Director’s Note: “Talking with Matt Greiner feels less like an interview and more like a reminder of why people start playing music in the first place.
Matt doesn’t separate drumming from living. Farming, posture, faith, patience, work without reward — it’s all the same muscle. What struck me most wasn’t just his power behind the kit, but his commitment to balance: physical balance, emotional balance, and moral balance.
We talked about Neil Peart, air drumming, and the long road from a Pennsylvania farm to stages across six continents. But underneath it all was something quieter — a belief that meaning matters more than image, and that intensity without intention is empty. That’s a lesson every musician, in any genre, can carry with them.”
From the Farm to the Kit
Matt Greiner traces his roots growing up on a Pennsylvania farm, learning discipline, hard work, and purpose long before music entered his life. That foundation shaped his approach to drumming as something earned slowly, without immediate reward.
Balance, Posture, and Playing With Intention
The conversation explores Matt’s distinctive upright posture and focus on balance behind the kit — physically and mentally. For Matt, drumming isn’t just power and speed; it’s about control, longevity, and feeling grounded while playing aggressive music.
Neil Peart, Purpose, and the Long Game
Matt reflects on Neil Peart’s influence, the humility of always being a student, and the importance of staying focused on growth rather than hype. The episode closes on legacy, patience, and why meaning — not recognition — is what sustains a life in music.
Watch video version here:
RAW TRANSCRIPT (Pardon the old-school glitches):
Ari Gold: Greetings, welcome to Hot Sticks Drum Show… And I’m very happy to have you on here because your drumming is—and your band is—a very interesting mix for me of this incredibly aggressive, powerful, like Meshuggah-like energy. And at the same time, lyrically and spiritually, I would say you’re bringing a totally different energy to the genre, or the genres, depending how you want to define them. So I would just love to talk with you about how—what interests me, you know, having made Adventures of Power, which is a comedy that also has a spiritual message—it’s interesting to talk to a musician who also has a genre that doesn’t necessarily mix in an obvious way with messages. But obviously your audience gets it. Your audience is moved by things that people who weren’t in the genre might be like, “Oh, there’s more than screaming going on,” you know. So how did that come about? Do you want to talk a little bit about your development as an artist and your development within the band as well?
Matt Greiner: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on, first and foremost. My name is Matt. I play drums for August Burns Red, for those that don’t know. Our band is not really on the radio, so we have this underground market or fan base that is just in love with the style of music, and they don’t need it to be popular or mainstream to like it. I think that’s actually part of the appeal. It’s like, “This is mine.” Yeah. “Oh, you don’t know about them?” That makes it a cooler experience—better. So I grew up in a home with seven siblings. I grew up on a farm. I wasn’t aware of this kind of music when I was a kid. I remember going to a Christian festival called Creation, which is in Pennsylvania, and I heard Project 86, Zao, Beanbag, and Newsboys. All of that stood out to me. And I went home and I was like, “I don’t know how to play drums, but I want to play drums, and I want to play in a band like that—heavy.”
Ari Gold: How old were you when you first heard—would you consider those bands metalcore?
Matt Greiner: No, it pretty much was just the heaviest style of music I knew of up until that point. It was just mainstream CCM—Christian contemporary music. There were two stations I was allowed to listen to as a kid. And whenever I had the chance, I would listen to other stuff, and then I would go back to those first two presets so my parents didn’t know I was listening to other styles, right? So bringing home these CDs—this is early 2000s—was shocking to my parents. And they were like, “We want to read the lyrics.” And so I showed them the lyrics to Project 86. It was an album called Drawing Black Lines. And I remember thinking, “Oh boy, this isn’t good,” because these lyrics are pretty dark. But they were incredible. And having an understanding about something that was so outside the parameters of what they thought their kids would grow up to like and be—I really appreciate that about them. I think about one day if I have kids, what it’s going to be like for me to hear or see or acknowledge a hobby or a passion in my kid’s life that I just don’t understand.
