Growing up in Hartford, Matt Covey remembers attending a grade school show ‘n’ tell presentation when he was about 6 or 7 years old. Another boy got onstage with a snare drum on a stand and a pair of sticks — and began to play.

“I was just totally mesmerized,” Covey says. “In hindsight, I’m sure it was pretty primitive but, even at the time, I was perceiving all kinds of rhythm and rhythmic potential. That’s the advantage of seeing things through a kid’s eyes.” 

Now a 34-year-old living in New London, Covey is a renowned drummer who has toured the world with metal-core headliners Shai Hulud, post-punk proggers Such Gold and ska fusionists The Flaming Tsunamis. At the same time — a juggler in the space/time continuum — he’s happily a member of several notable regional bands including Suicide Dolls (power trio), The Hempsteadys (party reggae), Young Pandas (Future Soul) and The Franklin Brothers (Steely Dan-isms by way of New Orleans).

“Does it ever extrapolate out of control?” Covey laughs. “It’s been on the border a few times. There have been some projects that had to be sacrificed or rescheduled. Other players are pretty cool about it and I try really hard not to double book. Google calendar has been my friend.”

It’s a humid late-summer afternoon, shortly before Covey hits the road for a U.S. tour with Such Gold, and he’s in a beer bottle-decorated rehearsal space near the Gold Star Bridge. The room is un-air-conditioned and, though he’s merely assembling his kit for purposes of filming a demonstration video, Covey is clearly just ... well, happy to be near his drums. In fact, anyone who’s ever seen Covey perform will have noticed that, if the man’s seated behind a kit, regardless of what style of music he’s playing, he radiates a sort of virginal joy.

Covey says, “My girlfriend loves to tell me I’m still a little boy, and I think part of it really is that, on some level, I’m about two-thirds a kid inside. I don’t know how that happened. Maybe some weird combination of genes?”

Most musicians of a certain proficiency require a combination of passion and commitment, but often they’re devotees of one particular style of music — whether punk or classical, metal or honky tonk, jazz or funk. Covey, as evidenced by the dizzying array of groups he works with, is rare because his affection for and curiosity about so many different kinds of music is apparently boundless.

“You know what might be interesting?” he says. “I’ve always had kind of a weird way of listening to music. I’ve rarely identified with particular musicians or particular styles. A lot of my friends can instantly name their favorites, or they even make lists. For a long time after I started to play, I didn’t focus on any specific drummer or band. I wanted to learn it all.”

Over the next two hours, Covey easily performs an astonishing array of musical styles with metronomic precision and dizzying chops. He talks passionately and eloquently about immersion in the indigenous rhythms of Latin, urban or African music — and the mindset required to assimilate the nuances. If there’s any common denominator to these wildly diverse genres, it’s that he clearly relishes all of them.

“Matt has a style that’s so individual and so his own,” says Jon Markson, bassist/vocalist of Such Gold. “He’s one of the most expressive players in the international rock community and, though he’s keenly aware of his strengths, he never stops pushing himself to better understand the music he’s helping to compose.”

Mike Maven of Young Pandas echoes the sentiment, describing how Covey came into the band in an emergency situation with two days’ advance notice to learn the band’s distinctive blend of soul and hip-hop, which relied a lot on recreating odd samples. “Matt showed up for rehearsal with every drum machine groove reverse-engineered and ideas of how to recreate those sounds on drums. He was exactly what were looking for in a musician but hadn’t been able to find anywhere.”

As for his e’er curious nature about all sorts of music, Covey says, “I think it comes down to the fact that I’m a super curious person anyway. Seeing other people have a genuine emotional reaction to something — even if it’s not drums or music — is a catalyst for me. What’s happening to that person? Why is he or she reacting so strongly? It makes me want to understand. And if it IS music, that gets me immediately and I want to hear more and connect in the same fashion that person does. The only way for me to do that is learn it, break it down — and crack the code.”

He’s been that way since that show ‘n’ tell experience. By third grade, Covey’s desire to take up the drums — “My parents would say I bothered them about it on a very regular basis” — had transformed into lessons at The Hartt School. A year later, he was in the school band and, two years after that, his family moved to Niantic. And while he had other interests at East Lyme High School beyond marching band and concert band, including basketball and film, he entered college focused on music.

“Unlike a lot of kids, I DID know what I was going to home in on, and it was music,” he says. “I didn’t know if it was practical, but pretty quickly I did dedicate myself to it.”

This awareness included his open-season love affair with all kinds of styles and genres. He absorbed jazz under the tutelage of his father, listened to artists from Bell Biv Devoe to Nirvana, and fell in love with the ska, punk and rock acts playing in New London’s famous El ‘n’ Gee Club. He was briefly in a punk band, then joined a rock band called Perfect Stranger with Andy Carey — with whom he still plays and collaborates with in The Hempsteadys.

“I think I knew for the first time that I could do this for a living in Perfect Stranger,” Covey says. “I went from, ‘Okay, there’s something here and it’s really fun’ to ‘This could actually be my life’ — and this was before I was exposed to people who actually did it for a living. I wasn’t even thinking in terms of dollar signs — it was in a bigger context. I just believed, ‘Well, someone will want me to play for them.’”

Carey says, “I’ve been playing with Matt for 18 years, so I’ve seen how far he’s come — and you could see that journey from Day 1. A lot of people are talented, and he’s more talented than most, but what sets him apart is that he’d dedicated himself, sacrificed a lot and really became what he wanted to be.”

At Western Connecticut State, Covey studied classical percussion and jazz and, after graduation, he briefly considered careers in classical music and musical theater but decided neither were for him. He returned to New London and taught drums at Ron’s Guitars as well as at Music & Arts. Reconnecting with Carey, they formed the punk band Hand Grenade Serenade with bassist Adam Wujtewicz and developed a following throughout New England and down the West Coast. Shortly thereafter, he got a call from the Flaming Tsunamis and spent two years with them before entering an exultant, globe-trotting experience with Shai Hulud.

At this point, Covey’s Google calendar is happily crammed with dates for Such Gold, The Young Pandas, The Suicide Dolls, The Hempsteadys, The Franklin Brothers and, yes, much more.

“Matt’s way more than a drummer to The Hempsteadys, and I’m sure it’s that way with whomever he plays with,” Carey says. “His love and experience playing so many different styles brings a whole new dimension.”

Covered with sweat and smiling happily, Covey wraps up his warehouse demonstrations in the sultry rehearsal room. Starting to break down his kit, he waxes eloquently about a musician’s term called “playing between the cracks” — a collective zone that gradually coalesces in performance when the players’ individual focus reaches an almost meditative state.

“A crazy thing happens,” he says. “There’s this amazing a-ha thing where all of a sudden everybody’s gotten onto this one wavelength together. And it can be the simplest thing in the world, but when you nail that wavelength, it’s completely sublime.”