Listening to Matt Pond PA is like going through an old photo album and noticing everything in the background: your old couch, the tree you climbed as a kid, or the look in a friend’s eyes that reveals more now than you’d ever have imagined then. MPPA captures those moments, bringing the background into the foreground while acknowledging our failure to realize the beauty in these moments. Using a traditional singer-songwriter approach as the core of each song, the band dramatically expands upon the music’s simplicity with a delicately orchestrated layer that infuses cello, violin, and keyboards into a conventional rock band. Invoking wistful yet loving language, and most strikingly, discarding the common abstractions that plague most artists who are striving to write something meaningful, Matt Pond’s songs paint pictures of moments in everyday life. Each song is to music what a still life is to a painter, capturing the beauty of things that one might pass over otherwise. “There are things that mean things, subtle things, that end up somehow getting stuck in your head,” says Pond. “You can’t let it go and it drives you crazy, so you have to put it outward in some way. Rather than punching trees or kicking things, you write songs.”

Emblems, their latest release, builds upon the so-called chamber pop of past albums, and with a new generation of band members, it has added a new dimension to the music. Although Pond is clearly the primary songwriter and lead singer, the musicians around him deserve more than the secondary role that comes along with the band name. “I think that some people that used to play in this band didn’t like the moniker, and I didn’t really like it either, but I didn’t see how it really deterred from people noticing their contribution. But then other people did, and, you know, I always tried to make it seem that it is a band,” he says. Pond has always found talented artists to surround him, and the recent additions of guitarist Brian Pearl and drummer Dan Crowell, as well as returning cellist Eve Miller and bassist Will Levatino, are no exception. Miller’s cello is the defining feature of the band’s sound, and without her they might be just another solid group of musicians whose songs are pleasant but forgettable. Instead, Eve pulls the quintet together, making Pond’s lyrics seem more poignant and the band’s musicianship more noteworthy. For although the other members lack nothing in particular, they need that extra element that Eve provides to pull it all together.

Matt Pond PA proves that you can still write creative music without turning yourself into a purely experimental band, unless of course you consider a cellist in a rock band experimental. “I don’t think it’s that hard to write music,” he says. “It can be pretty formulaic. I ride the line-like, I can push things to being so obtuse…but you know, I like the Beatles.” Pond has been willing to recognize that being different for the sake of being different does not create meaningful songs. A band can forge a distinct sound without forcing overly complicated rhythms or out of tune guitar work. Matt Pond PA understands this, and has developed an unmistakable style in their music while remaining quite listenable.

Much of the band’s success can be attributed to Matt’s ability to figure out the songwriting process. “I think I’ve found the formula for writing my own songs, but still, how other people react…the most uncomfortable part of working on a song is when you first play it in front of people that are your friends that are going to play on it. They’re the ones that decide whether it’s really worth it or not. I mean, I’ve written some of the worst songs that have ever existed, and thankfully they’ve been like, ‘don’t do that! That’s bad, stop what you’re doing and try something else.’” So ultimately, the key to the band’s songs doesn’t just lie with what Matt comes up with, but what they do (or don’t do) with the many of the ideas that he presents. His formula seems to be as much the process of bringing songs to the table and listening to criticism as it is the ability to put down words, lines, and verses in the right places. “Sometimes other people overtake a song and make it the way I never could. Sometimes I have a definitive idea of what I want it to be,” he says. Therefore, the band is often more PA than it is Matt Pond.

The rough part for Matt Pond PA seems to be in the struggles of life on the road. Like a family vacation that never ends, with hours upon hours packed in a van, conflicts are inevitable. “It’s hard to play with your really good friends…you end up hating each other,” says Matt. “Everything causes conflict, like…eating a muffin. ‘Why would you eat bran muffin when you could eat a blueberry muffin?’” he mimics. The tiniest details and most mundane differences become significant, and these added up and affected the band’s performances in the past. “You couldn’t predict your conditions. I mean, 40% of the shows were really tough, and the [former band members] took it tough and didn’t play hard. If we’re going to play, I’m going to play hard every night. Eve plays hard every night, this band now plays hard every night-they’re weird and they have their own wide array of mental deficiencies, including myself, but you have to consolidate and put them to the side to play.”

