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Saturday, 21 January 2006 02:44

Gentleman of Rock: Matt Pond Makes Brooklyn Home

Do you remember what it was like to leave home? Did you move to a big city? Remember all those emotions? That feeling of elation mixed with uneasiness for the new and unknown. Matt Pond has captured these feelings on his new album, Several Arrows Later, written after his move from Philadelphia to Brooklyn. Philly is no small town, but it hardly prepares you for a city of eight million.

Pond’s demeanor is that of a shy, sort of ill-at-ease kid who will carefully choose his words and then proceed to correct himself. However, it is easy to see that he is earnest and soon the conversation settles in to an easy clip.

“I have the world’s smallest room,” says Pond of his Brooklyn apartment. “And because that’s where we store all our gear as well, I have a really shaky wall of instruments that gets within an inch my bed. Talk about claustrophobia on claustrophobia—that’s my life.”

Pond moved to Brooklyn in 2003. At the time, he was working on final production and release of the well-received Emblems. “[The new songs] are also kind of a reaction to the process—the time it takes to get it done and the production, and then going to press. As time goes on, you get exposed to it in a million different ways.”

The autobiographical elements to Several Arrows Later (Pond says “all albums are autobiographical to some degree”) led to the telling of a tale that eventually became the album’s opening track. Pond relates, “Last Halloween, I was sitting in a really shitty costume—a really poorly constructed group outfit of paparazzi—and the rest of my group left. Without a group of people, you’re just kind of stupid looking. You’re at a Halloween party where everyone is doing all sorts of things around you and you don’t want to do them.” Pond laughs at the memory, but his party failure made for an interesting song that also reveals a darker side, as the partygoer starts imagining setting the curtains on fire and breaking the windows. “You’re stuck sitting in a corner because you don’t want to participate, but going home would be missing out. You’re just 100 times awkward. I wouldn’t want to think of myself as actively violent; I just think it’s not hard to imagine smashing windows and setting a fire. It’s a lot different imagining it than doing it; I don’t recommend it.”

After assurances that he is not really violent, Pond turned to his band—matt pond PA. Formed in Philadelphia in the late ’90s, mpPA released several albums and EPs. The group was never a stable band, though, with members moving in and out. All that changed in 2003 with Pond’s move to NYC. There, he met most of the current members: Brian Pearl, Dan Crowell, and Daniel Mitha. Dana Feder, a Boston transplant who replaced Eve Miller, completed the quintet this summer. This is really the first long-term, concrete band that Pond has had and he sounds excited about the prospect of working and traveling as a band.

“There have been times where it’s been really hard; you have really talented people in the band but you have to ask them to play less and,” he laughs, “people don’t like to play less. But these people do. They like to see where the space is and fit it or let that space be its own space. This band is pushing things more and see the song as something separate of themselves.”

Pond feels a strong band will steer the sound of his songs, even if that direction is different from the one he had intended. “I would hate to ever be thought of as a hippie, but it should be this open thing. You should be able to tell someone, ‘I don’t like that part. Let’s try something else.’ And now we’re at that part. And that’s amazing.”

I wondered if, following Miller’s departure, Pond had thought about removing cello from the band’s lineup. “Oh, totally!” he said. “We were at this point of ‘Are we going to do this without a cellist?’” Still, they posted the position and, right before mpPA was to leave on tour, people started responding. “A lot of them were great and could have done it, but the hardest thing was to imagine your life being given up to eating at Taco Bell and waking up in a new space every morning. And we were about to do that.” In Feder, the band found what they were looking for. “Personality-wise, Dana was the one person that had humility when she talked about future things. She wasn’t trying to change things immediately and she just wanted to play in a band and be a part of something.”

Pond sees the addition of Feder as not just a good musical choice, but also a way to impose some order. “I don’t want to be a bunch of dudes with a tour manager or sound guy that’s driving around the country without any kind of hormonal or chromosomal balance. I think we’d turn into something kind of horrible. We need these things to impose some small bit of propriety on ourselves.”

Pond and band are now in the midst of a national tour (with Liz Phair and Guster) and have just announced their first European tour (where Emblems has just been released and Several Arrows Later is available only as an import). Pond looks at the upcoming tour with his usual mix of excitement and caution. “I’m looking forward to doing it and hopefully it’ll start out not being half-assed. It’ll be one of those things where we’re lost and we don’t know what we’re doing…like most of our U.S. tours,” he finishes with a laugh.

You’ll want to keep an eye out—and perhaps even a map handy—for matt pond PA.

http://mattpondpa.com