Forever Five: Matt Corby

Waxx Lyrical
2 days ago
4 min read

🎤 One of Australia's most distinctive voices

🌿 Songwriter, producer and restless musical explorer

🪄 Drawn to groove, texture and songs that let the feeling lead

Matt Corby’s Forever Five for Waxx Lyrical

Matt Corby has spent the better part of his career gently refusing to sit still. What started with that voice, a voice that could have easily trapped him in coffee-table soul-boy territory forever, has slowly expanded into something stranger, warmer and much more interesting.

Across rather impeccable records like Telluric, Rainbow Valley, Everything’s Fine and now Tragic Magic, Corby has built a world around feel.

Soul, folk, psychedelia, gospel, funk, classic songwriting and handmade studio texture all move through his music, but never like borrowed clothes. More like things absorbed through the skin. Sunlight, grief, tape hiss, fatherhood, old records, backyard air, a slightly warped groove left to wobble in exactly the right way.

That is the thing with Matt. The technical gifts are obvious, but the taste is the deeper story. He knows when to open his voice up and when to tuck it into the arrangement. He knows that a song can be powerful without being polished to death. His best music often feels like it was grown rather than assembled in a studio.

With Tragic Magic, he has leaned even further into that human, soulful, lived-in space. It is a record full of rich instrumentation (and a magpie melody), classic warmth and emotional weight, but it never feels like an exercise in nostalgia. Corby has always seemed more interested in chasing the spirit of old music than recreating the furniture.

Which makes Matt Corby's Forever Five feel wonderfully revealing. These are records of harmony, pocket, dust, restraint and deep musical instinct. Records that move through the body before the brain has finished taking notes.

Matt Corby's Forever Five

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Déjà Vu (1970)

Four huge musical personalities, one famously combustible room, and somehow a record that still sounds sunlit, bruised and oddly eternal. Déjà Vu is all golden harmony and cracked floorboards: beautiful voices rubbing against ego, tenderness, politics, domestic dreams and private unease.

It makes perfect sense in Matt’s orbit. Corby has always understood harmony as more than decoration. A voice can carry memory. A stack of vocals can turn a chorus into a small congregation. Déjà Vu is sweet, yes, but never too neat. That friction is why it still glows.

Needle Drop: ‘Our House’

D’Angelo – Voodoo (2000)

Matt Corby’s Forever Five for Waxx Lyrical — D’Angelo, Voodoo

The groove does not walk straight on Voodoo. It leans, drags, melts, breathes behind the beat and somehow becomes more powerful for refusing to behave. D’Angelo’s masterpiece is all sweat, smoke, gospel ache and supernatural pocket, loose in feel but obsessive in construction.

This feels like a major key to Matt Corby’s musical universe. Not because he sounds like D’Angelo, but because both artists understand that soul music lives in the body. The voice is not just the thing on top. It is texture, rhythm, atmosphere, ache. Voodoo is a reminder that perfection is often less interesting than pulse.

Needle Drop: ‘Spanish Joint’

Dirty Art Club – Basement Seance (2017)

Matt Corby’s Forever Five for Waxx Lyrical — Dirty Art Club, Basement Seance

Exactly as the title promises: basement lamps, dust motes, old samples speaking through the walls. Basement Seance is a shadowy, instrumental mood-piece built from fragments, crackle and atmosphere.

This is the deep crate-digger pick of the five, and maybe the one that says the most about Corby’s ears. His music is never just chords and melody. It has pockets and rooms. It has little ghosts in the corners. It has weather. Basement Seance speaks to that same instinct: texture as storytelling, mood as musicianship, sound design with a pulse.

Needle Drop: ‘Queen Persephone’

J Dilla – Donuts (2006)

Matt Corby’s Forever Five for Waxx Lyrical — J Dilla, Donuts

A record collection cracked open and rewired into a secret nervous system. Donuts is 31 little worlds stitched from soul fragments, drum kicks, chopped voices and impossible instinct. Ideas appear, bloom and vanish before most producers would have finished introducing them.

Dilla’s genius was not just rhythm. It was emotional compression. He could make a loop feel funny, wounded, defiant and tender in the space of a few bars. For someone like Corby, who clearly values feel over flash, Donuts is sacred text. A reminder that musicality does not always need a traditional instrument in its hands. Sometimes the sample does the crying.

Needle Drop: ‘Time: The Donut of the Heart’

J. J. Cale – Naturally (1972)

Matt Corby’s Forever Five for Waxx Lyrical — J. J. Cale, Naturally

J. J. Cale barely raises his voice on Naturally, which is exactly why the thing lands so hard. The record is all restraint, pocket and quiet confidence: guitar lines that never show off, songs that never over-explain, grooves so relaxed they practically recline.

That lesson runs straight through Matt Corby’s best work. For all the force his voice can carry, he often sounds most compelling when he pulls back. When he lets the band breathe. When he trusts one small phrase to do the heavy lifting. Naturally is the sound of a musician with nothing to prove, which of course is the coolest sound in the world.

Needle Drop: ‘Magnolia’

Matt Corby's Forever Five — The Playlist

You can hear these influences running through Corby’s own music: the warmth, the restraint, the trust in great players and great songs.

Listen to the full playlist to hear the records that shaped him, alongside five tracks from his own catalogue.