Following up on last single “They Think It’s Funny,” Matt North returns with “Girl in the Garden,” the latest taste of his upcoming third album, Savoy (out September 1, 2026, via Round Badge Records). While the previous track explored how tiny moments carry outsized weight, this one turns to the solitary, meticulous rituals of home and garden through the same empathetic lens that defines North’s songwriting.
“Girl in the Garden” begins with faint piano and bass, and North’s voice. For a couple lines, the song floats in open air, then the full band emerges like sunlight spilling over the yard. Rippling guitar lines and taut, swinging drums dance with early-’80s Stones elasticity — never crowding the melody, just nudging it forward. The song conveys a sense of seeing what the heart already knows, letting intuition and care color the way we see the world.
Unlike his previous releases, which featured elite Nashville session players — from the bands of Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello, John Fogerty, and Emmylou Harris — Savoy is a homegrown affair. Recorded entirely in North’s hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, the album features local musicians, engineers, designers, and visual artists shaping its sound. Contributors include Kent Whitesell (The Martyrs), Lynn Canfield (The Moon Seven Times), Mitch Marlow (Robert Pollard), Paul Chastain (Matthew Sweet), Jesse Brown (Andrew Duncanson), and Ryan Groff (Modern Drugs). James Treichler mixed and mastered the record at Wave Upon Wave Studio.
“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 talent — a place I’ve coined the Muscle Shoals of the Midwest,” North says.
North’s early influences were eclectic: Saturday nights with his dad flipping between Hee Haw and Soul Train taught him that genre lines are more fluid in practice than on paper. Rhythm and soul became his foundation, from Sam Cooke and Otis Redding to Al Jackson Jr. of Booker T. & the M.G.’s.
In the ’90s and early 2000s, North’s career spanned comedy clubs, writers’ rooms, and film sets. He lived in Haight-Ashbury with Patton Oswalt and Mitch Hedberg, toured as a stand-up, and appeared opposite James Woods in Dirty Pictures, as well as in multiple episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm as Jason Alexander’s agent.
Precision in timing and storytelling carries into his music. North writes lyrics like a director builds scenes. “Girl in the Garden” is a frame of turned soil, open sky, and someone absorbed in the quiet act of tending what grows. He jokes that he wrote it “for my gardening-addicted wife, although I don’t recall if the opening line ‘She’s out digging a hole’ was for her or our Great Pyrenees — but both are for sure girls.”
That affectionate ambiguity threads through the song: observing without overstating, loving without announcing. As someone who also shares a home and yard with a female yellow lab/Pyrenees who digs with operatic commitment — and whose bark has the dramatic reach of a stage soprano — I can confirm the song gets it right. Beneath the digging and the dirt, there’s only devotion in motion.
