SAMUEL HYLAND

Two days after his 34th birthday, Lawrence Matthews, from Memphis, was sitting in the rickety outdoor section of a Brooklyn hole-in-the-wall, not thinking about his birthday. “Somebody got lynched the day my album came out,” he said, stone-faced. “These things are in the back of my mind, and I’m signing shit.” The first time Matthews had signed anything important, it was 2020, and he was making woozy guitar music under the moniker Don Lifted. Fat Possum, the Mississippi indie label, had eagerly offered him a deal, which he just as eagerly accepted—until, during a life-threatening bout with COVID-19, he was lucky enough to escape death, but not enough to escape the drop list. Last month, on his birthday, he released Between Mortal Reach & Posthumous Grip, his first album under his government name. Hours prior, the battered body of Trey Reed, an African-American student, was found hanging from a tree on the campus of Delta State University. The death was ruled a suicide.

“They’re like, Nah, we want more of that happy shit you was doing. The world is ending: What the fuck is there to be happy about?”

For Matthews, a Black musician at odds with a white industry, these coexisting extremes—deaths and rebirths, “suicides” and signings—are grimly familiar. Last spring, when I first met him in Memphis, he cruised through his hometown in an aging BMW, parsing landmarks of his chronic in-between-ness: mansions on one block, slums on the next, and Matthews somewhere in the middle, wondering, incredulously, whether anyone else saw the insanity he did. A year later, days after his album came out, he was not in Memphis, but New York City, where he had scheduled a lengthy gauntlet of business meetings. He’d fielded similar meetings in the past, and if you looked closely at his output as Don Lifted, you might have gleaned how he felt about them. At the eatery, Matthews recalled the music video for “Lost in Orion” (2021), which closes with an eerie shot of his dangling feet. “I’m telling people what I’m going through via code and imagery, because I can’t say it lyrically,” he said. “I’ve been purchased to say something else. They’re like, Nah, we want more of that happy shit you was doing. The world is ending: What the fuck is there to be happy about?”

The world has ended a few times since then, and so, too, has the one Matthews is currently trying to rebuild. When Between Mortal Reach came out, he hosted an intimate release party in Memphis, where he spent a majority of his life, and the entirety of his creative career. By last year, when he mounted a strenuous effort to sell his childhood home, this rootedness was beginning to shift: the house felt claustrophobic, while in the streets, his former social frameworks were withering, too. When a desperate Matthews was ghosted, last autumn, by a potential buyer, he spent months postponing his musical plans to renovate the property from scratch. With every passing day, he grew fixated on a sickly, dying tree in the backyard. “It was rotting—it had a fungus, or something like that, and the tree was starting to break,” he said. “Every time I came outside, a new chunk would be missing. That’s how I felt being stuck in that city.” Business was only one of his reasons for being in New York. The other, more pressing reason: He was scouting out a permanent move away from the place that had raised him.

“And for me, as someone from a place where exploitation is rampant for Black folks, in every single aspect of our lives, to hear other Black folks with platforms, with money, with careers, saying the dumbest shit on the internet? It just annoys the hell out of me.”

Why, then, is his debut album so deeply linked to a home he has outgrown? Between Mortal Reach is a staggering hip-hop project, in part, because it is spiritually populist: devoted, like golden-era rap was, to the stories and struggles of normal, working-class people. Last year, when I visited Matthews in the house he grew up in, he was intent—like his music—on showing me, a myopic New Yorker, the hope and heartbreak of his nuanced hometown: its garish class disparity, its inhumane job market, its well-hidden mansions, its not-so-well-hidden housing crisis. (“It’s an interesting space to be born in the middle of,” he mused, mid-drive. “Say whatever you want about fate, and destiny, and all that: it put me in the perfect place to question a lot.”) Oftentimes, Between Mortal Reach feels vaguely like a documentary, the preacherly Matthews hoisting a shaky handheld camcorder, à la Patrick Beverley, and yelling: Are you seeing this shit? Dynamic choices, like melding slide guitar with gut-rattling sub-bass, gesture towards a duplicitous South, of Black pain and Black capital. But more broadly, and perhaps more impressively, Matthews—as in real life—remains largely in the middle, as if doggy-paddling through the troubled history he has inherited. He raps in an explosive shout-speak, samples omnivorously, and, very often, sounds like a sweaty, out-of-breath pastor. In the closing seconds of lead single “Once More & Again (Our Mourning),” when he lets the vocal centerpiece of the chorus play out, it is disarming to learn that it was him, and not a televangelist, sermonizing all along.

