The Music Program and the members of the courses Writing About Music (HACU 184) and World Music: A Critical Inquiry (HACU 191) invite you to a morning performance/talk-back with musician/instrument builder Matt Lorenz ('02) (aka The Suitcase Junket).  Matt Lorenz will perform original songs, discuss his music and instrument building (including those designed as assistive technologies), and life as a national touring musician.

Growing up in Cavendish, Vermont, Matt Lorenz began playing piano at age five, and later took up violin, saxophone, and guitar. During his years at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, he studied music and adaptive instrument design, a pursuit that included building a prototype for a drummer who couldn’t use their legs, where they’d be able to play the bass drum and hi-hat through a system of pulleys. After college, he headed to Europe on a $150 plane ticket, ran out of money in Barcelona, and spent a year playing music in the streets. “That’s where I learned how to sing loud, which got me figuring out what my voice could do,” Lorenz notes. Once he’d returned to Amherst, he formed the band Rusty Belle with his late sister Kate and, several years later, started The Suitcase Junket with the aid of a guitar he’d found in a dumpster.  ‘The Suitcase Junket’ is a nod to Lorenz’s longtime love of collecting old suitcases, including an antique that he’s refurbished into a bass drum, and to a secondary definition of junket, i.e. “a pleasure excursion." 

The End is New is Lorenz's sixth full-length album as The Suitcase Junket. The album is produced by Steve Berlin of the LA-based supergroup, Los Lobos, and Lorenz' first for Renew Records/BMG. Lorenz tours extensively -- locally and nationally.  Matt Lorenz is also a visual artist. In the early years he designed all The Suitcase Junket album art and merchandise and made the music videos generated with his songs. He continues to create the visuals for merchandise, and to produce some of his videos, now with collaborators. He gets very excited about coffee, gardening, bees, dogs, birds, mushrooms, tinctures, making his own wine and maple sugaring season.