When matty co. decided to record his version of Flyleaf’s “All Around Me,” he wasn’t chasing nostalgia or trying to outdo the original. He was chasing a ghost. The kind that doesn’t rattle chains or slam doors but shows up quietly in the spaces between chords. The kind that smells like childhood and sounds like silence.
This track has been living rent-free in his head for years, rearranged, reimagined, and emotionally reupholstered. The original, written by Flyleaf’s Lacey Sturm and crew, was a spiritual fever dream: a visceral encounter with the divine, thick with longing and light. But matty co. heard something else in it. Something more earthbound. Something that reminded him of his father, who passed when he was just two. So this version? It’s a conversation with absence. A slow dance with memory.
He doesn’t belt it. He breathes it. The fire in the lyrics is the kind of burn you get from holding onto something too long. And when he sings, “I can feel you all around me,” it’s not a declaration. It’s a confession. The air thickens, the heart heals, and suddenly you’re invited into someone else’s sacred space by listening.
The video itself feels like a memory trying to materialize. Backlit, soaked in blue, like someone left the sadness on overnight and forgot to turn it off. There’s a kind of coldness to it, not the dramatic kind, but the quiet, clinical sort that creeps in when absence becomes architecture.
But matty co. strips “All Around Me” down and lets it breathe. No theatrics. No pyrotechnics. Just raw, reverent reinterpretation. This isn’t a cover that tries to be clever. It dares to be honest and in doing so, it becomes something else entirely; a sonic keepsake, passed down from a son to a father who’s no longer here to hear it.
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