Cancer battle, pandemic spur JATK to music on new album

When Matt Jatkola received a cancer diagnosis at the start of the pandemic and was undergoing numerous treatments, he knew for sure that he wanted to make more music.  Some of the songs on his new album, "Shut up and be the Light," reflect that journey.

 Jatkola — who records under the name JATK — is clear that, “the sentiment in the title is something that I would love to see more people actually doing.” His mantra for life these days — sometimes it’s nice to not take part in the chatter, noise and negativity out there and quietly do good on your own.

With a digital release on April 15, it is the most collaborative of his work. Every song is recorded with a different band with more than 20 collaborators on the album, but at the same time, they are his songs and he produced them.  A power-pop’ artist, Jatkola has been making music since high school in Ashburnham and at Fitchburg State. While his main instrument is the guitar, he dabbled in all sorts of stuff for the album — keyboard, bass and synth. “I’ve been saying that I am multi-instrumental for a lot of stuff but my guitar is best and I would never call myself a keyboard player, for example.”

Though he was used to the old school way of having a band as a core group of people to work with all the time, the pandemic made it possible to do so much more remotely and collaboratively.

“I could ask people for their input and to record it. The album is all over the place stylistically but it really holds together at the same time. My recovery kind of brought all of that into place.” 

He described it as just a lightbulb turning on. Some of the songs were fairly new, in that he wrote them during his recovery, but a few were older ones that he had been holding on to for a few years. “An eclectic blueprint, if you will, for anything I wanted to do in the future.”

Recovering from cancer, according to Jatkola, kind of makes you feel like you can do anything. “Nothing fazes me anymore and I had a very 'why not' feeling about putting this album out. It puts everything into perspective and I’ll do what I need to do.” 

He has been releasing singles from the album for about a year but when he began releasing singles, the album wasn’t quite done. "Japanese Butterfly" is a song about his post-recovery life. “It’s very joyful but it’s still a rock song.”

"When Tomorrow Comes," which is the eighth song on the album (and the first single), is about similar themes but was written during his treatment so has a different energy.

“It’s a bit darker, but those are kind of sister songs in my head. I was literally writing the lyrics in my bed when I was sick. I wrote JB ('Japanese Butterfly') much later, when I was feeling freer. They’re just forever linked as these during and after the storm songs.” 

Jatkola says there are a few songs that haven't been released as singles that are his favorites.

“There’s one song I was able to do with a mini orchestra. We had two people playing the cello and violin, a trumpet player and a euphonium player. That song, I didn’t think I could do it because I’ve just never gone there in terms of production, but it came out great and I’m really excited.”

He was also happy about the artwork — a broken donut theme. Each single that has been released has been a different donut but damaged in some way, and they come together for the main album cover, which is kind of a mess of broken and damaged donuts. “I felt like it was a good symbol, you take something that people love and it elicits some kind of reaction so it’s kind of a perfect symbol for the album in some ways. All of this, again, was remote collaboration. A friend did the photography for the cover and he recounted that it was funny talking about donuts in that way.

Collaboration on the album was a lot of fun and an efficient way to work for him during recovery, he said. In life, he likes to be spinning many plates in the air and that spilled over into his music life.

“It was nice to hand over a song to a drummer and they could just take it for a couple of weeks and work on it and I could hop onto another project about guitars or keyboard. I could constantly work on things and wait for each individual thing to be done.” 

The album itself is his commentary on how we live in this world of heady speed with social media and hyper fast communication, but that negativity spreads equally fast. He says it would be nice to have positivity spread in the same way, but quietly and organically. “I hope people understand that from listening to the songs.”

As to what's next, he says it feels very surreal, exciting and strange.

“I’ve been holding on to this for so long so it’s kind of scary, but I’m ready to share it with other people and hope that they can take something from it for themselves.”