Life under the radar of the major music industry has always been a welcome struggle for Pond. “It’s the mid-level American indie rock artist, and it’s the toughest thing in the world,” he says. “People will say file sharing is great-I say its not. Obviously big bands aren’t selling as much music, little bands are selling less. It’s weird the way music is treated. It’s treated like some sort of bastard art, and maybe it is. But I don’t like most reviews and most reviewers and most magazines because I think they take too lightly the thing that they deal with. Bands are still trying really hard to make music and they’re just getting shut down.” Nevertheless, Matt Pond PA has been able to stay afloat due, in part, to a stint writing music for the Oxygen Network a few years ago. “I don’t think we were selling ourselves short,” he says. “It was for a friend, it was with our old producer, and Eve and I and Mike Kennedy [now the drummer of Lefty's Deceiver]. It was one of those things when you try to infuse a popular or populist thing with your own ideals, and basically that’s probably why after a while it just stopped.” Matt admits, “We were riding the line of cheesy, but it was fun to do, and it was fun to spend their money. I’d do it again. We weren’t giving them our songs.” So although some might label them as sellouts, Pond explains, “you see a huge billboard in New York of Blonde Redhead posing for, what is it, the Gap?-and you kind of realign yourself on your principles of what it is to sell out. I think in the early 90′s selling out was such a preoccupation.” Maybe it still is, but “as long as you’re true to yourself,” he says and mutters “that sounds so stupid,” and finally he adds, “as long as you’re true to yourself, who cares?”

Following their performance at Graceland in Seattle, the members of The Race were kind enough to sit down with Yaeka and me to talk a little bit about their new album If You Can and touring in general.

So is this your first time out here on the west coast?
Craig: Yes, this is our first time here.

I was reading that there wasn’t much touring behind The Perfect Gift.
Steve: I think there might have been about two weeks that we did.

So what was it that helped motivate you guys to get out on a full national tour for If You Can?
Steve: I did.
Kevin: He’s the drill sergeant of rock and roll.
Steve: The Perfect Gift was a record where the whole band as it is now was just coming together after it was recorded. It was also the first record that the label that we’re on put out in any sort of serious fashion so everything kind of happened in the wrong order. We got done with two and a half weeks of tour before the record came out and everyone just kind of thought that it didn’t feel right, but on this record, everything was recorded and everything was done in sort of the right order so now we’re touring as much as we can to support that record.

The sound on this album is a little different. It’s a lot crisper and cleaner. Was that a result of putting all the pieces together or is that something you had in mind for the last album, but it wasn’t exactly possible?
Kevin: I think it is due to the recording technique more than anything. Before we were going to tape with inexperienced engineers and now all of a sudden we had a couple of guys on our hands who really knew what to do with the equipment they had and made everything sound really crispy and clean and lovely. I think for the most part it sounds exactly how we wanted it to sound whereas before we never really had the option to try.
Craig: We took a lot of time with this album.
Steve: I think the songs too. The songs evolved to a point on this record where they had the opportunity to be fully realized whereas on the old album it was just set up and play what you got and that’s it. On this one we spent tons of time paying attention to the most minute detail.
Craig: And before that too just working out the parts there was this point before we recorded the record where pretty much all of us somewhat knew all of the different parts. Not drums, but as far as bass and guitar and piano it was very collaborative. We worked a lot of it out in the practice space and also we played all the songs live at shows except for maybe one so we had been playing them for months before we headed into the studio. It was just at a different point. The Perfect Gift was kind of like an explosion of ideas just doing everything we could do since we had this studio we could work with. This one was much more deliberate so we were able to focus on the sound of each different part and were able to rip it apart and decide how it should go. We were able to strip it down to its essence.
Steve: We had these two guys who usually just make electronic music and will spend just hours making one measure of beats and so they got this indie rock band on their hands with a bunch of songs and I think the combination just sort of worked out well. We got to spend a lot of time making songs that were written instead of spending time doing that in the studio.

