gets stuck in your head immediately when you hear it.”

“The Madison singer-songwriter community has always been very tight. Everyone knows everybody,” Hart said. “A lot of times when you go to shows, it’s all the other musicians (in the audience). I know there’s a pretty tight punk scene and a metal scene in Madison, too. It really would be great to see more people out at the shows. I guess it’s up to those of us in the music community” to make that happen.

“It’s probably like this everywhere, but there’s a good history of music in Wisconsin, both past and present. Willie Porter, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, the BoDeans, Steve Miller, Ben Sidran, Clyde Stubblefield. Richard Davis, a professor at UW-Madison, plays bass on my favorite record of all time, Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks.’ It sounds nothing like the stuff we play, but it’s in there somehow, the spirit of it.”

Soft-spoken in conversation, the slim Hart — wearing jeans, a denim shirt and a Madison Muskies cap on stage — takes on a more commanding presence in the spotlight.

“I’m kind of a quiet person, an introspective person,” Hart said when asked. “I guess (being on stage) is how I choose to communicate, through songs.

“I just get a lot of joy out of playing music,” he said. “There’s that sort of hippie-dippie, unspoken energy thing that happens when there’s a crowd of people and you’re playing music, and there’s give and take and feedback. There’s nothing like it that I’ve found. It’s pretty great.” - Wisconsin State Journal