Ari Gold: Yeah. It’s almost a prerequisite. There’s no way a parent is going to understand everything their kid loves. It’s like what you said about a fan discovering your band and feeling like it’s theirs. Right? A kid—especially a teenager—is going to want their music to not be obviously understandable by their parents. That’s part of the generational thing that’s always happened. You can pretty much count on your kids bringing something home that you might be like, “What is this?”
Matt Greiner: Thanks for the warning. That seems pretty right on. So to that point, I started playing drums, which was also something brand new for my family. And my dad knew a little bit about my love for things that didn’t last. I started skateboarding—that lasted a couple of years. Did BMX—that lasted even shorter. Motocross was the shortest of all. I was taking piano lessons, and—
Ari Gold: He thought you were a dilettante. Jumping from thing to thing. Actually, you were a spiritual person saying we have to love things that don’t last because that’s the nature of being alive.
Matt Greiner: That’s exactly right. I was just a kid trying to figure it out. And then I found drumming—and it stuck. But my dad was like, “Okay, first of all, let’s just get you a snare drum. Not a drum set. We’re not going headfirst into this. We’ll see if it lasts for a year.” Which was wise. Because if you like drumming after playing just a snare drum for a year, then you’re real. You’re the real deal.
Ari Gold: And paradiddling for hours on end. I hope you had a nice stack of towels on there so you didn’t drive your seven siblings crazy.
Matt Greiner: No, I didn’t.
Ari Gold: Farm. I know that. By the way, when your band started, most rock bands do it for the chicks—but in your case, it was chickens, right?
Matt Greiner: I never thought about it that way. We actually started playing in an egg room.
Ari Gold: That is perfectly on point. You can use that pun on the road. “We do it for the chicks.” That’s incredible.
Matt Greiner: Our publishing company is still called Grown & Publishing.
Ari Gold: That makes sense.
Matt Greiner: So do you think your music had an influence on the chickens?
Matt Greiner: I think it traumatized them to the point of no return. There were a lot of dead chickens in that chicken house.
Ari Gold: Oh yeah?
Matt Greiner: That was my job to clean them up. I didn’t eat chicken for a good ten years after we stopped raising broilers. So it was always this dichotomy of farming and drumming. I hated farming as a kid because it took me away from the things I liked. And now I love farming because it gives me a perspective the music industry just can’t. They fuel each other now.
Ari Gold: What do you grow on the farm?
Matt Greiner: Corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay. All for livestock consumption. Cash crops—we sell them to local mills, and they sell to dairy farmers and pig farmers.
Ari Gold: We’re going to end up talking about farming this whole time, because I can see where this is going. Yeah. I mean, one thing I’ve noticed about your drumming—maybe it comes from, I’m going to try to bring it back to farming somehow—but for such a hardcore drummer, your posture is incredible. And I wonder, you know, you come from a family that’s farming, you can’t be stooped over. And, you know, going back generations, I’m sure you have machines, but like going back generations, you know, someone stooped over and by the time they’re 32 they can’t plant anymore. That’s your pocket, you know. There are a lot of hardcore drummers who mess up their backs, their discs, their lower backs by being in this hunched-over position. I mean, you look at someone like John Bonham—he didn’t live long enough for us to know what would’ve happened to his skeletal system—but he had that cool hunched-over thing. And you’re sitting straight up in the chair, like the teacher just said, “Excuse me, Matt Greiner,” and you’re sitting straight up, militant. “Get that back straight.” Did you learn that from a teacher? Did you learn good form? Or were you self-taught?