I also read that you had over twenty written songs before you went into the studio, but overall the album is still under half an hour.
Band: Yeah.
So is it that you guys are perfectionists or…
Steve: No, basically what happens is Craig writes a lot of songs and most of them are just garbage and we have to throw them out.
Craig: Fuck You!
laughter
Steve: Half of it is Jeremy and I going through them and we’re like garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, all right, that’s a good song. We got to rewrite this one. Garbage, garbage, garbage. No, but in this band there’s just an incredible wealth of songwriting. There’s nothing the members of this band enjoy more than writing a song and coming up with ideas so almost naturally there were just a ton of ideas that went into the studio. It was really a collaborative environment where everyone worked on a different aspect. The songs that made it on the record are the ones we all thought deserved to be on the record.

So do you think you’ll ever work with Telefon Tel Aviv again?
Kevin: It might not even be an option. One of the guys moved back to New Orleans and the other guy is just really busy. It’s not generally what they do — recording bands. I think we’ll probably leave it how it was and see what other options we have.
Steve: For whatever we do next, we’ll be exploring a bunch of different options. Really we’re just kind of working on songs right now and then we’ll feel out what the options are for the next record.

How’s the tour going so far besides the breaking car…well not your car, but…
Steve: I’m becoming a really big fan of Old Canes; I’ve got to tell you. They’re really good.
Jeremy: I haven’t listened to their record but I enjoy their live show so much.
Steve: We have the record, but haven’t listened to it once.
Jeremy: I realize that. We’re playing Trivial Pursuit every day.
Steve: Well this is our first time out on the west coast and so far we’ve played in St. Louis and Kansas City. We’ve played in Omaha, then Denver and Salt Lake and now we’re here in Seattle. So far it’s been great. I think the one thing we’ve realized is that we’ve been driving a lot. It’s a 19-date tour and we’ve been driving like eight hours a day. So far there have been great turnouts to all the shows and it’s been a lot of fun.

During the long drives have you come up with any creative ways to pass the time?
Kevin: Trivial Pursuit. The World Series of Trivial Pursuit. We have our own rules. Jeremy, maybe you can explain the rules.
Jeremy: We have so much time that we’ve turned Trivial Pursuit into a baseball game where you’ve got two teams and you ask all the questions on a card. Let’s say we get five and the other team gets four then we get one run because we got one more right than the other team. You play nine innings and whoever has more runs wins that game and we do a seven game series. That’s our big hour eater. We have ten different variations of Trivial Pursuit, that’s our main activity. Once and a while we’ll listen to music, but for the most part we don’t say anything and we just stare into space for hours and hours. It’s hard to make good use of twelve hours in a van. We could play a ton of different cities on the east coast easily because they’re all so close together, but west coast, everything is like 10 hours away so we’re doing some insane driving and I think we’re all losing our minds.

So you’re not making mix tapes ahead of time for your road trips?
Jeremy: Music is such a small element of driving. I don’t know why.
Steve: Well, what the main problem is that we just built a loft in our van with all our equipment in the back and in the front of the van there are two stereo speakers and the one next to the drivers left foot works, but everything else is just sort of blown out and just sounds horrible.
Jeremy: So the original question was how the tour is going.
Kevin: It’s good.
Jeremy: Yeah, it’s going very well. I think that we all love being on the road and have positioned ourselves in our life so that we would be able to do this as much as possible and we want to just keep playing shows. But you really should check out Old Canes. It’s hard to describe their music. I call it “skiffle” because I don’t have a better way to describe it. Every night a different song of theirs gets stuck in my head. Incredible band. Great music. It’s been a lot of fun touring with them.

