Matt Pond PA

Features • Wednesday December 24th, 2008 • 12:00 am

Two hours was all that transpired from when I first inquired about connecting with Matt Pond to the time we were discussing his latest (and cheapest) creation. The reason, he explains, is that he’s “a drifter.”

I’m not quite sure what that means, but I’m sure it has something to do with where we landed in our conversation, a position of musical humility where Pond discusses having his lowest expectations ever, yet loving every minute of it. It’s also the place where The Free EP was conceived, a brand new nine song compilation of a trimmed down line-up for the indie rock band. And it might just feature some of the band’s best material yet.

The forthcoming exchange was a pleasant one with a songwriter who’s been at this for over a decade now and finds himself wrestling with being misunderstood, modesty and making the music fun again.

SSv: Many things have changed since the last time we talked to you. When you look back on Last Light…

Matt Pond: It was different. A lot of people brought things into it and then a lot of people disappeared and didn’t speak up or play up. It wasn’t a bad thing. It was a learning experience. Every single piece of doing music, it’s some new learning experience.

SSv: So what did you learn from Last Light?

Matt: Oh, god, I set myself up for the wrong questions. [Laughs] You’re gonna ask a question about the thing I just said? Oh… You know, you kind of have to verify what you’re doing before you go into it. We almost did as a live record, so there was a lot of arrangements we wanted to do afterward. There were a lot of people who stepped up saying they would arrange things, so I focused on the concepts rather than on the specifics. I think the thing I learned from that is not to take things seriously. Any perception outside of our own, it really struck a deep chord that there’s nothing that matters as much as your own opinion of yourself.

SSv: Can you clarify that statement a bit? I’m trying to understand what you mean.

Matt: The last record was misinterpreted in a lot of ways and you can’t correct that. You just have to move forward. So in response to that, we did everything as simply as we could [on The Free EP]. So all the recording and all the music we’ve done since then has gotten a lot easier because we haven’t taken it as seriously. We’re not as worried about what isn’t going right. If you can somehow make a living at this and not worry about every detail then it’s the best thing you can do. Success would probably ruin us. Worrying would ruin us. I keep going off on tangents. [Laughs]

SSv: So stripping this down, does that make things fun?

Matt: Of course. The theme of Last Light or the purpose was to take death into account and not be intimidated by it. I don’t think that people got it, but that was the tension. Then we realized that if you obliquely tackle the topic of death, you’ll confuse people. Or else you’ll make them think nothing. I’m not sure. But this one, we didn’t even think about it. All these things are concepts and they’re all thought out. I think we talk about music way too much. I think we all do, but maybe it’s just me. But even in the conversations with this one, we took them less seriously. That’s the most important thing at this point.

SSv: What does that allow you to do and what does that now allow you to do? Because if you’re talking about the music less, I would think…

Matt: No, we did talk about it as much. The conversations just aren’t as Marxist in basements where we’re raving our fits. [Laughs] What it allows you to do is to enjoy the music more. Other people’s music and your own.

SSv: What does it keep you from doing?

Matt: Nothing. There’s nothing you can’t do. When you do things in a smaller group, you have that musical input that sometimes is enlightening, but sometimes looking for answers from other people can put pressure on them. Then they clam up right at the point where they’re supposed to be playing. That sucks for everybody. There’s just no expectations any more.

SSv: Really?

Matt: Yeah, you can’t expect anything. You can have small hopes.

SSv: So what are the small hopes with this one?

Matt: This is the hope that people realize that we actually appreciate their relationship to ourselves. Hopefully they can see that it’s enough. That’s a very modest thing.

SSv: Do you feel that you’re a modest band?

Matt: No. We’re just the same as any other. Everyone tries to have themselves perceived as modest, but everyone has that ego, so it’s not like we’re different from everyone else.

SSv: I’d love to hear about the sessions for this album if this was fun again. Were you holed up in a cabin?

Matt: [Laughs] Yeah, but being in a cabin in the summertime doesn’t feel that holed up. It’s amazing to play with the door open and a lot of the noise that comes through is noise that you can’t always fight – the animal noises, people breathing. We just didn’t worry about it too much.

SSv: In terms of the songwriting, what does it mean to be down to three people?

Matt: Chris [Hansen, keys/guitar] still did most of the work on these songs but then again that was a concept that we go through. Most of the time, I write the songs, then we flesh them out and then we see where they’re going. Again, there’s only so far you can take some things in the cabin. The drum sounds aren’t going to blow people away. There’s a lot that you can’t blow people away with. Also, every time you have some kind of construction, you’re building something but it’s also limited in a certain way.

SSv: Then I guess that brings up what I mentioned earlier about having limitations, which you said there weren’t any, but here you’re saying you were limited by your environment.

Matt: Well, I was talking about the drums because we’re not in a studio. But we’re not in a huge room with all these expensive microphones. We’re not going with a 50-track, two-inch tape and those are limitations. But they’re not bad limitations, they’re just mutations on the way people record in general now.

SSv: Small hopes for 2009?

Matt: We’ve been working on a full-length for a long time now, so I hope that works out soon. There’s probably 100 different ways it can work out. We have 40 or 50 songs that are there in different forms that we’ve actually recorded all the way through and we’ll just see how they work together. We don’t know if we’ll redo them all or not. But it’s not intimidating anymore. The more you lower your expectations the more exciting it becomes. It’s not being beaten down, it’s just knowing the reality of it.

SSv: That journey to get to this point…

Matt: That’s the best thing about this band and the people I’ve always played with. It’s funny how many people we used to play with who have come up to me and said they love the EP. Those are the toughest critics. Those are the best people to get that from because they don’t have any reason to say that. They’re not even a part of it anymore. But wait, what was the question?

SSv: Just wondering about the journey to be at a place where you can let go of those expectations?

Matt: That’s the best part about this band. Each time things go well, they come with this sour twist. [Laughs] We’ve never felt larger than life or beyond all of this. It’s this underlying part of rock and roll. I’ve seen people that act and feel above normal humans. And that part of it will never affect us. That’s a good thing. That’s good. We’ve been both complimented and humiliated excessively but I almost wouldn’t want to be in another position.