Matt Greiner: I was self-taught—but I did learn that from a teacher. So both things are true at the same time. My mom was my teacher. I was actually homeschooled from first grade on, and we had these benches in our kitchen. So when we sit down to eat, your natural inclination is to sort of do this—like, you can’t really see me, but I’m just stooped over—because there’s no back. It’s just a bench. And my mom would say, “Sit up straight.” So as soon as my butt hits a seat—minus what I’m doing right now, just because I’m close to my screen—my instinct is to be like, “Okay, yeah.” And I really do attribute it to that. I was actually talking last night—we’re on tour right now—and I was talking to another band guy in We Came as Romans, and he was like, “I’m just so impressed by your posture.” I get as many compliments about that as I do about my creativity and stuff. And I think it’s because it stands in the face of how things generally are. But for me, it’s how I feel comfortable and balanced. And balance is such a huge part of drumming. If I’m not balanced, I feel like crap. I can be playing the parts okay, but the drum set feels foreign.
Ari Gold: Yeah. I mean, as you may know, I’m an air drummer. I’m in the Guinness Book for air drumming—which is true. People think I’m kidding. I’m like, “No, no, this is true. I’m in the Guinness Book for air drumming.” And when you don’t have a kit, and you don’t have a stool, and you’re just by yourself on the stage, balance is everything.
Matt Greiner: I totally agree.
Ari Gold: Tell me about this record that you hold. I honestly don’t know that much about it.
Ari Gold: Well, I made a movie called Adventures of Power, which is a comedy about air drumming, and Neil Peart from Rush was in it. It’s a comedy, and it’s spiritual, and it’s a political story metaphor, as you know. I’ve got Nick Kroll, Michael McKean from Spinal Tap, Jane Lynch—it’s incredible. Anyway, it’s a great movie. Check it out. It’s on Amazon. It’s free on Amazon. It’s called Adventures of Power. You can go to airdrummer.com to see videos from it. So when I was promoting the movie, Neil Peart came back to me and we did some videos that ended up kind of launching this podcast spiritually, essentially. Because I did an interview with him and I realized, “Oh, I love talking to drummers about drumming and what motivates them—and also air drumming.” It’s a joke. I always like to hear who people first air drum to. So I’ll ask you that later. But the movie started spreading. It’s an independent movie—like your band. It wasn’t on TV. It wasn’t in theaters other than festivals. But people started hearing about it. One of the groups that heard about it was a casino in San Bernardino, California, that was trying to get a Guinness record for air drumming. And one of the things Guinness needed to make the category valid was a quote-unquote “air drum expert.” Because I had made a movie about air drumming, acted in it myself, and had been a judge at the World Air Guitar Championships in Finland, I was officially classified as an air drum expert. So I conducted 2,500 people air drumming. I had to invent a set of moves that would classify as special moves for Guinness. And there was a guy in a funny suit watching the conduct. And then they awarded “Largest Ever Air Drum Ensemble Conducted by Ari Gold.”
Matt Greiner: Oh my God. My life. That’s incredible. What an accolade.
Ari Gold: Yeah. It’s a weird one. But no one has toppled me yet. Anyone listening is welcome to try. So air drumming does have a spiritual significance for me. You have to be balanced. You have to find the heartbeat in yourself. You’re making something out of nothing. It’s a joke—it is silly on one level—but the best jokes have a profound truth underneath them. And I devoted three years to making this crazy movie about it.
Matt Greiner: It sounds like you interviewed some insightful people.
Ari Gold: Yeah. Starting with Neil. We talked about how drumming improves kids’ brains. Drumming and rhythm-focused music can help repair neural pathways after brain injury. Which brings me back to something I wanted to ask you—when you said you didn’t have a teacher, but your mom set you straight—was your mom your drum teacher?
Matt Greiner: No, my mom wasn’t my drum teacher. But my parents played the biggest role in guiding me. My dad worked 80 hours a week on the farm. Any free time I had, I was working with him. I learned how to work hard knowing there probably wasn’t anything coming back to me. No pay. No vacation. The reward was purpose. Identity. Contribution. That mentality transferred directly to drumming. You practice for three hours, walk away soaked in sweat, frustrated, not knowing if you got better or worse. So learning that it’s not about immediate reward—it’s an investment—that everything matters, that carried me through 20 years of playing drums. Now it’s two-time Grammy nominations, 2,000 shows, six continents, same core band members. We treat our crew like family. Tonight we’re taking them to a baseball game. Every aspect matters.
