"[6] Kearney began focusing on music fusing his simple guitar playing with spoken word or rap.

When we pulled into Nashville we slept in a school parking lot for three days until we finally rented this apartment where the roof was caving in and mice were crawling all over."

"[6] On April 18, 2006, Kearney's second album and major-label debut, titled Nothing Left to Lose, was released.

It contains several reworked songs from Kearney's first album Bullet, as well as some new material, and has sold over 450,000 copies to date.

He collaborated with Nashville artists such as Trent Dabbs, Matthew Perryman Jones, Kate York, Paul Moak, Daniel James, Will Sayles, and Josiah Bell.

Robert Marvin (tobyMac, Britt Nicole), the producer of Kearney's previous albums and EPs, joined him yet again.

The lead single was "Closer To Love", and it received much airplay, on both secular and Christian outlets.

In May 2009, Kearney toured with Keane and The Helio Sequence for several weeks to promote City of Black & White.

[10] On December 13, 2016, Kearney signed with independent music company Big Loud Mountain Management.

[12] Kearney released a self-titled EP on December 22, 2017, previewing new tracks from his forthcoming album, Crazy Talk.

[17] He recalls that upon the release of his major label debut, "it got totally trashed by Rolling Stone because I was blending hip-hop stuff into my music.

"[18] Inspired by his hero, Paul Simon, Kearney tries to make each of his albums have a distinct sound stating, "usually if I did one thing on one record, I tend to somewhat be the other extreme on the next one.

Kearney has stated that his legal name is Mathew due to a nurse's error on his birth certificate.

Kearney's songs have appeared on the following television series: 30 Rock, Awake, Dirty Sexy Money, Kyle XY, The Unit, Without a Trace, Laguna Beach, The Hills, Bones, Jericho, Friday Night Lights, Wildfire, What About Brian, South Beach, 8th & Ocean, One Tree Hill, Scrubs, The Closer, NCIS, Life Unexpected, Grey's Anatomy, Parenthood, So You Think You Can Dance, The Vampire Diaries and A to Z.

Kearney's song "Sooner or Later" provides the background music to the WWDC 2013 and Google's Zeitgeist 2011: Year in Review video, which was uploaded to YouTube on December 14, 2011.

[40] In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ricky Gervais included Kearney on his "Must List", stating "This singer-songwriter does spoken word that sounds like French hip-hop.