#TBTV Concert Preview - Matt Pond PA

All journeys come to an end. Some culminate in a grand arrival at the traveler's destination. Others conclude with the determination that, to borrow a title from Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever you go, there you are". So it is with the increasingly inaccurately named Matt Pond PA. After two decades the group will disband, and its namesake artist will pursue a different path, musically and perhaps otherwise. His final pair of shows in the area take place this weekend, with gigs at DC9 on Saturday and Ottobar on Sunday.

A child of New Hampshire whose ascribed to his Philadelphia-based band a combination of his own name and the abbreviation of the group's home state, Pond now resides in Kingston, NY. He waged war with his former record label, contemplated quitting music and opening a distillery, changed his band's name to The Lowlifes, and eventually reclaimed the moniker to release a pair of standout LPs and an EP over the last 2 years.

The first half of this Throwback Thursday Video post is a live performance of Summer Is Coming from the band's 2002 album The Nature of Maps. The song is as inscrutable and haunting as the New England winters in which Pond came of age, using the outdoors as his escape from an older brother. It's beautiful in its austerity, a violin, a cello, a guitar, and a voice.


Less a throwback than a counterpoint, we have "In Winter" from last year's Winter Lives. More personal, even intimate, the song is a marker on the journey its writer has taken. Touching upon the closeness that the cold and dark of winter engender, "In Winter" is more direct and less abstruse in its affections and emotions. It could very well headline the soundtrack for an evening of hygge, the Danish concept of coziness that swept across the States last winter.

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