Ari Gold: What was it like playing in Dubai?
Matt Greiner: Honestly, I skied inside a mall. The show itself was forgettable. But knowing the band you started on a farm played Dubai—that’s amazing. It’s incredible to know that the band you started on your farm is playing in a place like Dubai.
Ari Gold: Yeah. I mean, you’ve played six continents. That means you have not done Antarctica yet, right?
Matt Greiner: Correct.
Ari Gold: I haven’t been there either. My grandfather went to Antarctica. He was very fond of penguins.
Matt Greiner: That’s really cool. Your grandpa went to Antarctica? Wow. Well, you kind of have to go now.
Ari Gold: I know. I want to go. We’ll do a co-gig. I can air drum along to your stuff—with good posture.
Matt Greiner: Yeah, yeah.
Ari Gold: You’d be joining an illustrious company. The only drummer I’ve ever done live air drumming next to was Neil Peart. And if we did it in Antarctica, that would be next level.
Matt Greiner: You must have been more devastated than most when Neil passed.
Ari Gold: Yeah. I mean, meeting one of your heroes and discovering how intelligent, gentle, thoughtful, and generous he was—it really threw me when he died. I didn’t know him deeply. We hung out a few times. We stayed in touch. But when my movie premiered at Sundance and got a bad reception, it felt like my career ended in ten minutes. Harvey Weinstein walked out. People were saying it was over. Neil came back to me after that and said, “If you believe what they say about you negatively, you’ll believe what they say positively—and that’s not good either.” Then he did videos with me. A drum-off. Interviews. He helped me when I was on the ropes. That’s something I’ll never forget.
Matt Greiner: Wow. He had nothing to gain by doing that.
Ari Gold: Nothing. Only something to lose, maybe.
Matt Greiner: That says everything about his character.
Ari Gold: He always considered himself a student. He’d travel to Africa to study drumming. The best teachers know they don’t know everything.
Matt Greiner: I was just telling a fan last night—he said, “You’re the god of metal drumming.” And I said, “I have a lot to learn. I’m not that good. I want to get better.”
Ari Gold: What do you want to improve?
Matt Greiner: My foot control. It’s good, but it can be better. I stay within boundaries I know I can perform well in. I’m scared to go past them because it shows who I really am.
Ari Gold: Who inspired you growing up?
Matt Greiner: Mike Portnoy. His fills were catchy. Tomas Haake. Aaron Spears. He’s a role model—not for chops, but humility. Always clapping loudest for others. Same with Ash Soan. We did a Zildjian Live project together. Incredible human.
Ari Gold: How connected are you to Zildjian as a brand?
Matt Greiner: It’s a sound thing. Zildjian A Customs are my favorite crashes. Master Sound hats are my favorite hats. Even just a few pieces can sell me on a brand. Same with Evans EMAD kick heads. Best kick head in the world, in my opinion.
Ari Gold: I need to sign off soon, but I just want to say—I’m intrigued by you. You tell stories through drumming. You communicate grief, surrender, power. Through time signatures. Through posture. Through farming. It’s pretty amazing.
Matt Greiner: I really appreciate that. It’s been great talking with you. And hearing about Neil from someone who knew him—that meant a lot.
Ari Gold: If you go to airdrummer.com, there’s a Rush page and a Neil Peart page. You’ll see some videos we did together. Me air drumming with no beard and a headband.
Matt Greiner: Sounds good. Thanks for having me, man.
Ari Gold: Enjoy the tour. Maybe I’ll see you backstage somewhere.
Matt Greiner: That would be awesome. Antarctica tickets.
Ari Gold: Antarctica. Alright—keep good posture.
This interview originally appeared on Hotsticks.fm.
See more about Matt Greiner on the official site for Adventures of Power, the world’s greatest (and only) Air Drum Movie!
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