Matthews is an intoxicating speaker, which makes the task of interviewing him quite easy: set down a tape recorder, ask him a question, and eat your food. In his music, he is much more concise, on purpose. “I’m speaking for niggas,” he told me, while I worked on a sandwich. “I’m speaking for poor people. I’m speaking for working-class people. I’m speaking for people who ain’t been on a yacht. I’m speaking for people who don’t have a billion dollars, or a million dollars, or even a thousand dollars in their bank account. I need them to understand me if I’m going to be able to effect the type of change I want to effect—or at the very least, give them something to listen to while they’re figuring it out.” If you believe in the political power of rap music, as Matthews very deeply does, then these logistical decisions are (1) many, and (2) vital: things you think about when you intend to lead people. Oftentimes, he finds himself irritated with the rappers who do not. “There’s a particular rapper in my mind right now,” he said at one point, giving a recent example. “He was warning other rappers about differentiating between lab diamonds and blood diamonds. And that’s the only wisdom you have to share. Do you even understand what you’re saying? Do you even know that a diamond is a mineral? It is created in the Earth. And now, because of technology, we can recreate it. It’s literally the same thing. One just requires imperialism.

“That is stupid shit,” he continued. “And for me, as someone from a place where exploitation is rampant for Black folks, in every single aspect of our lives, to hear other Black folks with platforms, with money, with careers, saying the dumbest shit on the internet? It just annoys the hell out of me.”

“I didn’t have anybody to motivate me, like Hey, go do this. I had to seek out wild ways to not be like Life is worthless and there’s no point.”

Doubly annoying, perhaps, is the fact that for Matthews, these rewards—the platform, the money, the career—didn’t come very easily. Between Mortal Reach is “new” only in the sense that it came out in 2025—three years after he finished it, in 2022, from a home he would eventually sell, and a Hell he would eventually survive. (Months after the property sold this past March, he wrote, in an Instagram post: “I’m enjoying being all places and no place.”) Matthews is deeply methodical, and also, sometimes to his detriment, feverishly conscious of the exact right moment to do what he must. When he was dropped from Fat Possum, penniless and sick, he faced a damning ultimatum: make the best album of his entire life, or return to rock bottom, where the privileges of making art and being happy were no guarantee. He renovated his home, spent a semester teaching art at a local high school, made phone calls, hopped on Zoom meetings. All the while, in a makeshift recording studio adjacent to his kitchen, he chiseled away at a record—album and chronicle—of his life at its lowest, and the delusional hope that made it worth living. It was a profoundly lonely undertaking, and one with no guaranteed payoff, let alone a quick one. “I didn’t have anybody to motivate me, like Hey, go do this,” he said. “I had to seek out wild ways to not be like Life is worthless and there’s no point.”

At the restaurant, Matthews was wearing a black bomber jacket with dark-wash jeans and a black baseball cap. The few times I have seen him in person, he has favored dark attire, which has granted him a grim air: like someone who has received bad news, or come to deliver it. In September, on the first night of his New York stint, the latter was much more apparent than the former, which wasn’t very relevant at all—he had accomplished something he had been working towards for years. Why, then, did it feel grim anyway? When Matthews told me that he would be in the city, my understanding, at first, was that this was a celebratory occasion—which, in no small part, it was. If tomorrow went well, he could triple, in a single day, the reach he had been toiling for in small-market Memphis over a half-decade. He could also completely fuck it up. And what if he did? Early on in our meeting, he described his spiritual disposition as “indigenous,” perpetually in conflict with the pseudo-worlds we have built over the raw, true earth. (“The more I’m surrounded by it, the more I feel out-of-place.”) Matthews is painstakingly sincere, which means, in 2025, that he is also fundamentally incompatible with America. Somewhere beneath his quest to re-introduce himself, under his government name, to this America, lies a litmus test: how hospitable can Hell be to the honest? “It’s scary,” he conceded, as our food got cold. “It’s weird to put yourself out there.”

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“It’s me. It’s Lawrence Matthews. I can’t lie as Lawrence Matthews. It’s my dad’s name. It’s my grandfather’s name. It’s my name. I have to come correct.”

