The definitive repository for the work of Matt Farley, Motern Media, and more!
Matt Motern Manly Man
And the city lights are still so far away Countless miles into the great unknown Hoping for rest and a better day These tracks will lead us home
Matt Motern Manly Man is a Motern Media band, usually featuring Matt Farley as the sole contributor. It is a “No-Jokes” act and the closest Motern Media band to Farley being himself, with many songs stemming from real events happening in Farley’s life.
He originally intended to name the project “Matt Motern Media”; however, his distributor disallowed this due to a restriction against having record label names in artist names. Farley said he chose the name “Matt Motern Manly Man” because he was outraged with the distributor and wanted to show his displeasure “by choosing an utterly ridiculous name.”
History
The project began in January 2015 after the release of Basement Reunion, the Projection From The Side record which saw the band members reunite for recording in that configuration after over a decade. Inspired to work on more No-Jokes music, Farley set out to write what he called “a darkly funny, sprawling masterpiece.” However, he found that he couldn’t help write some lighter fare as well, and therefore decided to let himself write without forcing any tone or subject. 20 songs stemmed from this session, all of which would eventually become the debut album of Matt Motern Manly Man, Joyous Cackle!
In April 2016, Matt Motern Manly Man released Motern Heartburn, a vinyl-only album. Farley had wanted to put out a vinyl exclusive and felt that he was able to do so at that point in his music career, believing that he would at least break even. He invited Tom Scalzo, Doug “Froggy” Brennan, and Chris “Pete” Peterson to contribute to the album, making it one of the only releases under the Matt Motern Manly Man moniker to not be a solo work. To offset the production costs of the vinyl, Farley took a listener’s suggestion to sell four square ads on the cover.
Matt Motern Manly Man released its third album, Delicate Genius/Thirsty Killer, in April 2017. It featured several songs that Farley had written years earlier but had forgotten in a notebook. In December of that year, Farley would release Great Unfinished Masterpiece under this moniker, which he intended to pay tribute to the writers of the Great American Songbook.
After releasing four albums in three years under the name, Farley did not put out another album as Matt Motern Manly Man until July 2019’s I Forgot What I Was Gonna Say. This was Farley’s reward to himself for reaching the milestone of 20,000 songs. Although the album had no theme, the album would act as the first part of The Ancient Forces Trilogy, which would follow with Brennan McFarley’s Wednesday Night Chronicles and Caniko Tucci’s These Are The Forces.
Matt Motern Manly Man’s next project was writing the instrumental portion of the soundtrack for the 2021 Motern Media film Heard She Got Married. The instrumentals were released as their own album; however the film features music from other Motern Media bands including The Big Heist, Moe’s Haven, and Projection From The Side.
The most recent album from Matt Motern Manly Man is What We Wanna Remember, released in January 2025 as part of Farley’s project to put out one release per month that year. Doug “Froggy” Brennan contributed to some songs on this record.
Future
Because Farley appears to have announced the end of No-Jokes albums on Twitter as of June 2026, it is highly unlikely that he will release any more records as Matt Motern Manly Man.
