Second Homecoming

Matt Suggs says he’ll feel immediately at home when he rolls into Lawrence this Thursday for a gig at the Replay Lounge. “The second I get there, it’s very comfortable,” says Suggs, who spent five years in the college town between 1992 and 1997. “It’s so comfortable and easy. There’s a reason people stay for such a long time.”

Like a lot of Lawrence residents, Suggs moved there to go to school but “just ended up hanging out.” He stayed busy working in kitchens around Lawrence and playing in a band called Butterglory with Debby Vander Wall.

The band’s unsolicited demo was chosen from a stack of submissions at Merge Records. “I just sent them a tape out of the blue, and they responded,” Suggs says. “When other bands ask me for advice about getting on a label, I don’t want to tell them [how I got signed], because it’s so unusual that a label will pick something out of a pile of demos at random and not only listen to it but respond to it.” Butterglory left its mark on ’90s indie rock, recording three full-lengths and a collection of singles for Merge before splitting up in 1997. Since then, Suggs has recorded two solo records for Merge: 2000’s Golden Days Before They End and his new release, Amigo Row.

For Amigo Row, Suggs enlisted Thee Higher Burning Fire (Than Kinsey, Raymond Morin, Zach Holland and John Anderson) to back him in the studio and on tour. Some members of Thee Higher Burning Fire used to call Lawrence home (its 2000 recording, In Plain Song, was released by Kansas City’s Second Nature label), and billmates the New Amsterdams are a Lawrence band as well (by way of the Get Up Kids), so Thursday’s show should be a scenester reunion.

“I haven’t been there in two or three years. So many people come and go,” Suggs says of Lawrence’s trend toward revolving-door residency. “It seems like there are always a handful of people from when I lived there. I guess I’ll have to wait and find out.”