The Suitcase Junket live with Jocelyn Mackenzie

Matt Lorenz, The Suitcase Junket, performs in a blend of imagery, sound and staging — any instruments he requires, Lorenz builds from scratch and salvage in a contemporary upcycled one-man-band, and he can play as many as five parts alone.

Lorenz homesteads with rescue dogs and chickens in rural Western Massachusetts, and he is most serious about the songs he writes. Solitary on stage and on the road, his mind is crowded with characters, narratives, voices, imagery, sounds as wide and varied as mountain throat singers and roadhouse juke boxes, and newsreels of the planet’s destruction and salvage.

“The things I value are under attack,” Lorenz writes. “And writing songs and making art are the methods I have for responding. I have tried to use my observations and reflections of the world bent through my fun-house-mirror mind to show what I see: a planet stressed. … We can do better.”

Get tickets »

In 2020 he released The End is New, produced by trusted friend producer Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, who produced The Suitcase Junket’s acclaimed 2018 release, Mean Dog Trampoline.

“Most of the time making records for a living is both fun and edifying,” Berlin says, “But every once and a while I get rewarded with a simply superlative experience, and making The End Is New was certainly one of those.” He adds, “We had a blast building these ideas into songs, and Matt’s endless inventiveness made each workday a genuine pleasure. His talent is a unique gift.”

“I told Steve I wanted to make a doom-folk record,” Lorenz says. “That’s what I’d started calling my music when people asked. He was game. Neither of us knew quite what that meant at the time, but I think we found out with The End is New. There’s a heavy mix of hope and desperation in the sound and lyrically I was trying to be a mirror to society using truth, myth, confessions and stories.”

In the strangest of ironies, the production of this album, an artist moving from solitude to collaboration, went forward in a time when Lorenz, Berlin, all their studio musicians, and the entire world were in isolation for the lockdown of pandemic.

“We had done some tracking in February and felt that we had a good start,” says Lorenz, “but things had gotten a bit strange. Steve Berlin, producer extraordinaire, was stuck at home on the West Coast under a newly imposed lockdown and here in Massachusetts the virus was starting to heat up. The bicoastal, remotely produced recording process was bizarre and frustrating but fruitful. We plugged along, track by track, occasionally commenting on how crazy everything was feeling.

“Justin, the sound engineer and co-owner of Sonelab, and I had spent time together in the same studio so we figured if one of us had The Virus we probably both did so why not finish the record as safely as we could? So we watched as the world drastically changed around our little musical haven, unsure of what lay ahead.

“We polished off the record bit by bit in the following months, recording overdubs from home with no more studio time to be had. J Mascis made a ripping appearance on ‘Light a Candle’ and Steve Berlin slipped off his producer shoes and laid down some horn parts. I’m so very excited to share these new songs. I think the writing on this album is some of the best I’ve ever done and the production has them sounding huge and cinematic.”

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, 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, Lorenz headed to Europe, 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 says. Once he’d returned to Amherst, he formed the band Rusty Belle with his sister Kate and several years later started The Suitcase Junket with the aid of a guitar he’d found in a dumpster.

The name ‘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.”

He also gets very excited about coffee, gardening, bees, dogs, birds, mushrooms, tinctures, making his own wine, and maple sugaring season.

Jocelyn Mackenzie is a Brooklyn N.Y. musician, maker, and medium. A singer, songwriter, songwriting coach, artist, stylist, intuitive, and psychic, she recently released her debut solo album PUSH on Righteous Babe Records. Written for string quartet, voice, and synth percussion about healing through radical self love, PUSH was co-created by an all star team of collaborators including Sam McCormally, Emily Hope Price, Franz Nicolay, Adam Schatz, Jo Lampert, Barrie Lobo McClain, and more.

Best known as the singing drummer from indie-pop trio Pearl and the Beard (2007-2015), Mackenzie and bandmates Emily Hope Price and Jeremy Lloyd-Styles released six studio albums in their tenure. They boasted an extensive touring history across the US, UK, and Canada with such noteworthy artists as Ani DiFranco, Neko Case, Iron & Wine, Ingrid Michaelson, Lucius, Dar Williams, Lady Lamb, and David Wax Museum.

Jocelyn’s first solo album, the “Unlovely EP” was released in 2016 via Consequence of Sound and with a track co-written by Ani DiFranco. Her music and voice over talent has appeared in film, theater, and television.