Matt Pond PA

From a cabin in the woods outside of Bearsville, NY--where there's nothing much to do but watch the grass grow up with the coyotes, deer, turkeys, and yes, bears--Matt Pond let go of all those studio entanglements and hacked off a piece of his own fate. Trusting in the flicker at the end of the tunnel, he gives us The Dark Leaves, due April 2010.
It's been a few years since matt pond PA's, Last Light. And in the meantime, there's been some razing, rooting and rebuilding. You can hear it in the song “Ruins,” and you can feel it in a strain called “Remains.”

Out of the gate on Running Wild, starting blocks in a Louisville backyard, on a broken piece of a Miller High Life, to the sidewalk grass of Brooklyn Fawn, to the Specks of gold in the Connecticut River which divide New Hampshire and Vermont, to reeling mistakes washed away in cracked sinks of Virginia hotel bathrooms. Spinning seeds, green eyes, sleepless nights and sparrows in the rafters, they all make up the unsound holes in a heart bent on survival. These are the far flung, stories and symbols of inconsequential pain that somehow end up getting a person completely absorbed by their own pitch-black night -- all the way back around to when the dark finally leaves.

In this era of technological advancements, it's remarkable that something can be repaired the old-fashioned way -- dismantling the gears to put it all back together again. After almost giving up on the world outside the woods, Matt Pond, with the invaluable aid of Chris Hansen (engineer, co-producer), returns with The Dark Leaves. It's a record about surrendering and not, about being done with darkness and having something to sing about it.