How a sunset in Sandy Cove inspired Québécois musician Matt Holubowski

Musician Matt Holubowski was on the last day of a vacation in Sandy Cove, NS, last summer when he was faced with a dilemma: write a song or go to the beach with his girlfriend.

The solution? Do both.

Holubowski had the chord structure and had written multiple versions of the verses for it, but nothing stuck.

“I sort of hit my head against the wall because I really wanted to finish this song, but I didn’t know how to get there,” said the Québécois musician, who was on a three-week working vacation in Nova Scotia.

Armed with an acoustic guitar, he spent the day on the beach playing the song over and over, eventually taking in the sunset. His girlfriend also took pictures of him.

Holubowski got the inspiration he needed and came up with new lyrics. The final product is Sandy bayone of the songs on his new album, Like it Flowers On A Rendered Lawn.

“I was very grateful to that sunset and that beach for giving me that song,” Holubowski said in a recent telephone interview from Montreal. “It was a bit of a relief in some ways.”

With the basics in order, he soon began recording the song, adding elements such as cello, a Japanese instrument called koto, and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. (The orchestra also appears on two other tracks on the album.)

Holubowski, who sings in English and French, is popular in his home province. He was a finalist in the 2015 edition LaVoixthe Québécois version of the televised singing competition, The voice.

Although he is best known as ‘an acoustic guitar guy’, Like Flowers On A Rendered Lawn sees him drawing from inspirations such as Radiohead and Pink Floyd, pushing his music in more experimental directions.

Nova Scotia was just one of the locations where he wrote the album. There were about six working holidays, including visits to friends’ cottages and even a trip to Croatia.

Holubowski said he always wanted to vacation in Nova Scotia, which is why he ended up in Digby County. He said he enjoyed lazy days reading and writing. He liked to eat lobster and to go to a wrestling festival.

At the end of August, Holubowski returns to Nova Scotia to shoot a music video for it Sandy bayand he hopes to play some shows in the province during that visit.

The first leg of his Canadian tour only went as far east as Moncton, NB, and he is currently touring Europe.

“I begged and begged my booking agents to send me to Nova Scotia,” Holubowski said.

Breaking into Canadian markets outside of Quebec has been challenging, he said.

“I think something really strange is happening with artists coming from Quebec and the rest of Canada,” said Holubowski. “There’s this…I don’t want to call it a divide, but a divorce, and I was longing to go to the rest of Canada and it was hard, harder than I thought it would be.”

When writing the lyrics of Sandy bay, Holubowski said he was inspired by the pandemic and a situation many people have had to go through. He said that a close friend’s views have become extreme.

“It was really hard to reconcile this person, who I loved very much, who I still love very much, and we just don’t agree on anything anymore, and on things that we used to agree on, and it just came out of nowhere,” he said.

“It blindsided me, and it was kind of frightening, and it was very sad, and I still mourn that.”

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