When one of his eyes doesn’t feel as if it’s wobbling up and down, or he doesn’t feel so depleted that he has to nap, Matthew Sweet still has moments of hope. Until last fall, one of the downstairs rooms in his Omaha, Nebraska, home was his music room, filled with guitars, a recording console, and assorted gear. But since he can no longer climb stairs for the foreseeable future, he now spends a good deal of his time in that room on a newly installed king-sized bed. What remains of his musical setup is still visible, reminders of a life and career on pause.
“I guess I have a feeling that I will make music with all of it,” Sweet says, in his first interview eight months after he was rushed to a hospital. “In that way, it’s positive. It’s a vision of the time when I’ll be able to use everything. I don’t feel like it’s that far away. I don’t feel like it will be an impossible thing for me to write songs. Then again, I don’t really feel a burning desire to figure that out, because there’s just so much stuff making it difficult right now.”
For Sweet, 2024 was shaping up to be a reset. After several years off the road after the pandemic, the man who almost single-handedly kept power-pop alive had put together a new band and played shows in the spring. He was in the early stages of prepping his first album since 2021. In the fall, he started another round of gigs, this time opening for Hanson, whom he’s known and worked with for more than 20 years, and doing his own separate shows. “I really felt very positive about it,” he says. “I was doing two-hour-long acoustic shows playing songs from all during my career.”
Then, last Oct. 12, Sweet and his crew — his small acoustic band, his road manager — arrived at their hotel in Toronto. His tour with Hanson was into its second week, and Sweet had just driven up from the previous stop in Baltimore. As they were checking in, the singer, who had turned 60 a week before, felt a sensation he’d never experienced before. “The first thing I felt was really cool, like cold sweat,” he says. “And I remember saying to one of my band members, ‘Feel my arm. It’s freezing cold.’ Something wasn’t right.”
Slumping into a chair behind the front desk, Sweet began hearing what he calls “this kind of tinnitus, more like white noise, and that became really, really, really loud, in both my ears. And that’s the last thing I remember until I was in an ambulance and I heard a guy say, ‘Sir, you’ve had a stroke.’”
In the months since that diagnosis, Sweet has had to cope with more than canceled performances. First in Canada, then in his home state, and now at his house, he’s had to relearn how to walk, talk, and play any sort of instrument. He’s learned that a stroke can impact other parts of the body and that recovery can be slow and painstaking. Since he didn’t have insurance at the time of his stroke, he’s also become a representation of artists who can’t always afford it and count on touring to pay their bills.
“It was really a drag, because the touring went so amazingly well in the first part of the year,” Sweet says now. “And then, bang, I had the stroke, and it was just all over.”
From his studio-bedroom, Sweet recalls the beginnings of his career with one of the chuckles that unexpectedly punctuates a conversation with him. It was the mid-Eighties, and the Nebraska-born Sweet, who’d moved to Athens, Georgia, for college and had become swept up in the burgeoning indie rock of the time, was on tour with the Golden Palominos. Featuring an ever-shifting lineup of New York-area musicians like keyboardist Bernie Worrell, singer Syd Straw, guitarist Arto Lindsay, bassist Bill Laswell, and drummer Anton Fier, the Palominos were Sweet’s induction into the life of a traveling musician.
“I was just a kid, and it was the first time I was ever really on a bus tour, so it was like Touring 101,” Sweet says. “I would like to go see Bernie in his room, and he’d be there with a bunch of girls in the bed with him. Just classic. Chrissie Hynde came to see us in Toronto. We stayed up with her all night in a hotel room, and I was like a fly on the wall, maybe providing the weed. Such cool memories.”
With his winsome voice and penchant for charged guitar melodies rooted in his love of the Beatles, Sweet, along with bands like the Smithereens, kept guitar pop alive after hair metal had overtaken rock & roll. The battle was somewhat uphill, but Sweet’s third album, 1991’s Girlfriend, established him as an artist in his own pop right. With the advent of grunge the following year, Sweet’s subsequent albums didn’t have the same commercial impact, but he remained a master of the form, recorded three duet albums with the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs, and helped Hanson make the transition to indie pop by collaborating on their album Underneath. His voice was heard in a 2014 episode of The Simpsons (Homer and other dads form a band, and Sweet provided a Journey parody song for them to play), and he was also glimpsed in Austin Powers in Goldmember.
