From a Pixies album to the meaning of life

Or, a conversation with my best friend Matthew

I first met my friend Matthew on the Internet, as one does. It was 2002, maybe 2003, and both of us were nerding out on an online food forum called eGullet. Matthew even had a title: he was the Pacific Northwest forum moderator, ooh la la, while I was just a regular member. At the time, Matthew was a restaurant critic for the Seattle Times, and to me, he was a very big deal. I remember going to a get-together for Seattle eGulleteers — I know — and seeing him and his wife Laurie and feeling too shy to introduce myself. I don’t think we ever had an actual conversation until 2006, when we again found ourselves at a meetup of food enthusiasts who knew each other from the Internet. The story is much longer and includes even more meetups of strangers from the Web, but the upshot is this: based on the fact that we’d made each other laugh a couple of times, Matthew did a bold thing in late 2009 and sent me an email to ask if I might want to co-host a food-and-comedy podcast with him. We hardly knew each other, in case I haven’t made that clear enough. But our friendship has grown alongside our podcast, Spilled Milk, which we launched in early 2010. And we’re still at it, releasing a new episode every Thursday. I know we both plan to continue as long as we can. You can read more about that below.

When he’s not making Spilled Milk with me, Matthew works for the excellent budgeting app YNAB, where he is part of the customer support team. He also co-hosts a podcast called Hidden Jukebox, with his brother Jake Amster, and he was a co-host of the podcast Look Inside this Book Club, with Becky Selengut. Matthew is also the author of the YA novel Our Secret Better Lives and four nonfiction books, including Hungry Monkey, which taught me most of what I know about creating a sane and pleasurable culture around eating with young kids. I must also mention that Matthew has been a contestant on Jeopardy!, as has Laurie! And, Matthew is also a singer. His latest project is Consolation Lakes, with Lauren Huhn.

We spoke on October 10, 2022, via Zoom, because Matthew is in Calgary, Canada, on vacation with his wife. He’d just come back from an ice hockey game, the Calgary Hitmen vs. the Brandon Wheat Kings. What follows has been edited by both of us for clarity and brevity. Please note that all book links are affiliate links to Bookshop.org or Libro.fm.

Matthew, on a 2018 run to the grocery store to buy a lemon pudding cake for reasons I no longer remember

Molly Wizenberg: Hi! How was the hockey game?

Matthew Amster-Burton: Oh, it was so good. Our team lost — I mean the Hitmen lost — but the good news is that the Wheat Kings won.

Molly: I love that. Especially taken out of context.

Matthew: There’s so much fighting in hockey! I thought maybe, like, fights would happen every couple of games or something, but it's like every couple of minutes.

Molly: Wow. Yeah, so they really are the Hitmen.

Matthew: They killed several of the opposing players.

No, no, but there was a warning at the beginning that you might get hit with a puck, and that the Hitmen accept no responsibility. And — okay, so this is the best thing that I learned about hockey, definitely keep this in the transcript — there is an official who is in charge of the puck freezer, like a little dorm freezer full of hockey pucks, because apparently they have to be cold when you put them out onto the ice, for reasons I don't know. And at one point the official took a puck out of the freezer and motioned to a little kid, like, You want a free puck? And the kid came down with her mom and took this hockey puck and was very excited, but then as they were walking back, she said, “Mommy, why am I getting this?” and then started rubbing the puck against her face.

Molly: Maybe if you were born in Canada, it feels good to rub a hockey puck on your face.

Matthew: I assume so.

Molly: Anyway. So. Matthew, you were the first person I thought of when I started this newsletter and had the idea to do interviews, or conversations. I wanted to create an opportunity to talk with you about all the kinds of things we don't usually talk about on our podcast. Because there are whole parts of your life that I don't know a lot about. And at the same time, over the years of our friendship, I've learned a lot from you. So I’m glad we’re here. When I texted to ask if you’d be willing to sit down and do this with me, I asked if there was anything that you especially wanted to talk about. And you said you wanted to start our conversation by talking about the new Pixies album.

Matthew: Yeah. And I totally get how that sounds — like, a middle aged white guy wants to talk about indie rock. I want to own that upfront. But we can take it from there.

Molly: You suggested I listen to the album, but I completely forgot to.