When Matthews was a teenager, he knew very little about making music, and less about making people want to hear it. The first time he ever performed for an audience, he was surrounded by fashionistas, and the promoters, a set of Memphis scenesters, had neglected to offer him (1) a soundcheck, nor (2) a microphone. The resulting debacle was humiliating, as were his hours spent standing on street-corners, handing out mixtapes, watching people throw them in the trash. But with every humiliation came a humbling, and with every humbling, a necessary honing. “I had motherfuckers cuss me out over my mixing one time,” he recalled, at the restaurant. “I was like, Can I get on the radio? He was like, Are you fucking crazy? Do you hear your shit? Do you even get this mixed? I was young and my feelings was hurt, but it stuck with me, because I was curious: What is he talking about?” Within years, Matthews—now Don Lifted—had pivoted to reverb-heavy guitar music, signed a record deal, and become a darling in artsy, predominantly-white Memphis spaces. When the label grew tired of him, and Matthews of being a token, he entered a violent midlife crisis: one that tasked him, suddenly, with re-thinking not only his music, but who exactly he was making it for. He finished his album, made phone calls, put together a small team, and stitched his life back together, piece by piece. Years later, with the record finally out, he faced a simple, familiar challenge: making people want to hear it.

“My grandma was passing the phone around the table. And that was weird. That wasn’t normal. Because they had seen themselves. They’d seen what shit looked like for real to them.”

The morning after we met for dinner, Matthews and his digital marketing strategist, a tight-lipped man named Erik, were ambling down an empty sidewalk in Brooklyn, towards a warehouse-y structure at the end of the block. At the door, they exchanged warm hand-clasps with a friendly employee, who cued an elevator while regaling them with tales of his pet cat. (“That thing… kept me awake all morning.”) He worked for Okayplayer, the Afrocentric online publication, and this afternoon, he was slated to produce a new episode of “Diggin,” an ongoing staple of its YouTube channel. Upstairs, in a brutalist loft area, there was a hipster-ish office space, peppered with polaroids and echoing with buzzy chatter. Matthews and Erik exchanged hugs with a friendly woman, Alicia, who introduced herself to me as Matthews’ publicist. She became aware of Matthews in 2023, after he sent a lengthy email to Nick Dierl, the founder of the PR firm Orienteer, and was told to sit tight for updates. “Six weeks went by,” Matthews told me, “and Emily (Mullen) and Alicia reached out, and we put out ‘Green Grove.’ That’s kind of how this started.”

“Green Grove (Our Loss)” is deceptive, because for about 30 seconds, it sounds like a Don Lifted song. When Matthews was signed to Fat Possum, he specialized in brooding, circular arpeggios, a stark bedrock for his wounded sing-speak. “Purchased” as he may have been, he was participating, no less, in a distinctly Afro-Southern tradition, of Black guitarists critiquing—overtly or covertly—the conditions forced upon them by capitalism. Don Lifted was appreciated, within white-liberal spaces, because he softened this language into a safe pastiche: familiar enough to conjure difficult contexts, but not nearly stark enough to confront them. Retrospectively, his over-reliance on echo and reverb—softening agents, wielded to cushion sonic blows—scans as a concession, a buffer against inconvenient decibels and inconvenient demons. But in the opening moments of “Green Grove (Our Loss),” when Matthews dawdles over a bare acoustic guitar, there is no such cushion, and it makes a meaningful difference, even if a subtle one. Two years ago, when it came out as the lead single to Between Mortal Reach, it played, structurally, like a slow killing-off of Mr. Lifted: gradually, the guitar lick gives way to a bass stab, and Matthews, once a doe-eyed singer, opts for snarling speech. The mixing is more confrontational, and by the chorus, which interpolates “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” so, too, are the histories he intends to lay bare.

“A tree coming out the bricks… all this shit we built. To hide the soil? We don’t even want to see soil?”

