December 16–23, 1999

music

Pond Gets Deep

Matt Pond, Zen and the art of songwriting.

by Brian Howard

Matt Pond can’t escape classic rock. Something about the location of his Chinatown apartment and the travel of radio transmissions won’t let him. "I get radio frequency in my house over everything. When you turn on a television you can hear it a little bit, or in your clock radio it comes through, too," bemoans the guitarist/songwriter of Matt Pond PA. It even infiltrates his four-track recorder. "It’ll be like Led Zeppelin, and it almost seems subliminal. I can’t record anything [at home]. I’ve tried to make tapes. I really want to pre-record our records but it’s loud enough so that it’s annoying — if ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ were just kind of mildly undulating through the songs, that would be fine. But you can hear the [station’s] promo and then ‘rocks the nation!’ and it’s the wrong thing."

Zep isn’t exactly a personal demon for Pond; the classic rock station’s constant intrusion is more a problem of logistics making it difficult for him to home-record. The hard-rock crunch of Page, Plant, et al. couldn’t be further from the dramatic, string-laden bedroom pop Matt Pond PA has been creating for the last several years. But if that intrusive radio station played, perhaps, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, early James Taylor and Patti Smith, it might just be the perfect metaphor for the love-hate relationship Pond seems to have with his music. It’s as if despite having a critically lauded band, all he can hear are his deficiencies.

Pond is the biggest fan of everyone he knows, from other local bands to the cast of Philly-scene all-stars who round out his camp: Josh Kramer (guitar), Jim Hostetter (cello), Rosie McNamara-Jones (violin, vocals), Sean Byrne (drums) and Brian McTear (production and all manner of instrumentation).

But talk to the 29-year-old New Hampshire native about his own playing and songwriting, and he’s unforgiving. Over dinner at Old City’s Fork, Pond constantly reiterates that he’s not a strong guitar player and counters praise of his songs and lyrics with admissions that he could be doing these things better. "I have more throwaway songs than anyone, and a lot of them are really bad," he explains.

"Most of the initial songs we recorded we ditched. I was like, ‘I hate these songs,’ so I rewrote them all," recalls Pond of the recording of his band’s second LP, Measure (-ESQUE), which will be released this Sat., Dec. 18, at the Trocadero. He and the band also completely changed direction a couple of times. Initially Pond and McTear had planned on doing a very quiet record without drums. The availability of Byrne, drummer for Lenola and Mazarin, changed their minds. But even with Byrne’s percussion, Measure is a much quieter record than last year’s debut Deer Apartments.

Pond describes Deer Apartments as schizophrenic; Measure reflects a greater concentration and focus. Pond, characteristically, eschews the credit, instead heaping it on McTear. "He tells you what he thinks so you don’t waste a lot of time."

The albums’ dual title tracks, "Measure 1" and "Measure 2," are about pretentiousness, the ways people try to prove or over-inflate their importance. It’s a subject Pond knows a few things about. As the lighting guy at the Trocadero, he’s got a lot of stories about rock stars who are pricks and those, like Beck, who go out of their way to be nice. "It’s about people who think that they know more than anyone else, and that that gives them any more value," explains Pond.

It’s refreshing to hear a musician who’s more critical of his work than even his critics. But while Pond only notices what he could do better, it’s hard not to hear what he and his band are doing right. Deer Apartments was recorded as a three-piece with a group of rotating extras. Measure’s version of the band includes five full-timers, including new additions Byrne and McNamara-Jones, formerly of The Low Road, who started playing with Pond shortly after Deer Apartments was released.

The string parts are becoming more integrated with Pond’s plaintive singing and simple, poignant guitar playing. "I think there’s this perception of strings having this ‘Long and Winding Road’-type feel," says Pond. "I just [feel] that they are instruments that are completely misused.… It’s annoying when strings are just all of a sudden [introduced for emotional effect], like I’m supposed to cry… now."

Pond explains that he doesn’t write the string parts; that’s all on the players. "The greatest thing is having such a good band of people who are supporting and enthusiastic. It’s bizarre, they get annoyed when we don’t practice because they want to play."

"I can’t make it clear enough that it is a band," emphasizes Pond. "It sounds so cheesy, like, ‘I love those guys’… but I do," he adds matter-of-factly.

Along with the new album, Matt Pond PA is making a leap into multimedia. A show on the Oxygen network, Going Nowhere, will feature a theme song and incidental music penned by Pond. The show, campy cut-and-paste stop-action about the misadventures of three young thrill-seeking women, is being done by some friends from Bard College, where Pond was majoring in history and gender studies. It’s nice, he says, to be paid a certain amount for a certain amount of work. It’s also a bit of a disappointment, though. He really likes the song he wrote for the show and now has no rights to it. But as far as Pond is concerned, it’s the first good thing that’s come of his college days, which he describes as a "big waste of money.… I probably withdrew from more classes than anybody of all time," he jokes.

That’s also around the time he first started writing music, short songs "probably not past sixth-grade level" about his then-girlfriend’s parents and "how mean they were and how depressing everything was."

But from those humble beginnings, Pond’s developed into a pretty fine songwriter, trying constantly to avoid familiar structures and repeating himself. He’s even learning to not be so hard on himself. "I’ve let things go that were pretty bad. Like in Mel’s Rockpile [his first band], I was into some songs that were bad. I think I know a little bit better [about what I don’t know]. If you think you know, then you don’t.… It’s a zen thing."

Matt Pond PA will play a record release party with Eric Bachmann, Aspera ad Astra and headlined by Lenola on Sat., Dec. 18, 8 p.m., at the Trocadero, 10th and Arch Sts., 215-922-LIVE.

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