‘They Think It’s Funny’: Matt North’s Subtle Avalanche of a New Single

Matt North has spent much of his creative life understanding how small moments carry outsized weight. Today, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter releases his new single and accompanying video, “They Think It’s Funny,” an early look at Savoy, North’s forthcoming third album, due September 1, 2026 via Round Badge Records.

In the chorus, after the title lands, North delivers the song’s emotional thesis with disarming clarity: “Well, I’m not laughing.” It’s a line that doesn’t raise its voice, yet doesn’t let go. The song hinges on how the smallest things—tiny slights, a thoughtless brush against someone’s sensitivity, for example—can set larger forces in motion. North conveys this astute, humanistic, empathetic observation with subtlety, letting the weight of these moments unfold like “one snowflake to start a whole avalanche.” It’s a metaphor that reflects his broader songwriting instinct: allowing meaning to surface in the spaces between notes and lines.

Unlike his previous releases built around elite Nashville session players—including musicians drawn from the bands of Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello, John Fogerty, and Emmylou Harris—Savoy marks a purposeful shift. The album was recorded entirely in North’s hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, with a core band of local musicians alongside local engineers, designers, and visual artists.

“I basically took a break from my beloved band of Nashville hot shots to put a band together of guys from my old high school just for this one record of all Champaign-Urbana, Illinois talent—a place I’ve coined the Muscle Shoals of the Midwest,” he shares.

North was raised on a balanced diet of Hee Haw and Soul Train, absorbing early on that genre lines were far less rigid in practice than in theory. “I’d sit down with my dad on Saturday nights,” he once told me in an interview. “You could turn on Hee Haw and there’s Kristofferson, there’s Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Glen Campbell.” With rhythm as his primary instrument, North also points to the Black American soul he cut his teeth on—Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett—and the human timekeeping of Al Jackson Jr. of Booker T. & the M.G.’s.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, his professional path unfolded across comedy rooms, writers’ rooms, and film sets. He spent formative years in San Francisco and Los Angeles working as a screenwriter and story analyst, rooming in Haight-Ashbury with Patton Oswalt and Mitch Hedberg, and touring as a feature act alongside comedians including Dave Chappelle, Dana Gould, and Dave Attell. That same precision in timing and language carried into his acting work. In 2000, North appeared opposite James Woods in the Golden Globe–winning Dirty Pictures, and soon after was cast by Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, appearing across seven episodes as Jason Alexander’s agent. 

Even then, music remained the constant as North continued recording, performing, and raising his son. The parallels between his music and acting are clear. Writing lyrics, North creates a movie in the listener’s mind. In “They Think It’s Funny,” that movie is understated but pointed. The accompanying video follows the same logic, a visual extension of North’s belief that once a song is released, it belongs less to the writer than to the images it inspires for others.

North had largely stepped away from recording altogether, writing songs only for his son to enjoy privately, influenced by the grief of his father’s 2024 death. What drew him back wasn’t momentum or reinvention, but the recognition that time, and attention, are finite.

The songs that followed favor significance over scale. “They Think It’s Funny” is one of those songs. Like the snowflakes that start an avalanche, the song’s defiant joy arrives softly, yet once it begins to move, it’s impossible to ignore. At the same time, it captures those private moments of knowing amusement, laughing to oneself at the world’s expectations even when the sky above is overcast.

Matt North