After a flurry of handshakes, a bespectacled woman led Matthews into a well-lit studio area, where stacked crates brimmed with vinyl records, and a bearded man presided over a professional camera. There were four stacks, and for five minutes at a time, Matthews would have to rummage through them, hastily, to answer the woman’s prompts: What’s one record from each section that everyone should know? Which records would you play at a party? What are five records that are essential to understanding you as an artist? It was interesting to watch Matthews, typically passionate and long-winded, fumble to squeeze his profuse love for music into curt, broad-strokes statements, like “my party should make people have kids” or “I listen to Blonde once per week.” At the end, when the producers asked him to pick a few records to pose with for the YouTube thumbnail, he considered, then reconsidered, then reconsidered again. His final selections included J Dilla’s Donuts, Outkast’s Aquemini, Grandmaster Flash’s The Message, and Parliament-Funkadelic’s Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow. I chuckled, inside, at how avuncular these choices were, and how much he sounded like an old-head explaining them. Then, I thought about the stakes: Matthews was, in fact, a 34 year-old rapper starting from scratch, in a market much younger, and much less patient, than the one he had originally floundered in. At the restaurant, he emphasized the importance of his government name, a fixture that rooted him firmly in his lineage. “It’s me. It’s Lawrence Matthews. I can’t lie as Lawrence Matthews. It’s my dad’s name. It’s my grandfather’s name. It’s my name. I have to come correct.” Coming correct had never looked as crucial as it did now.

Midway through a long, sweaty walk, Matthews grew fixated, momentarily, on a tree struggling to grow through the sidewalk. It was a little after 1 PM, and he was searching, along with Alicia, Erik, and myself, for a place to chill before his next appointment, which would be broadcasted to millions of subscribers within a few weeks. The tree was twisty and resolute, its roots mangling the concrete as if crowbarring a prison cell. “A tree coming out the bricks… all this shit we built,” Matthews scoffed, genuinely disgusted. “To hide the soil? We don’t even want to see soil?” An hour or so later, when we arrived at a rickety building off the Montrose Ave L stop, there was very little soil visible, for different reasons: the shrubbery, evidently untended, was wildly unkempt, as if no human had walked this block in years. At the door, we were greeted by a fratty young man with a Cash Cobain T-shirt, a studded snapback, and an aloof, weed-brained attitude. (A glance at my notepad prompted constructive criticism: “You got doctor’s handwriting, bro.”) “My engineer should be here momentarily,” he said, leading us up a staircase littered with Amazon boxes. He turned back to Matthews. “Question for you. The song we’re doing today: released or unreleased?”

“I was like, Well, this is what my work is about. They didn’t always like that. So I had enough.”

The song was released, and in many ways, it was a perfect fit for On The Radar: an “elevator pitch” single, for an elevator pitch platform. When Matthews made the music video for “Limelight Honey,” his most popular track under his own name, his family—once indifferent to his music—reacted more strongly than they ever had. “My grandma was passing the phone around the table,” he told me, last year. “And that was weird. That wasn’t normal. Because they had seen themselves. They’d seen what shit looked like for real to them. They were like, I see you, nigga. That shit was hard.” (When I met Matthews’ aunt, a matronly cat owner named Shirley, she chastised him about all the ass-shaking in the video, before yelling out the front door: “I’m kidding! I told everyone about it!”) Structurally, “Limelight Honey” is a diptych: the first half, a boastful stomper; the second half, a subdued meditation. Early on, Matthews seems hellbent on stacking superlatives, as if to make up for the years he spent singing sad-boy songs. (The very first lyric, and the centerpiece of the chorus: “I’m the best thing comin’ out the South side.”) But when the beat switches, and the booming bass gives way to a swelling organ, it feels like a comedown from a manic episode. No longer pompous, a numb Matthews looks down, like a disappointed father, from the head of the table:

Who in the hell left the gate open for these minions?

Oh damn, that’s my bad.

Trying to give these boys everything I didn’t have

Fucked around and made them think they earned that.

