Kingdom Underground is the second studio album of singer/songwriter Matt Duke

Matt Duke (musician)

Matthew Thomas Duke is an American musician and singer-songwriter who was born in Reston, Virginia and raised in Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey. He released an independent album, Winter Child, through the student-run Mad Dragon Records at Drexel University in Philadelphia...

 and his first major-label record. It was released by Rykodisc in the US on September 22nd, 2008, and featured the single "The Father, The Son and The Harlot's Ghost".

History

Duke had recorded the album Winter Child on the student-run record label Mad Dragon at Drexel University when Rykodisc started to work with Mad Dragon and other student-run record labels across the country to distribute their albums with Ryko Distribution. It was from this union that Rykodisc became aware of Matt Duke and had asked him to sign with Ryko after the release of Winter Child.

With Duke now signed to Ryko, Ryko played a demo of the song "I've Got Atrophy on the Brain" to producer Marshall Altman to see if he'd have interest in handling production for Duke's next record. Altman agreed to spend a few days with Duke in Los Angeles to see if they'd be able to work together. After the meeting in Los Angeles, both Duke and Altman agreed to work together for the next album. Duke flew back home and began writing and compiling songs to record for the new album over the next few months. With the songs written, Duke flew to Burbank, California to spend the next four weeks recording the songs at The Galt Line recording studio. Songs were recorded with the acoustic guitar while Duke and Altman worked with engineer Eric Robinson. A live band was brought in to play over the acoustic guitar tracks for the final tracks.

The lead-off single for the record was "The Father, The Son and The Harlot's Ghost" but no music video was recorded. The follow-up single would have been "Sex & Reruns" but it was never followed through. Months after the release, Ryko asked Duke to record a supplemental EP of acoustic versions of songs from Kingdom Underground, which ultimately became Acoustic Kingdom Underground

Acoustic Kingdom Underground

Acoustic Kingdom Underground is the first EP of singer/songwriter Matt Duke and his second offering from Rykodisc. It was released in the US on June 30, 2009.-History:...

.

Theme and lyrical content

Duke as an artist uses themes and lyrics that can focus on literary references and his religious Irish Catholic

Irish Catholic

Irish Catholic is a term used to describe people who are both Roman Catholic and Irish .Note: the term is not used to describe a variant of Catholicism. More particularly, it is not a separate creed or sect in the sense that "Anglo-Catholic", "Old Catholic", "Eastern Orthodox Catholic" might be...

 upbringing. The song "Rabbit" is based on the John Updike

John Updike

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....

 Rabbit

Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run is a 1960 novel by John Updike.The novel depicts five months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life...

 series of novels, "The Father, The Son and The Harlot's Ghost" is based on the novel Trinity

Trinity (novel)

Trinity is a novel by American author Leon Uris, published in 1976 by Doubleday.-Introduction:The book tells the story of the intertwining lives of the following families: the Larkins and O'Neills, Catholic hill farmers from the fictional town of Ballyutogue in County Donegal; the Macleods,...

 by Leon Uris

Leon Uris

Leon Marcus Uris was an American novelist, known for his historical fiction and the deep research that went into his novels. His two bestselling books were Exodus, published in 1958, and Trinity, in 1976.-Life:...

, while "Ash Like Snow" is based on Ayn Rand's

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....

 We the Living

We the Living

We the Living is the first novel published by the Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand. It was also Rand's first statement against communism. First published in 1936, it is a story of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Rand observes in the foreword to this book that We the Living was the closest she...

. "Kingdom Underground," the hidden title track on the album, is a song based on the Creation

Creationism

Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...

 and Adam & Eve

Adam & Eve

Adam & Eve was the name of a major international exhibition of contemporary art held at the Saitama Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan , Saitama, JapanOctober 10 1992 - December 6 1992...

 from Satan's

Satan

Satan , "the opposer", is the title of various entities, both human and divine, who challenge the faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible...

 perspective. The album Kingdom Underground was to be a concept album based on the John Milton

John Milton

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

 novel Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...

, before being abandoned to become a standard album.

Track listing

All songs written by Matt Duke, except for "The Father, The Son and The Harlot's Ghost" and "Walk It Off" which are written by Matt Duke/Marshall Altman.

Musicians

• Matt Duke: vocals, acoustic guitar, tack piano, toy piano
• Michael Chaves: electric guitar, keyboards (Rabbit)
• iZler: electric guitar
• Jim McGorman: piano, Wurlitzer
• Aaron Sterling: drums
• Jonathan Ahrens: bass
• Eric Robinson: Hammond organ, programming
• Marshall Altman: backing vocals, programming, keyboards

Production

• Marshall Altman: Producer, Arranger, Recorder
• Eric Robinson: Recorder, Mixer
• Gene Grimaldi: Masterer
• George Bates: Illustration, Type, Design
• Bo Streeter: Photography
• Jamie Silvers: Management