Matt Masters Burgener is best known as a Calgary based country and western singer and songwriter. Since 1999, he's performed over 2,500 concerts in 12 different countries and released 7 albums. He first broke into the national consciousness in 2005 when his Alberta Centennial tour took him to 100 communities in 120 days performing a suite of Albertan written tunes. This led to local and national media coverage. Matt's continued international touring and album releases kept him at the front of Alberta's culture community, where he won the 2009 Mayor's Award for Business and the Arts, recognized as an arts innovator. In 2007 Matt joined Barney Bentall and the Cariboo Express, a fund raising band that he would play with for the next 16 years, raising over $6 million for Canadian charities. From 2008-2018 Matt founded and ran the Spaghetti Western Music Festival, a live music event in Calgary's Olympic Plaza. This event helped launch the careers of a number of new established Canadian artists such as Kaia Kater and Mariel Buckley. Matt made local headlines as the house band for the NHL's Calgary Flames in 2008 and in 2009 Matt premiered his first play, Don Coyote, to critical acclaim at the Sled Island festival in Calgary and at subsequent headlining performances at Toronto's Nuit Blanche, in London England and at Calgary's High Performance Rodeo. Performances in Turkey, Qatar and at the Vancouver Olympics kept Matt's work in the public eye through 2010. In 2015, Matt became headline news when he declared himself as the NDP candidate to run against former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Matt's campaign featured ground breaking video, social media and lawn sign campaigns that saw him lauded as 'brilliant' by the Toronto Star. In 2020, Matt along with his wife Amanda, launched Curbside Concerts, a safe live music initiative that captured the attention of Canada's music community reeling from the pandemic. Mentioned in Forbes.com, and awarded local, national and international prizes for innovation and community support in the music sphere, Curbside Concerts has continued to grow as a now national live music booking agency, successfully paying Canadian artists over $1 million dollars in it's first 4 year of operating. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the fall of 2020, Matt became a vocal champion of supporting those with mental health struggles and wrote his first book 'Manic Memoir' in the fall of 2023. Matt is the father of three young children and plays mens league hockey each winter.