Rob Mathes

Rob Mathes is an arranger/composer, producer, and songwriter best known for his work as a musical problem solver. He has been writing his own brand of blues influenced spiritual pop for years and yet has increasingly become known in the industry for other things. He has produced records for artists such as Panic! At The Disco, Carly Simon, Rod Stewart, and Vanessa Williams. Rob has also written arrangements for artists as diverse as Lou Reed, Bono, Sting, Jay-Z, Yo Yo Ma, Eric Clapton, and Luciano Pavarotti.
Singer-songwriter, producer and arranger Rob Mathes has worked with a who’s who in the music industry including Sting, Bono, Pavarott, Carly Simon, Renee Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Jay-Z, Elton John, Bonnie Raitt and many more. In 2008 Rob produced one of the biggest selling records of the year by Panic! At the Disco. He was also seen on TV as music director for the Kennedy Center Honors and We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial. He was also recently commissioned by maestro Leonard Slatkin and composed “Concertino For Orchestra” which was debuted by the Nashville Symphony.
In a rare appearance for the Naked Soul series, Rob brings together a string quartet of some of New York’s finest musicians led by Max Mendel on viola and percussionist Ben Wittman (Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Jonatha Brooke, Paula Cole) to perform music from his record Orchestral Songs, recorded in 2007 with members of the London Symphony at Abbey Road Studios in London. A searing record of sophisticated yet Pop-oriented settings of Poetry by W.C. Williams, Yeats and others, be prepared for an evening of romantic music, songs that suggest the music of Joni Mitchell or Nick Drake on one hand and the music of Benjamin Britten on the other.