“Who in the hell left the gate open” is funny, because it smuggles the bleak, obvious associations between “hell” and “gate.” The “gate” has been left open for “these minions,” who foolishly perceive, as do we, a beautiful opportunity. But “who in the hell” may just as well be “who in the Hell (location),” which would make the “gate” in question deceptively grim: a golden ticket to a hopeless eternity, one spent climbing, like a crab in a bucket, towards sunlight you signed away. Earlier on in “Limelight Honey,” Matthews says something that might invalidate this entire paragraph: “You can see it in my eyes / that I don’t believe in Hell.” He doesn’t believe in capitalism either, and that wouldn’t be the only thing dollars and damnation have in common. Capitalism, like Hell, is a bottomless pit, brimming with people who climb, but cannot get out. And when I saw Matthews in the On The Radar studio, a turnstile of competitors for digital real-estate, I saw a Hell in vertical-scroll hip-hop, a crowded world of climbers and clout-chasers who do not know, or care, that they are doomed crabs. Matthews doesn’t believe in the Hell in your Bible, nor does he seem to believe in the one on your phone. But his belief in himself outweighs his disbelief in damnation, which was why, on a Thursday afternoon, he was here: reciting a deeply spiritual song in a short-form content mill, surrounded by cardboard boxes and a cooler stocked with sponsored energy drinks. He looked out-of-place, the way damned souls often do. Most people in Hell don’t belong there. Maybe, I thought, Matthews, who has worked relentlessly for decades, did not belong on the ground floor, either.

A few takes in, Matthews followed the studio manager into a control room littered with alcohol bottles. The engineer, a despondent man slouched in a hoodie, presided over a hulking monitor, the way a zombified teenage gamer might. Erik at his side, a curious Matthews analyzed the footage, rubbing his chin. Something felt off. What was it? The previous take was perfect—99% perfect, that is, had it not been for a single word. Dissatisfied with his pronunciation, a perky Matthews asked whether it was possible, by any chance, to overdub one take with the audio from a previous one. (“Should I do another take? Or can we copy that same word from the other one we did?”) The man nodded, and Matthews watched, satisfied, as he dragged-and-dropped a teeny, 1-second waveform from one track to another. Part of me thought, for a second, that this was pedantic. A larger part of me knew that the stakes had never been this high.

And maybe, considering what he had gone through, they always had been. An hour or so before On The Radar, we were picking at pastries in a Brooklyn cafe, when Matthews, candid and stone-faced, asked me a blunt question: “Did I ever tell you about how I was in a cult?”

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“Eating once a day, not sleeping, just working: we were trying to make something happen.”

When Matthews was a visual artist fresh out of college, he struggled to gain traction in the Memphis gallery system. A little over a decade ago, his paintings, unlike his songs, engaged explicitly with racial violence, which placed him in a familiar position: at odds with a white power structure, yet still in need of its money. “I didn’t like the idea of white galleries telling me not to make my work,” he recalled on a muggy Friday afternoon, between sips of a lemonade. His flight home was in a few hours, and he was perched in a dingy Lower East Side bar, carrying two Between Mortal Reach vinyls he planned to give his publicists before he left. He was dressed head-to-toe in all-black, as he had been the previous day, and the day before that. “They owned it,” he continued. “I was like, Well, this is what my work is about. They didn’t always like that. So I had enough.”

Being a Black painter in Memphis, like being a Black musician in Memphis, presented an existential dilemma: get rich at the cost of your integrity, or be earnest at the cost of your sanity. These are isolating stakes, and when Matthews realized, in the mid-2010s, that he was not alone, it felt like a godsend. Someone, a Black peer, had seen what he and others were going through. Before long, they had developed a promising plan to wrest control. “She came up with this idea to start a space, a way for Black people to be in community together,” Matthews said. “We already had a friendship, so we just became brother and sister—really close. And then all these other folks started coming into the fold, and we sort of had a revolving door of people over the years.”

Within those years, the loose conglomerate had sprawled into a radical, grassroots bloc: putting together programs, visiting universities, beefing with white institutions on Twitter. In some ways, it was perfectly timed, while in other ways, it was the opposite. By the spring of 2020, when social-justice initiatives prospered nationwide, this young, outspoken entity—an independent collective of Black, self-assured creatives—was a money-magnet for white guilt: co-signed by the very infrastructure whose shunning made it necessary. (“We didn’t get a dime for anything until George Floyd got killed.”) Meanwhile, for Matthews, whose fledgling music career was becoming serious, it was overwhelming at best, and alienating at worst. Between him and the founder, who he declined to name, there were certain differences, one of them being this—Matthews was splitting his time, while his friend, who had staked everything on the project, saw all additional pursuits as an affront. Between the two, he claims to have been the busier one. “I would find people and bring them into the fold, invite them to shows, get them into shows of their own,” he said. “And then I had the artist network from college, so I knew all the black OGs. She didn’t know none of these people. That ain’t her life.” The trade-off, and what made her a great business partner, was that she knew how to work a keyboard. “Once she had you, she could convince you of anything,” Matthews added. “She didn’t like public speaking at all. But on the computer, she was really good at getting funding.”

