Matthew McConaughey stood in a burnt orange button-up on a simple stage, decorated with just a piano, as he divided the audience in two.
“Seems to me like we’re made up of doers and dreamers,” McConaughey said. “Most of us are at least doers who could dream more, or we’re dreamers that can do more.”
With that, the UT alumnus set the tone for the last stop on his “Poems & Prayers” book tour at Bass Concert Hall on Sunday. The book was released Sept. 16, compiling 36 years’ worth of poetry written by McConaughey since graduating high school. In the past few years, however, McConaughey wrote that he’s found it harder to rely on logic to understand the world, a conflict he sought to solve in his book through faith.
“I was a young man who gave a damn, and I don’t want to quit giving a damn,” McConaughey said during the show. “I still have a lot on my mind. I still battle doubt in myself — in God, in you, and I still write poems and prayers to try and make sense of it all.”
Striving to have more fun than just signing events at bookstores, McConaughey said he wanted to elevate the experience by inviting friends and musicians to “jam” on each stop of the tour.
Seven-time Grammy Award-winning artist Jon Batiste performed alongside McConaughey. Together, they delivered a spoken word show where McConaughey rattled off poems with rhythm and rhyme to the sound of Batiste on piano.
Through some shouting, improv and singing, the two offered lessons that tackle family, love and belief.
“Belief keeps you standing. (It) keeps you here,” Batiste said to the audience. “If you don’t have anything that’s holding you down from the inside, then the outside will overtake you. … Belief and hope are different. Belief is a knowing.”
Playing the piano, Batiste simultaneously shared a story about his faith’s evolution following his wife’s battle with cancer.
“The grace came in the form of transforming our perspective on things,” Batiste said. “There’s a depth to figuring out how to authentically transform how you see something, and that allows you to see everything with that new perspective.”
Batiste wasn’t the only one to join McConaughey on stage. His son, Levi McConaughey, brought a guitar designed as the Texas flag and spotted with signatures to add an intimate dimension to the show. McConaughey took the moment to present a poem in his book about his daughter, titled “Daughter’s Bed.”
“Sometimes we can lie down and rest our head and take a little nap in our daughter’s bed,” McConaughey said, reciting the poem. “Hope on a hunch it’ll clear our mind, slow down our clocks, get us back on time.”
To end the night, McConaughey proposed questions as a call to action for the audience, receiving shouts as replies from the crowd. The question revisited the idea of doers and dreamers.
“‘What if we were willing?’ That’s the question,” McConaughey said. “What if we were willing to do what we dream? What if we’re willing to dream? But we’re gonna have to do a whole lot more than just imagine.”
