KCRW Exclusive: Matt Pond PA “More Winter Lives”

Our dearly beloved Matt Pond PA will no longer be recording music under that moniker. It’s sad, but when you read his statement below it was clearly an inevitable ending. Matt is obviously addressing his fans/friends through this record. It’s a deeply personal account of what it means to take that next step as an artist. KCRW is incredibly fortunate to offer you the exclusive premiere of his final E.P. More Winter Lives.

“The body is still capable, the brain still sparks. Highways continue to fall in line underneath a moderately steady hand, a deliberately heavy foot. In daylight and in dreams, the glowing gauges of a Chevrolet dashboard always appear in front of me.

It was all a monophonic blitz of belief. Stopping to pee was nearly forbidden, stopping to think was pure blasphemy.

I initially wrote music because I couldn’t make sense of my own thoughts. Trouble and doubt ruled the disquieted kingdom behind an uneven fringe, easily imagining the books I would read in jail.

And then I realized that my senselessness connected me to the space outside of this body. The clear-cut reflections of a New England kid running through thick pine forests somehow resonated with the world beyond my world. As if we only made sense together.

For a couple decades, I didn’t stop to question the seasons or the reasons for the acceleration. No broken bones nor rumbles of criticism would grant me permission to pause. Lightening, as a way of living. Ain’t it funny how the night moves?

The first snow of the season is falling while I write these words. Like a moment underneath moonlit sheets, totally disconnected from time and space, and yet still flashing forward.

As a feral creature from the woods of northern New Hampshire, I came up with a way of thinking and speaking. But the language I’ve created risks repeating itself and shattering, a figure eight worn deep beneath chattering hockey skates. (To fall through the ice and succumb to a frozen pond — now that would be funny.)

I’m looking for another way of speaking, a better way of being. So that I don’t completely disappear. A faint morse code to last through another winter, tracing paths unknown, intersecting a spring melt to meet first-timing eyes.

Lately, the moon has been circling my house. Telling me about other people, other planets. Trying to get me to shake the symmetry and jump into the waves. I wrote The Moon Rose as the best farewell my brain could wrangle. Admitting, accepting and celebrating the silver strangenesses within our small, shared lives. We don’t have to give up on one another.

Instrumentals, remixes, duets, all done as a plain-clothed, honest aloha. And yet I still blindly and wildly believe I can do better.

The body is still capable, the brain still sparks.”

– Matt Pond