For Russell Carter, Sweet’s longtime manager, Sweet’s return to the road in 2024 was the start of a plan to rebrand him as a legacy artist, especially for the Gen Xers who grew up with his records. But that schedule was tabled when Carter heard from his sons (one of whom was Sweet’s road manager, another in his band) that Sweet was headed for an ICU in Toronto. “That was lucky,” Carter says. “He could have been in the middle of nowhere in a van on a trip to Canada. Or he could have been on an airplane. The circumstances of where he was couldn’t have been better.”
Taylor Hanson says he and his brothers were rattled by the news. “We were saying, ‘What’s going on?’” Hanson says. “We heard it was something extreme and we knew pretty quickly he was going to the hospital. Everyone jumps to the worst scenario. At first we through it was a heart attack.”
At the hospital in Toronto, aides had Sweet sit up in bed to demonstrate how his body had been impacted by his stroke: His left side couldn’t handle the weight and would fold under him. In time, doctors lowered his blood pressure and some progress was made with his speech, as Carter learned during calls with him. “He had to make great effort to bring thoughts together,” Carter says. “He could make a great deal of sense, but not for long. But he improved day by day.”
Sweet also learned that his stroke had taken place in an unusual spot, the pons region in the back of the brainstem. The cause, he was told, was likely a spike in blood pressure. Adding to the mystery, Sweet had high blood pressure in his youth but had lowered it in recent years.
By way of an ambulance transport plane with two nurses, Sweet was eventually flown back to Omaha to begin rehab at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital. “I was the last one to realize how bad it is to have a stroke like that,” he says. “I sort of felt like just everything was going to come back really soon. And then as I got back to Omaha and went to Madonna, they had group classes, where the idea is to explain to you what to expect from it. I found that really depressing. I did not want to go to this class full of people who all had strokes and have to learn how bad it could be, but it was part of my coming to terms with it.”
At that facility, Sweet began physical therapy, walking exercises, and using a robotic device to help him regain more control of his impacted left arm. But his obstacles were just beginning. At that point, he didn’t have health insurance, and the bills, starting with that pricy transportation from Toronto, began piling up. “A good six weeks without insurance, so it was crazy,” he says. “It was so, so expensive, $5,600 a day or something. I didn’t know it could be that much. I would sit there and think, ‘What could I have bought with today’s money?’”
To help defray those costs, Carter set up a GoFundMe for Sweet soon after. Fans contributed an average of $50, but another indication of Sweet’s respect in the industry was the list of musicians who donated: John Mayer, Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, producer Brendan O’Brien, and members of R.E.M. (Peter Buck and Mike Mills), the Bangles (Hoffs and Vicki Peterson), and the Go-Go’s (Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin).
Movie-world admirers like Jon Cryer and Judd Apatow also contributed, resulting in a fund that currently sits at more than $600,000. “I just love his music,” Apatow tells Rolling Stone. “The sound of his voice and his guitar always makes me instantly happy. He’s been in heavy rotation in my house forever and I’ve written entire screenplays to his music. 100% Fun powered me forward through many writing projects. I donated because he has brought me so much joy and wanted to let him know how much his work meant to me.”
Sweet says he was initially unaware the fund had been set up and was shocked to see the list of donors. “Yeah, I saw those names,” he says. “I was like, ‘I know you, Ducky!’ Probably the most emotional moments I had early on in the stroke was a result of being so amazed there were that many people that cared. It was an awakening to see how much heart people have. Part of me was like, ‘How do they all know how bad a stroke is?’ I didn’t know. You think old people have strokes.”
Says Hanson of the outpouring, “I hope Matthew recognizes that his music has reached and touched a lot of people. More than sometimes he realizes.”
As his early rehab was taking place, Sweet’s home, which he shares with his wife Lisa and their niece, was being retrofitted for his return. Carpeting was ripped up and replaced with wood floors to allow him to use his walker, and door frames were widened to accommodate a wheelchair. Until the upgrades were finished, the Sweets checked into a local hotel (“I was really ready to leave after being in a hospital bed all day,” he says), but that resulted in another setback: When Lisa attempted to help bathe her husband, they both slipped on the shower floor, and Lisa broke a leg and had to be hospitalized herself. “So,” Sweet says, “not good luck for us to have that happen.”
