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potentially hold onto an idea for years and then later on, when I'm writing a certain song, I'm like I
need a certain bit for this section and then I'll go back in the catalogue and be like oh yeah, that
thing I wrote about six years ago, that's going to fit here really well. I always say to people never
throw away any idea because you never know when it's going to come back. Even if you never use

that idea again, it's just in case. You never know.

BiTS: You, Matt, are already an award winner. What do you think of the whole process of giving
people awards for playing music?

ML: I think it's nice in a way; it's giving people who don't necessarily have a lot of share of the
limelight in comparison to a lot of other musicians and other kinds of music out there, especially

blues. It kind of shines a light on them in a way and I think most of the time they all deserve it and
it's just fantastic. We've never gone out of our way to get awards. We've never been driven by “we
need to win this thing”. It's never a competition for me all these kind of things. That's a fool's kind
of way of looking at it for me. I never look at it as a competition, it's always a celebration of the
music itself and the musicians. To be honest, being nominated is enough for me, a lot of the time.
It's just humbling to know that people give a dam about what you do, more than anything. I'm
happy with not having any trophies or medals or anything like that. I'm not doing it for that but

knowing that people actually care about what I'm doing is invaluable to me.

BiTS: Do you have a favourite guitar that you play?

ML: I do. Well, yeah. I do and I don't. I always think it's like choosing between your favourite kids
because I've got quite a few, but yeah, I've got a couple of main ones, certainly that I'll use pretty
much full time. One of them being a PRS guitar,

SC245, if you want to be specific and nerdy about
it. It's one of the most beautiful guitars that I've
seen and one of the best guitars I've ever played,
so I'm very, very happy with it and another one is
Gibson Les Pauls. A lot of the time, you can't go
wrong. I love all those kind of things, but every
now and again, I pick up a Strat or a 325 or some

other kind of thing and they all do different things.

BiTS: Do you like, many guitar players, have
dozens of guitars around?

ML: I certainly have. I never call myself a guitar collector. I call myself a guitar hoarder. There's a
big difference [chuckles]. I like to think that a good majority of the ones that I own, I do play and

some of them fairly often, but most of them I do play. There's a couple that I don't really play and
they're for sentimental reasons, like my first ever electric guitar and things like that and then
there's a couple that I'm like I don't need this. This is a slab of wood with some strings on it.
[Chuckling] It's not anything valuable to me, but they all do different things. I enjoy them all
equally as much as each other, but I will tend to gravitate more to the Les Paul style of guitar or
PRS guitar.

BiTS: Ever do an unplugged set?

ML: I've done acoustic sets. I've not done unplugged sets because I like having loopers and things
like that to go behind me on an acoustic set, it just kind of helps fill out the space a lot more. I've
done a lot of acoustic sets, recently. I've been doing a lot of live streams over the last year and kind