A little something about Matthew Wilder
The feel-good tune "Break My Stride" from 1984 made Matthew Wilder an overnight star. The native New Yorker got his start as a folk musician in the early '70s, strumming his guitar in Greenwich Village as half of a duo called Matthew & Peter. In 1978 he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his music career and eventually became a jingle singer, crooning on ads for Maxwell House and Honda and doing backup work for artists such as Rickie Lee Jones and Bette Midler. It wasn't until the radio-friendly "Break My Stride" (which was on his 1984 debut album, I Don't Speak the Language) that Wilder became a star in his own right. "It was a time when I was just trying to dig up as much perseverance as I could," Wilder told PEOPLE in 1984 about the inspiration for the Top 5-charting "Stride." "The song was a gift to myself. I didn't have the support of anyone in the business." But fame was fleeting and his follow-up album flunked. Content with working behind the scenes, Wilder is now an award-winning music producer. Wilder, who's married with two sons, spent the late 1980s and early '90s writing songs and doing production work.