Matthew: No, no, that’s fine.

Molly: So when did this album come out?

Matthew: The end of September, I think September 30.

Molly: Why did you want to talk about it?

Matthew: Okay. I wanted to talk about it because I, like many people, I'm getting old, and I'm doing a really poor job of reckoning with it.

Molly: In what way? Have you started dyeing your hair? I hadn’t noticed.

Matthew: I just want to kind of pretend I'm young forever and, you know, not think about the fact that someday I'll be dead. About the fact that some of the things I enjoy doing now will become more difficult because I'm getting older. And at the same time, I think I've done an okay job of accepting the fact that I'm not young and cool anymore. I find it perplexing when someone my age clearly is trying to retain the same ways of being cool that they did when they were, like, in their early 20s. Or alternatively, just bashing things that young people are into, because, really, they're bashing themselves for having committed the crime of getting old. I felt like this new Pixies album helped me assemble a lot of thoughts around what it means to get older in a way that is comfortable. That you can still be yourself without having to be every part of who you were when you were very young.

Molly: When you listen to the new album, do you get the sense that the Pixies are not trying to make the music that they were making in 1993? That they’ve made the music that they’re making in 2022?

Matthew: I think that's it, but more interesting to me than what's on the album itself — which, you've kind of nailed it, they have slowed down and they are clearly okay with that — is that no one is asking for a new Pixies album to come out in September 2022. I know that you’re a big fan of the old Pixies albums like I am, and you didn't even know about this.

Molly: I had no idea.

Matthew: Which is totally fine! So, you know, the only reason they made this album — I doubt they need the money — is, like, I think they wanted to get together with their friends and make music, and if someone listens to it and enjoys it, that’s great. There are other bands that seem to be really trying hard to become relevant again, like Smashing Pumpkins. But the Pixies have kind of settled into, like, okay, we’re kind of old now. And we’re not going to rock out quite the same way we could when we were twenty. And we’re not going to mean the same thing to people, to the extent that people bother to listen to us at all. And when you listen to the Pixies’ new album, it sounds, like, fundamentally satisfied with those inescapable facts.

Molly: I think part of what you’re pointing to is the difference between producing work with the goal of appealing to the market, versus producing work whose goal is to follow your inner compass.

Matthew: There was an interview that I think about a lot, an interview in the New York Times that David Marchese did with Eddie Vedder in January of this year. And the part that really stuck with me was this, when Marchese says, “Not to ask the jerky question, but what do you say to the idea that it’s good that you guys are having a better time making the records but maybe the records were better when it was a struggle?” So what Eddie Vedder says is, “Our job is not to make records that people like. Our job is to make the music that makes us feel proud. I’ve been pondering your questions: Is there something I’m missing here? Am I supposed to be thinking about what other people are thinking? Because with songwriting it’s almost like you can’t think about it in order to let it happen.”

Molly: Matthew!

Matthew: Yeah?

Molly: Did you know that I read that same interview and wrote down that exact same quote on an index card, and I keep it propped on my bookshelf? Like, I’m looking at it right now!

Matthew: I loved it so much, like, first of all, how Eddie Vedder —

Molly: God! Wow! I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this quote before! It’s so crazy that we both love it!

Matthew: Yeah!

And what I mean is, that is something that I struggle with so hard as a creative person. I think there is a parallel between the latest Pixies album and our podcast. As you know, you and I do a comedy podcast about food, which is not one of the most popular genres of creative work in the world. [Laughs.] And we're lucky enough that, you know, a fairly-impressive-to-me number of people like to listen to it. But we're at the point where we've been doing it for 13 years, and, like, we're not going to break any new ground or suddenly become super-popular.

Molly: We’re not going to reinvent what we do. There’s a certain formula to our shows, even.

Matthew: Yeah!

Molly: And that’s very pleasing to me. In many ways, the fact that we’ve been doing it for long enough to have really figured out a formula for the show allows me a sense of, like, confidence and fun that I didn’t have in the early days, when we were still kind of inventing what the show was going to do.

Matthew: Yeah, like, like, it’s so okay for creative work to be formulaic. Like, that's a thing that took me too long to understand. I think I was a very tiresome young music fan who always wanted to listen to something that was explosively creative or groundbreaking in some way. And you can't do that for very long as an artist — with some very rare exceptions, a David Bowie or a Prince. And as a person who is not any kind of star, it's okay for your life to become formulaic. It's good, probably.

