Matthew James Aylett has been writing songs for over twenty years, and the lineage he draws from – Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan – tells you everything about where his priorities lie. His 2022 self-titled debut was produced by Gordon Raphael, and since then, he’s shared stages with Slim Chance and Willy Tea Taylor, recorded in Tennessee and Texas, and played the Cactus Cafe in Austin. “Past Goodbye” arrives as a standalone single in May 2026, sharing its name with a 2025 EP that came out of those American sessions, and it carries that landscape with it – the open, flat skies of the English fens filtered through the wide spaces of American roots country.
The song is carried by the poetry of the lyrics, and the music sets the scene in a more supporting role – but it’s not an afterthought. You would be surprised how complex it is to create a delicate musical texture around such intimate vocals. The instinct for less-experienced arrangers is to fill space, to add layers that signal effort, but that approach kills this kind of song dead. What Aylett does instead is leave room – room for the vocal to breathe, room for a phrase to land before the next one arrives, room for the listener to sit inside a line rather than be pushed past it. The instrumentation works the way good lighting works in a photograph: you don’t notice it consciously, but remove it and suddenly the whole thing loses its shape. There’s a real craft in knowing what not to play, and it’s the kind of craft that only comes from years of understanding what the song actually needs.
With twenty years of songwriting behind him and an active 2026 ahead, Aylett is clearly not in any rush to be anything other than exactly what he is. “Past Goodbye” is the work of someone who has made peace with the slow, honest path – and it sounds like it.