Sweet’s life hasn’t gotten any easier since then. As likely aftereffectsof his stroke, he’s been diagnosed with ataxia, a neurological condition that often leaves him off balance, and nystagmus, which make one’s eyes unexpectedly move side to side or up and down. Sweet suspects the latter diagnosis may have resulted from a smaller stroke he could have experienced a few months ago. He’d also been diagnosed long before his stroke with essential tremor, the neurological condition that causes people’s hands or heads to shake. (Katharine Hepburn famously suffered from it.) “There is a shaking that’s pretty pronounced on the left side of my head, as weird as that sounds,” he says. “So the early part of the day, I’m often shaking a lot in the left side of my head and face.”
Even with nystagmus, Sweet can see well enough, but aides help him type out texts to friends. A sense of vertigo also accompanies him: “When I look down, the floor looks like it’s caving in, which is really kind of unnerving.” That makes it challenging for him to use a walker and has led him to have to rely on a wheelchair and nursing aides, who help transport him to his bed, shower, and bathroom or into a car. He can’t walk upstairs and remains confined to the first floor of his home.
Financially speaking, Sweet is doing better thanks to the GoFundMe, and he’s applied for Social Security disability benefits and now has insurance via the Affordable Care Act. But with home-care costs continuing, his GoFundMe has been rebooted. Under the Trump presidency, the future of Social Security itself is uncertain. In the worst-case scenario, Sweet says he may have to sell his house and move to a less expensive place.
The future remains a blank page, physically and professionally. “It’s sobering to think I might just have to always have a person that can handle moving me one place to another,” says Sweet. “My thoughts originally were, ‘Well, how likely is it that I’ll walk if I have the ataxia?’ And no one will say. It’s more like they don’t know. This might be as good as it gets, or I might make progress.”
Carter shares that sense of frustration. “He’s getting treatment from lots of good doctors, but the most frustrating thing for Matthew is that he still has no prognosis,” he says. “They encourage him to put his nose to the grindstone and do all the PT and just hope for the best. It’s somewhat discouraging that he hasn’t made more progress, but I don’t think that’s unusual. It’s a very slow process.”
Then there’s his music. Before the stroke, Sweet was in the early stages of making an album he was calling Midsommar. “I don’t feel like it’s in any way ready to be brought to fruition right now,” he says, “but I certainly remember it.”
In conversation with Rolling Stone, Sweet speaks in a voice that is occasionally halting, but he’s lucid and never losing his breath. Singing, however, could be another issue, despite undergoing speech therapy in rehab. “Maybe I’ll regain some of the breath power, but it hasn’t happened yet,” he says. “I just kind of run out of air at the end of a word, and then I have to start over and say the word again.”
Given his issues with his left hand, guitar playing is off the table, but he’s hopeful that he can play some keyboards, since he generally relied on his right hand for the instrument. Performing live, however, feels unfathomable. “Most of the venues we were in last fall had stairs in them,” he says. “There’s just no way I could ever go up to the dressing rooms. So I think, ‘What would it even be like to tour? Other people play instruments, and I’m just there on stage attempting to sing?’”
As part of his tour with Hanson, the band had been hoping to bring Sweet onstage for the title song of Underneath, which Sweet wrote for them. “One of the sad personal notes is that we were a show away from doing it at soundcheck and remembering the arrangement and then playing it,” Taylor Hanson says. “But it hadn’t happened yet. I’m going to hold out that that will occur, in some form.”
Sweet insists he is remaining as optimistic as possible. “I have to just be happy to be alive and try to do what I can each day,” he says. “Somedays I’m just tired and want to stay in bed. Some days I can be awake more. I do have a lot of weepy moments, but I’m generally a positive kind of person, and so I try to be hopeful and accepting and think, ‘If this is how I have to be, that’ll be okay, and if I have breakthroughs, that’ll be great.’ All my life, I’ve been an optimist. So even if a lot of stuff is a little bit out of my reach right now, it doesn’t make me not want to try and keep living.”
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