Matt Pond PA Searches for Shared Silence
For more than two decades, Matt Pond PA has built a catalog that feels both cinematic and intimate.
He’s written songs that score the quiet corners of our lives while hinting at vast landscapes beyond them. With a mix of candor, nostalgia, and wry humor, Pond reflects on the evolving meanings of old songs, the resilience music has given him, and why Florida once became an unlikely refuge. Ahead of his run of intimate listening room shows, he opens up about retuning guitars, rewriting the past, and chasing manatees after the encore.
Your music has always felt cinematic, like a score to life’s quieter moments. When you write, do you first picture a scene, feeling, or sound?
Songs arrive differently every time. Sometimes they drift in from a dream, or from a line that pops into my head while I’m running. But most often, they appear when I start retuning my guitar and stumble onto strange tunings. It’s like shaking the frame until new pictures fall out.
How has your relationship with nostalgia—such a thread in your work—shifted as you’ve continued writing across decades?
Nostalgia is inevitable when you’ve been playing the same songs for years — but the meanings evolve. A song like New Hampshire will always pull me back to its original moment, yet every time I play it, it picks up a new layer from wherever I am now. The truth about the song New Hampshire is that most of it happens in Vermont. Things are never exactly as they seem.
If one of your albums could be reimagined today with your current perspective, which would it be, and what would change?
I’d completely redo Last Light. I’d fold in songs from the If You Want Blood EP, and I’d make “Sunlight” a live recording — it should’ve felt like a party on a sinking ship in shallow water. I’d add warmth to everything: the mix, the master, even the writing. It was meant to be a fun record about death, but it ended up too serious. And I’d turn Neko Case’s vocal on “Taught to Look Away” up as many decibels as physics allows.
Do you have any memories of past tours through the Southeast that stand out as surprising, challenging, or unexpectedly beautiful?
I once fell for Florida so hard I stayed for two years. I’d broken my leg on tour, and it was the perfect place to heal — endless hours at the First Coast YMCA, slowly becoming an upright human again. There’s a quiet eeriness to driving at night, the Spanish moss hanging over dimly lit streets. But I never saw a manatee. So next time, after the shows, that’s my mission.
How do you balance playing the songs fans have lived with for years against introducing new work that might not yet carry that same history?
I usually slip in two or three new songs, but the goal is always connection. The old songs are part of everyone’s history — mine included — but the new ones come from the same place. If they’re honest, they’ll eventually earn their own meaning.
Your lyrics often carry an undercurrent of resilience and survival. What role has music itself played in your own endurance through difficult times?
Music is how I survived. It’s how I learned to steer myself back when everything felt off-course — almost like a private religion. I can be cynical about most things, but great music, films, books, art—they remind me there’s something worth fighting to stay open for.
If your songs could leave audiences with one lingering feeling after these Florida shows, what would you hope it to be?
I’d hope people walk out with a small sense of shared meaning — that we all got to exist in the same room and see a piece of ourselves reflected back. Music is the one thing that beats my cynicism. The only way I know how to be on stage is to put everything I have into it.
Looking at your long arc as Matt Pond PA, what do you think has remained constant in your music, and what has transformed the most?
About five years ago, I made it a goal to be a better person. Before that, I always wanted to be decent, but I let music come first — I was a gentle tyrant, but a tyrant all the same. What’s stayed constant is my fascination with the natural world. What’s changed is that I try to let the songs breathe, instead of bending them (and myself) into rigid shapes. I’m hoping to get to a few more hikes in the Catskills before the cold completely takes over. The gold in the thinning leaves. That’s where all the voices in my head settle down and allow me to hear the ever-present music.
What kind of environment do you feel best brings out the heart of your songs?
I love a tightly packed room where you can feel everyone listening. That closeness brings out the best in the songs. I figured this out on our first house tour, something about the shared quiet makes the music land differently. And still, the right kind of raucousness is definitely welcome. I’m always looking for an appropriate amount of trouble.
How does performing in a place like Florida, with its vivid climate and atmosphere, shape your approach to a show?
Florida isn’t like anywhere else. There’s a looseness to playing in the South-below-the-South — the air itself feels alive. It makes you want to let go a little, to lean into the brightness and play like the singularity of the state is part of the band.
Matt Pond PA’s Performances
January 16 - Spinster Abbott’s
January 17 - Blue Jay Listening Room
January 18 - The Lynx Books
