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Dear K.
(This miniature synthesizer’s consumed the last two hours. It’s definitely possible to love and hate something at the same time)
Regarding your Tennessee Williams quote, we can’t all be ON ON ON. That’s just sleight of mind.
I know people who are consumed with what they do, swamped and scurrying. I can’t compete. I like letting things roll around in the old brain-box.
It’s quite possibly an incarnation of laziness. It’s also fermentation — simple mind, simple time, simple wine. I just don’t think I was made for ON ON ON.
Who cares if we lose a little time. I’m not worried about dying.
I’m worried about living. That’s what worries me. The future’s proving to be a disconcerting destination.
My slight pessimism for humanity is my own personal optimism. Death isn’t terrible = I love sleeping in the afternoon.
There’s boatloads of lost time down here. I didn’t even get out into the endless sunshine until it was starting to set.
Ran five miles, flipped off some swerving jerks, watched a few episodes of Strangers With Candy and now I’m waiting til tomorrow.
Tomorrow, I’ll pick up Chris at the airport in Orlando. Then we’ll practice and play on Record Store Day. Sunday, we’ll shoot a video for the Stevie Nicks song.
The track goes up on the Onion AV Club tomorrow. Thank you, thank you for the suggestion and guidance. Yes and yes.
The video’s going to be a love letter to Orlando. It’s not the city “they” say it is. A better version of myself could’ve spent a good amount of time there. I believe it’s like a sultry Baltimore.
My outward existence is only revealed in sudden segments. I live in these times and hibernate for the rest.
See? It’s only eleven thirty and I could so easily sleep. Good night.
m.

I have a thing for cotton sheets. Even in the summertime when it’s too hot to have anything touching skin, I love at least one calf wrapped up in a clean cotton sheet.
Apart from that and a few other scrappy facts, this life is mostly a mystery to me.
I’ve tried to identify the world with crisp scientific bulletins. Which are at best, fumbling, nearsighted misconceptions:
“Who’s that lady?” (a dread-locked, hippie male)
“There, a black cat!” (a mottled crane)
“Look, an oak tree!” (a streetlamp)
There are personal truths which maintain enough of an orbit for me to reasonably revere. They work well in songs but make for lousy conversation.
For example, the best flashback is the simplest. Upstate New York, five Augusts ago, sprawling in bed on a Saturday afternoon, two degrees from being a full-on derelict as an unexpected guest of my house-sitting friend, D.
Chlorine mane and a forsaken mind, there was some kind of spectral, humid force conducting the curtains, the katydids and the grasses out past the barn.
That right there is where half of my brain eternally stays. I guess if you lend me some swim trunks and slightly suggestive choreography, I’m good to go.
I love cotton sheets, I write songs to be heard, I write words to be connected and underneath all of this, I’ve tried to keep my ego in the well of low expectations.
Because everyone knows, a drowned ego can make an amazing pool float.
Dear Luxury,
It’s been a little over a week since we stopped spinning around the country. I’m on my stomach in bed, glaring at the trees until they give me back my spring.
I imagine you’re in Boston, mostly loved and mildly mistreated. Isn’t that the way we all want it, anyway? Leave perfection to the pademelons. Tigers need trouble.
My most vivid recent memories are of your stripes, alongside the flashing backdrop of a recklessly speeding motor vehicle. Remember staring into the empty east outside San Diego? Or on stage, under the frenetic strobe lights of Seattle? Chicago was a half dream, half nightmare. When I woke up, you were always there.
Tours, they feel endless. The days and nights rattle and resonate with exhausted energy. Explosions of guitars, tempers and impulses. Absolutely arbitrary and yet somehow everything makes complete sense.
And then *snap*, the thread abruptly breaks and there are no more shows.
Tigers and people you’ve gotten to know better than your own kinfolk disappear and scatter back to their settlements.
The van slows to a stop, the sheets become home.
I will never say that I miss anything. My main rule is to keep moving forward. Don’t look back, ever. (I repeat my mantras with my foot on an imaginary stump, while chewing a blade of make-believe hay)
But I miss my days with tigers. I miss feeling faster than time. I might even betray myself further and say that I miss those singular strangers who became my temporary friends.
Take care. And remember, it’s always ok to eat your owner.
Adjö. m.
Kentucky. We’ve been playing shows and running around in circles for almost two weeks. Snowy sleepless zombies, my northeastern upbringing isn’t a match for the gnarlier nights.
Still, the test is how well a human being can bring it together backstage. To let it all out, without self-destructing. To sprint without a spill.
We’ve loved every one of the cities we’ve played in, so far. From Portland, all the way to this hotel in Louisville. If that love doesn’t always echo clearly, please consider the gravelly-voiced source.
It’s Valentine’s day eve. Tomorrow, I’m either going to be my own worst enemy or my own best date.
I choose the latter. As much as it goes against my hypercritical nature, I’m choosing the hotness of optimism. All to the sweet songs of the American Analog Set’s, Know by Heart.
Yes please.
We used to try to push our nights as far as they would go. Against the grain of reason and down dirt roads, pointlessly going after some kind of lucidity that was always beyond our reach.
We’d drive out to Old City Falls in Strafford, run through the woods and hopefully get caught in the ribs with barbed wire. Doing that was the sign of something far greater. Losing your breath and small puncture wounds in the chest were the reminders we could survive. As long as long as you could move your fingers, as long as I could move my toes.
It’s adventure I’m still senselessly tracking. Even if that means typing on a Monday night to see how far I can take the unsophisticated truth. From a temporary bedroom, the mind goes on forever.
I don’t want to know the future. Sometimes, I don’t even want to know next week. Somehow, that makes everything possible.
Upside-down optimism is what keeps me alive. And when I hit myself on the back of the head, it means I’m happy.
Our tour starts in two weeks. And I have no idea what’s going to happen.
I’m happy.
In anticipation of the new album coming out on 2/5, we’ve partnered with Noisetrade to give away an acoustic EP called ‘the ‘Natural Lines’. Get it for FREE here: http://noisetrade.com/mattpond
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ivIGDrdcWI&feature=youtu.be
These are my best friends.
It’s kind of like building a bayern curve in your own back yard.
You can jump up and down on the rails, but you have no idea what’s going to happen until you hit full speed.
Along a similar wavelength, the motion of a tour is what I’ve been waiting on for over a year.
To be honest, it’s not like I’m head over heels for every mile of a wayward life.
All my greatest mistakes come from the long whorls of playing shows. I’ve slept in many hotel room closets as if they were makeshift panic rooms.
Still, I’ll call them great mistakes because I’ve never been familiar with flawlessness.
Each chip in the veneer is another chance. The more flaws, the more shots there are at the unsettling word “love”.
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