Molly: It’s interesting, because ‘formulaic’ doesn't have to mean cookie-cutter or boring. When we talk about a narrative arc in a book, well, that’s almost a type of formula. Every story begins at point A and moves to another point. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. For a memoir to feel satisfying, for instance, the reader needs to be able to see that the narrator has undergone a transformation over the course of the story, that the person who's guiding us has been fundamentally changed by the end of the book. That is a quote-unquote formula, and we embrace it.

Matthew: You know, I love reading romance. And romance is a formulaic genre. But there's so much exciting stuff that can happen within the formula, and that's why people like it. You know the parties are going to get together at the end. And each of them is going to probably have some part of themselves that's healed by the other person, that the romance itself isn’t the whole point. Those things are true of pretty much 95% or more of romances. And that said, I love reading them.

Molly: Is there a title you’d recommend as a terrific gateway romance?

Matthew: Oh, let’s see. This is a bit of an oddball romance, but it was one that was very popular: The Roommate, by Rosie Danan. It's a pretty steamy romance. One of the characters is a porn actor, and I think this book has probably expanded the horizons of some of its more mainstream readers. I enjoyed it for that reason, but also the characters were fun.

Molly: Speaking of books, you mentioned to me a while ago a book called Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman. I’m not done with it, but I’ve been really enjoying it, especially the audio version, which is narrated by the author. I thought of it earlier, as you were talking about the Pixies and aging, because it’s basically about accepting the fact that we are all going to die, so we might as well make conscious choices about what we're going to do with our time. How do you feel like [Burkeman’s] book fits into your thinking about aging?

Matthew: I think the relevant piece to me is it’s easy to fall into the trap of striving, even if you are essentially a lazy person like me. There’s an extent to which striving is good; it’s good that people want to heal the world and make their lives and the world a better place. But it's also easy to fall into this sort of Protestant-work-ethic myth of striving — like, I have to be the best at what I do.

One of the big projects that I fell into when the pandemic started was I got back into singing. And I probably took it a lot more serious, definitely a lot more serious than was necessary and probably more seriously than was good for me. I rediscovered the fact that, like, I'm a pretty good singer, and if I really practice, I could be a very good singer, and I sort of felt that that matters in some way. And it really doesn't. It has to be okay that it doesn't matter, because, like, I'm never going to be a successful singer! And why should it matter if I am or not? It can’t matter, because it’s not going to happen. If I decided that it was important that everybody hears what a good singer I am, I’m going to make myself miserable. [Laughing.] That’s what [Four Thousand Weeks] was about to me — like, ways to try and not make yourself miserable with the one short life you have.

Molly: What keeps you singing now?

Matthew: I still sing because it feels good to do it. And because it's a great way of interacting with people.

This is something you know about me, because it’s kind of the underpinning of our friendship, but this is the only way I know how to have friendships: you and I have an ongoing project that we work on together. We make a podcast. We meet up once a week or so and spend time trying to make each other laugh, and that’s how we keep the project going, and people depend on us for it in some way. And, like, I live in fear that if we ever didn’t have that, I would let our friendship evaporate because this wouldn’t force us to get together.

Molly: Our friendship is the most regular, and I would say connected, friendship that I’ve had in adulthood. It’s not that we go out to dinner or meet for coffee or take walks. In fact, we sometimes go long periods without having an in-depth conversation. But we spend a lot of time together doing something that we both really enjoy.

Matthew: And I just don’t know how to structure a friendship any other way. So, like, one of the things I’ve enjoyed so much over the last couple of years — which have been difficult years in a lot of ways; I don’t know if you’ve noticed? — is that I have friends now that I make music with. Like, I have a friend at work, Matt, and we’re working on a pop-punk EP together. He’s writing the music, and I’m singing the songs, and he’s a very, very good guitar player who works on sessions in Nashville. And it’s an honor to sing with him on this little album that we’re making. And it’s also just so much fun to have this kind of interaction, where we learn little bits about each other, mostly through the music we make together and conversations about the music. That’s a great basis for a friendship. That’s why I keep singing. I wish I knew how to maintain a friendship that didn't have something like that underlying it, but I'm probably too old to learn how to do that at this point.

