Head of Studio

Matthew Boll

What I Do

I'm the co-founder and Head of Studio at Longview.

My work spans the whole operation — business and technology, hiring, building AI-powered tools for our team, and helping craft the stories we tell from the producer's desk.

I started Longview because after a decade building other people's companies — Gimlet, Spotify, The Free Press — I wanted to build my own: one that tells the kind of stories that changed my life, the ones that stick with you and help you make sense of the world.

I've spent more than a decade in audio storytelling, on both the creative and business sides of the podcast industry. I won a Peabody Award for developing the music and sound of Uncivil, a series about the hidden stories of the Civil War. I produced, edited, and mixed The Horror of Dolores Roach, now a series at Amazon Prime, and was part of the team behind Crimetown, which became the most downloaded podcast on iTunes at the time. In 2022, I joined the founding team of The Free Press as head of audio operations, where I produced and engineered The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.

I got my start in audio producing a Radiolab episode, Slow, with my band The Hudson Branch. Fifteen years later, we are still releasing new music. In 2016, I moved to New York to lead the audio engineering team at Gimlet. When Spotify acquired Gimlet in 2019, I created and hosted a new-format show called Duet, a part podcast, part radio DJ set, exploring two artists' connection to the music that shaped them.

My Background

I grew up in Crystal Lake, Illinois, in a close-knit, church-going Midwestern family.

At 18, my faith led me to travel to remote corners of India and Thailand, and then to college, where I studied music. Those experiences challenged both the religion I'd grown up in and the idea that people who believed or lived differently than me were to be judged rather than understood.

I spent my twenties writing, playing, and recording with The Hudson Branch and Edwin, and for myself. Outside of Longview, most of my time now goes to being a husband and father and working on my new album.

My Ethics

Songwriting was my first education in storytelling — the craft of a lyric, the pacing of words against music. Everything I've made since comes from that same belief: that a story, told with care, can change how someone sees the world.

I'm drawn to stories with characters who don't fit easily into "good" or "bad," and narratives that reflect the complicated nature of the world rather than flatten it into black and white; it's no accident I've spent my career on shows about sympathetic mobsters, the satanic panic, and J.K. Rowling.