This could be something.
I make no secret that my favorite band of all time is matt pond PA, and that I believe Matt Pond is one of the most talented songwriters of the modern day. I’ve been following his work since 2002, when I was living in Duluth and Anton first introduced me to The Green Fury.
I was instantly hooked to its chamber pop stylings, but what really grabbed me was the rich imagery of mpPA’s lyrics. I fancied myself a wordsmith at the time, writing entertainment articles and humor columns for my college newspaper and the local alt-weekly rag, and pursuing an intellectual diet heavy on English, journalism and Vonnegut.
But man, Matt Pond’s words, man. Little did I know at the time I was setting the foundation for a creative interest that would still be with me nearly ten years later. Of all the albums that followed, I can absolutely pinpoint the time of my life when I really dug into them. The Nature of Maps is forever associated with a spring break trip to Oregon, my first time ever to the Pacific Northwest, a place that would soon become my home for two full, formative years. It’s the soundtrack to white salt fogs, to weeklong rains, to brilliantly suffocating shades of green.
Emblems came next, the summer I lived in the dusty high desert of Central Oregon. It is the sound of hot days and chilly nights, of biking with Shane among the ponderosas, of flipping over my handlebars on a gnarly stretch of singletrack and folding my last good thumb behind my hand.
There are others. The point being that Matt Pond’s is a body of work that I have listened to and studied immensely over the last nine years.
Here’s the kicker, though, and what continues to convince me of Matt Pond’s brilliance:
These songs, they all interrelate.
In his music Matt Pond is constructing a mythology of sorts, each song describing a slightly different part or a slightly different angle of a much larger story. Even the way he names his songs and albums contains meanings, some obvious, others hidden. There’s an album named Emblems, but there’s also a song named Emblems on Several Arrows Later.
There’s a song First Light on Auri Sacra Fames, but there’s an album Last Light with a song Last Light. There’s a Lily One and a Lily Two, two songs on two separate albums. There’s Promise The Bite and Promise The Party. There’s an album named Measure, but there’s also a series of five songs with names from Measure 1 to Measure 5, spanning one album and three EPs.
There’s the Close series, which includes Close (Kc Two), Closer and Closest (Look Out). There are songs with multiple names, and just as Close’s secondary name is Kc Two, there’s also a plain old Kc. The album The Dark Leaves has two songs called Brooklyn Fawn and Winter Fawn, and there’s an unreleased demo named Spring Fawn. There’s The Butcher and Summer (Butcher Two).
Summer (Butcher Two), for Kate and I, just happens to be the closest thing we have to “our song”. I vividly remember us listening to it while blasting our Geo Tracker up the Gunflint Trail, heading back to camp after a rollicking weekend together in Grand Marais.
I believe, sincerely, that there is something huge going on in this body of work. I’ve been reflecting on it a lot over the years, but every time I try to put pen to paper about it my research agenda immediately spins wildly out of control. I am prone to doing that, and so up until now my critical analysis of matt pond PA has been largely a tacit accomplishment. I hope to begin sharing these thoughts with the wider world, but as it is with finding purchase on any latchless box, there’s going to be a lot of fumbling around.
In our next installment, we’ll talk about the East Coast.