Molly: Going back to the idea of striving, there are a lot of things that I’ve learned from you, these intentional decisions you have made about how you operate. It’s an obvious example, but you’ve taught me a lot about personal finance and budgeting. We live in a world where it’s easy to prioritize money, to feel like there’s never enough of it, no matter how much you have. And conversations that you and I have had have helped me to think about the value of money for me, the value of money relative to getting to live a life that I enjoy every day. Especially in the years since my divorce, I have made a lot of conscious choices about money and how much I truly need, trying to make choices that will allow me to feel at peace in my everyday life as much as possible. And those choices, the things I’ve chose to value, have turned out to be different from what I once thought I would want. I make less money than my parents did, and I have less financial security. I worry more than they did. I put a lot of effort into working with our household budget so that we can do some semblance of all the things that we want to do. But I have time for myself, and time for my family, and I value that. I learned how to think about that from you, more conspicuously than anyone else in my life.

Like — Matthew, you and your parents are the first adults I've ever known who don’t value owning a house. I am a white American woman who grew up with significant privilege, and I grew up thinking, like, why would anyone ever not want to own their own house? So it blew my mind in a really good way, seeing the choices you’ve made, especially the choices not to do things that so many people do, so that you can instead do XYZ that you’d rather do.

Matthew: [My wife] Laurie and I were talking about this recently, and I think that so much of what turns into your values — ‘values’ may not be the right word — actually happens kind of randomly. Like, you make a decision, not knowing that it will be a big decision. For us, one of those was in 1998, when we moved to New York for one year because Laurie was going to grad school in Manhattan, and when we left Seattle, we sold our car. We didn't get a car in New York, because you don't need a car when you live in Manhattan, but we had a plan to get a car again when we went back to Seattle in 1999, because that’s what you do when you live in Seattle. We found this Mazda that was like $5,500 and, and I was like, Great, let's get this car. And Laurie was like, You know what? We don't have $5,500 right now. We could get a loan, but we live right on the bus line. We don't have jobs yet. Why don't we give it a month and see how things go, taking the bus? I remember this really well. I felt like, No, I want this car. It's right in front of us right now. But I went along with it. And after a month, we realized it was going fine. That was 23 years ago, and we still don't have a car.

This is not to say, like, we’re the cool carless family. I mean, I do feel that way sometimes. But it’s because of this random decision we made. A lot of things, even things that feel like a deeply held part of ourselves, are just things that came from a random decision or a moment that wasn’t even a decision.

One I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is — and I don't know if I've told you this story before, but I'm going to tell it again. When I was in eighth grade, I used to go over to my friend Eli's house, Eli had a cool older brother who I only met probably once or twice, and the thing that was cool about Eli's older brother, besides the fact that he was just an older kid, was that he had a CD collection, an interesting CD collection. The thing we would do when I went over to Eli's house was listen to his brother’s CDs. The two CDs I specifically remember listening to where the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album and De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising. And those are two of my favorite albums to this day, and also, almost all the music I listen to sounds like those albums! Nothing is more important to me than music, and so much of the music I listen to was formed just in Eli's living room, listening to his brother’s CDs. Like, if his brother had been into different genres of music, I probably would be now too.

Molly: When we were texting before this conversation, you also said that you wanted to talk about joy. Is music related to that?

Matthew: I think we were texting after my therapy appointment.

Molly: You were heading into therapy, brainstorming what to talk about.

Matthew: Music is the thing that brings me the most joy. Something you and I have talked about, and that I talk about a lot with my therapist, is that, you know, I’m trying to point myself in the direction of accepting getting old. I’m not going to do anything groundbreaking in the remaining remaining years of my life, and that's okay. I can focus on listening to the music I like, and making sure to make time for my friends and family, and those are the important things — but at the same time, we live in a world where the opportunities to experience joy are not evenly distributed. They're not evenly distributed for reasons that are arbitrary and unfair, the result of prejudice and discrimination. And if you're a person who likes to experience joy and believes that everyone should have the same access to joyful moments in life, I feel like it gives you a responsibility to try and do something to, in a very Jewish phrase, repair the world. I don't feel like I do a great job of that, and don't really know how to reckon with it.

