Matthew Griswold at Forager Brewing Company

His youth belies the experience that infuses his songwriting and performance. Minnesota native, Folk/Blues singer-songwriter and amateur musicologist, Matthew Griswold, is currently playing hundreds of his modern day minstrel shows each year. Though a “solo” performer through trade title, he carries the sound of layered guitars and an array of dynamic vocal themes. Those elements are then supported by a boot strapped foot stomping on a wooden cigar box drum and keeping his signature hypnotic voodoo-ish groove. Griswold’s performances are rugged, haunting, howling, bone-shaking affairs where all of the grit and soul of a man who has seen the war torn battlefields of Iraq, yet still sought hope after the worst of tragedies, are brought forth through one voice and one guitar. He confidently leaves his crowds cradled in subtleties, but rocked by an undeniable presence. Those who witness him live, will experience a musician who inhabits, and is inhabited by, his music as if it were a spiritual transformation allowing all to dance in the dragon’s den.

He has crafted an arrangement style of his own (the “Hypnotonic Sacred Blues”), which he employs to reinvent well known classics, traditional standards, or plug original songs that pay tribute to their Sacred Blue Note lineage. With a well-honed natural talent, an ego voided work ethic, and an applied practice of musicology tilting the odds in his favor, Griswold has become one of the country’s most noted independent working musician/songwriters. He has over ten years of strategic millage marked by thousands of live performances and hundreds of intriguing press features, all while building a dense catalog of works to be preserved by the those he refuses to call “fans”, and more proudly refers to as “Witnesses of a Fellowship”. Griswold has gained both industry notoriety and scholar level respect as an ‘Alt-Folk/Blues’ era music maker, and while having had many of his original songs and compositions used in various films, TV shows and commercials around the globe through a contract with Universal Music, no matter where you stand, you’re never far from someone who has likely been spellbound by his hypnotic rhythms, tonic blue notes, and howling edge …. even if unknowingly!