Our Story

As Told by Willie Belliveau

The night that Julia and Matt won their Grammy for Album of the Year, the music world wept tears of disbelief. Two Carhartt-clad, maple syrup-gulping New Englanders had just beaten the likes of Bruce Springsteen and John Legend. I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. It was February 2017; I was on the Stairmaster. When the host announced the winner, I nearly choked on the tuna melt I was eating. “Overnight success,” the critics said. “Mercurial magicians.” What the world didn’t know that night was that Julia and Matt had been on a collision course with succulent stardom for years.

In 2012, Julia was running her freelance copyediting agency, Jule’s Reviewals, reworking the greater Burlington area’s atrocious poetry. Matt was a simple delivery boy for Leonardo’s Pizzeria, mastering the art of pizza composition and distribution. Things changed for the couple on Christmas Eve, when Matt, while delivering four large Hawaiians, slipped on an icy porch, tumbling through the air and splatting on the ground like a soup dumpling. According to the accident report, the pizzas frisbee’d nearly fifty feet, landing cheese down in the customer’s hedges.

“I told him he needed some footwear with actual traction,” Julia repeated, exasperated, “but for some reason he insisted on wearing Birkenstocks year-round. There was something about those two brass buckles and suede straps that called to him.”

Matt’s porch flop resulted in a shattered tailbone. He was bedridden for six months and forced to resign from Leonardo’s, as he could no longer deliver. “I was in the dumps, man,” he told me. “Everything I had built at Leo’s — poof! — gone in one slippy-slappy instant.”

From bed, the two activities that Matt could do were watch Julia critique bad poetry and strum his mandolin, an instrument he had always loved. Julia eventually grew restless, both with the sonnets and with seeing Matt immobilized. One night, inspiration struck: “I’m a damn fine writer; I can spin words together like a spunky silkworm,” she told me. “And Matt can make a mandolin purr like a bobcat in a hot spring — why not try our hand at songwriting?”

After years of finding their tone and voice, in 2016 the duo’s first song was complete. They named it Improper Footwear, a tribute to Matt’s splintered coccyx. Julia knew it was gold from the minute it danced across her eardrums. “I had to get it into the hands of an industry titan,” she told me. It turned out that her uncle’s iguana groomer went to high school with Trey Anastasio, lead singer and guitarist for the legendary jam band Phish, and was willing to pass Trey a recording of their song. “It was nerve wracking,” Julia said. “I had just sent Matt’s hero a song about him botching a pizza delivery in the most embarrassing way imaginable.”

To Julia and Matt’s awe and delight, Phish covered Improper Footwear the following night at Madison Square Garden. Suddenly, Julia and Matt were all that. Record labels were clawing each other’s eyeballs out trying to sign the duo, and fans were sending them entire ponytails of their hair in the mail.

Matt and Julia began calling themselves Phlat Bread Phrisbee as a tribute to Phish and the infamous pizza incident. They released their album, “Dough, Re, Meat Lovers,” a week later. It got so much attention that Youtube’s server warehouses exploded into flames. Rolling Stone called the album “the gilded progeny of Jane Austen and Paul McCartney.” Paul McCartney called it “a sonic corn maze trumpeted from the windpipes of Mother Nature.” At this point, the 2017 Grammy’s ceremony was a mere formality — the award was theirs.

Julia and Matt are getting married in Vermont in 2019, and it is expected that the entire music community will be watching in anticipation. Of course, all their bridesmaids and groomsmen will be dressed as pizza sticks.