Molly: Maybe this sounds dumb, but does that inform our podcast in any way? The fact that we make a comedy podcast?

Matthew: Oh, I think it does. Yeah. I can't think too hard about that while we're trying to sit down and be silly on mic. But it is so gratifying when a listener writes in and says, “Your podcast helped me get through a difficult time.” Or, “When I can't sleep at night, I put on an old episode of Spilled Milk.” Like, “I needed you and you were there.” Those kinds of emails really get me, because then I can’t tell myself that I’m not doing anything to make people’s lives better. I’ve got the evidence in front of me.

The thing I worry about the most is, what if my being here is making the world worse on average, because I’m not doing enough to make it better? So the podcast is part of it. And making music has to be part of it too, even though I’m doing my best to reject striving. I love writing songs. I don’t do it very often, but working with my friend Lauren last year, we wrote a couple of songs that I’m really proud of, that I think are beautiful, and not a lot of people have heard them, because who cares about the songs that me and my friend are making together, and that’s okay. But a few people have heard them and enjoyed them, and they get played around the office sometimes. I watched a recording of a meeting at work where someone was playing intro music for the meeting, and it was one of our songs — [laughs]

Molly: Yessssss!

Matthew: And I was like, We’ve made it.

Molly: I remember a time, probably ten years ago, when you told me that you had sat down and sort of come to an understanding about the things that were most important to you in your life at that point. You said the two most important things to you were writing and your family. And you were doing what you could to remove from your life obstacles that would keep you from focusing on those things. What would you say are the most important things in your life right now?

Matthew: I don't remember having that conversation.

Molly: It had a big impact on me.

Matthew: Really?

Molly: Big time. The fact that you were able to have that clarity — it felt really notable and unusual to me, and it made me want to have it too.

Matthew: I feel like there is sort of, like, an aroma of striving behind me saying that I would prioritize writing. Not in an unhealthy way, though, because after that I wrote two books that are probably my two best.

Molly: I get it. Writing is so weird. I don’t think I would say that it’s one of my favorite things, but oh my god, I do believe that it’s what I’m here to do. Like, if anybody put me here for a reason, I think writing is it. But I often don’t love the act of writing; I like what writing gives to me. And there’s a whiff of striving about that.

Matthew: And I hardly write anymore. If you had told me ten years ago that I wouldn’t be writing anymore, that I’d be doing other stuff, I think I would have felt like, Oh no, what went wrong in my life that would have led to that? But I feel totally okay with it. I don’t feel 100% okay about how I use my time, but the fact that I’m not writing right now feels fine. I still prioritize spending time with my family. I got, like, a day job [at YNAB]. That takes up a lot of my time and is a pretty good job. And I spend more time on music than I used to. And that’s really all I have time for. And that’s okay.

I think about, like, what I was put on earth for, and Four Thousand Weeks really had an effect on how I think about that. I think most of us, including me, are not put on this earth to do something that will be remembered after we’re gone. That’s kind of too much to expect out of life. And you can make yourself miserable trying to get to that point. I think I was put on this earth to try to be nice to people. Which is something I don’t always do a great job of, but that I’ve learned is a very very important thing. I spent too many years of my life not realizing how important that was. I don’t think I was ever a bad guy. But there are ways in which I was self-centered and prioritized hearing my own voice in a way that was not only not respectful to the people I was interacting with, but also bad for me.

Molly: I see that in you. How much of that understanding comes from age?

Matthew: A lot. I spent a lot of time as a young person believing it was important for me to be right about things. Like, for people to think that the music I liked was good and important in a twenty-something-guy kind of way, and what in the world could possibly be less important than that, right?

[Both laugh.]

Matthew: And that’s kind of the point I was trying to make about this Pixies album. Like, I’m not trying to make anyone listen to this album, or to think the Pixies are good, or like, to think I’m cool for liking this band — it’s, like, exactly the opposite of all those things. I don’t even think [the Pixies] believe those things about themselves anymore. And that’s good.

Molly: I love it. This was fun.

Matthew: Do you think anyone’s gonna find this interesting?

Molly: Oh yes. We went from the Pixies to the meaning of life.

Matthew: That’s what I was hoping would happen. Thanks for including me.