“So it’s great, but it’s like: this person is on drugs, this person is an alcoholic, this person is fucking everybody, this person assaulted somebody. It just became people fighting. All types of shit.”

At their peak, the organization had forged serious real-estate—literally and figuratively–in a difficult art world, regardless of how taboo their presence seemed within it. Their first opening attracted thousands of revelers; by the pandemic, they had purchased a comfortable headquarters, where they held open discussions about religion, queerness, and sexual assault. Matthews, the curator, was stretched incredibly thin. “I am running all of that, and emailing every artist, and talking to every person, and doing all these things, and working myself to the bone,” he said. “Eating once a day, not sleeping, just working: we were trying to make something happen.” Making something happen is difficult under wretched conditions, and before long, those conditions were beginning to fester. Many organization members had been wounded, or broken, in some way—abused, ostracized from ex-communities, abandoned. Within the collective, dangerous trauma bonds began to form, while beyond it, reputational smears—“clique” to some, “communist” to others—steadily swirled. They became local anti-heroes, garnered national press, and racked up generous funding. All the while, they were upstart, newly-famous young people, with problems that poorly influenced the ways they dealt with them. On one hand, there was arrogance: “I remember Photoshopping myself into Stalin and calling everyone comrade and shit,” Matthews recalled, of early criticisms. “We didn’t give a fuck and we were popping.” On another, more serious hand, no one was in their right mind, and it affected everyone. “There were a lot of great times, in theory,” he continued. “It’s just that nobody was their healthy self. So it’s great, but it’s like: this person is on drugs, this person is an alcoholic, this person is fucking everybody, this person assaulted somebody. It just became people fighting. All types of shit.”

Chief among these troubled characters, as Matthews retells it, was the founder: a wounded person with a talent for recruiting, and exploiting, other wounded people. Over time—especially as money kept coming in—she seemed to see them more as a means to an end. While infighting undermined the strength of the collective, moneyed organizations seized upon its lopsided power dynamic, doing with the leader what she had done with her vulnerable staff. “Now, you have all these funders, who essentially want to gentrify Orange Mound through us, in her mind and in her pocket,” Matthews told me. “Just giving her tens of thousands of dollars, like: You deserve this. And because of her ego, and because of the life that she had before, she was like: Yes, I do. I’ve lived a shitty life. I deserve $50,000 for no reason. Whole time, not everyone on your staff has a salary.” Over the course of a year, she had purchased expensive art, new cars, new purses, and a new house. When other members of the collective began to notice, it was not only because their communities remained unchanged, but because their stories—and struggles—were being fetishized in the process. “She would take our stories and go, She was like this when we met her. And he was a gang member. And she was being sexually assaulted. And she had just been kicked out of her house for being gay. She would tell these testimonials in the grant applications, and because it was post-George Floyd, white people would just eat it up.”

“Somebody would be like, She’s doing too much. And then the next meeting, they’d be gone.”

Discontent with these practices, and increasingly unhappy with his complicity in them, Matthews worked himself up towards an endpoint: he would stage a meeting with the entire group, announce his departure, and open the floor for others to voice their grievances, too. It wasn’t solely his idea, nor had it originally been. For months, members of the collective had come to him with similar plans, to essentially stage a coup—or, at the very least, directly address what felt like obvious wrongdoing. The suffocating thing, as it continued to not happen, was that the founder was paranoid, and increasingly willing to act on it. She planted moles in group gatherings, found ways to monitor conversations that occurred without her, and fired anyone who disagreed. (“Somebody would be like, She’s doing too much. And then the next meeting, they’d be gone.”) By now, she had turned the staff against Matthews, but undermined her influence with a particularly egregious misstep. (Matthews declined to give details, but offered, tersely: “she had just showed her ass royally to a lot of people, and fucked up a lot of shit.”) Infuriated, the staff approached Matthews, once again, to say that they were finally ready: upon her return, there would be a mutiny, and Matthews would initiate it.

When the time came, he opened, as planned, by announcing his departure. He cued others to voice their grievances. Everyone remained silent. And in that stunned, traitorous hush, a puzzled Matthews, hung out to dry, looked the way he often does: crazy, as earnest people often seem, and alone, as earnest people often are.