Tell us about the cover art for If You Can
Craig: There were a few stages in the process of the cover art. The basic idea for it came about from a friend of Kevin and mine and actually Jeremy knew her as well. It’s a really long sad story, honestly, but a person that we all knew very well had this idea that she was going to build a replica of the Biblical arc in the desert of New Mexico and tragically about a year ago she died in a car accident. There’s a song on the record called “Arc Again” and it is kind of about that in a way as much as you can talk about something that is so serious in a song. It’s music and can never convey something like that, but that was the basic idea and there was a song that came about. The album was very thought out and every detail was sort of pored over. So we thought we’d take this drawing that Kevin did which is just sort of this sketch of this idea of a song and it came about that we thought it’d be really cool if we had someone who could hand sew all of this stuff. You know, a sort of quilt and this girl Sara, Sara Kohl, who is related to all these people here hanging out with us right now and distracting me from this interview, stitched all of this stuff for me. So it was sort of this idea and this drawing that Kevin made that kind of encompassed the idea of a song and then something bigger than that. A lot of ideas at once.
Kevin: I don’t know if it comes out like this, but it’s pretty detail oriented as far as the position of the stars in the sky being actual constellations in a certain part of the United States, namely the southwest, during a certain part of the year, but I don’t know if that’s really important at all.
Craig: There’s a lot of things together. In the end the idea is that we spent so much time on this record and that everything is kind of like a stitch everything is sewn together over this long period of time. We really thought about it and analyzed it and were just trying to do something and we didn’t even really know what it was that we were trying to do. Just do something that was…I don’t even know how to say it. It’s overwhelming when I think about it. It doesn’t do justice to anything. Someone spent all this time hand stitching all the stuff; all the words, everything.

It made a lot of sense…you conveyed it well. All the parts and the detail and effort that went into the album is apparent — you hear it and you see it.
Craig: I’m glad that you saw that. I didn’t know if it was apparent. That was the idea when we came up with that. Something that just fit with what we were doing. As soon as we started to actually do it. She was working on it and it made sense.
Kevin: That’s a pretty good spiel about the artwork.

It was a rather cold, rainy night in Seattle when Yaeka and I headed to Seattle’s Chop Suey for a show featuring Grand Buffet, Rogue Wave, Hawnay Troof, and headlining Mates of State. The set was rather short due to the lengthy billing, but it still of course kicked ass in typical Grand Buffet style. As was the case with the one other Grand Buffet performance I had seen away from the Colgate campus, where the group’s performances are now legendary, the crowd began afraid and rather unsure of how to respond to the two men performing on stage. This uneasiness was demonstrated clearly when Jared (aka Lord Grunge) performed his trademark dance moves onstage while Jackson (aka Grape-a-don) made his way into the crowd and approached an audience member with right hand in the air, requesting a high-five. The young woman, stunned, just stood there, looking at Jackson until he moved on to receive a high-five from someone else. However, she wasn’t completely in the clear, Jackson returned once again and she, now understanding that the typical performer-audience rules didn’t apply, gave him five. The situation is one that Jared and Jackson have had to deal with before and they explained their willingness to confront these situations.

Yaeka: If you dislike pretentious people so much, is it difficult being in the music world?
Jared: Very, but also they’re great cannon fodder; pretense is the easiest thing to assault. I’m not out to crush anyone’s self-respect, but crush someone’s pretense, sure, why not? You’re doing them a goddamn favor.
Jackson: It helps that that kind of attitude exists to kind of clear a path and find kindred spirits in music or in art.
Jared: Or just in life.
Jackson: Yeah, and in the audience once you call people out for playing that game, usually people will start to cheer up—it’s like a middle school dance, everywhere. It doesn’t matter how smart the people are at times. When they see the group not dancing, and then when they see everyone dancing, they would feel weird if they weren’t.
Jared: It’s not an intellectual thing. Some of the smartest, most intelligent people are the most miserable, self-loathing pretentious assholes. It’s not like it’s playing on one’s intellect, but it’s about getting people to be real, be cool. To me that’s not an intellectual thing. Our shit definitely has an intellectual component that I think people can appreciate, but that’s not all there is to it. I definitely think that we do shit that people would dig if they would just fucking let go of their garbage, you know, it’s the emperor’s new clothes phony shit. It’d be like, pardon the expression, it’d be like if in a high school the retard with glasses that everyone fucking hates the shit out of. It’d be like at the game—the football game—the team is down five points and the fucking homo, retard four-eyes loser scores a touchdown for the team; they’re going to forget how shitty they are. They’re just going to drop it and that’s kind of how it is for me when we crack the crowd and they get that we’re not playing by their rules. Maybe that’s not a good analogy at all, I just wanted to say the word “retard.” But it’s like sometimes when you hit people hard enough they will relinquish the whole pretense.

During their performance, Jackson took a moment to share with the crowd that he and Jared had seen Cheaper by the Dozen. However, it wasn’t this film that dominated Grand Buffet’s sharing with the crowd that if they didn’t like the show they could simply use The Butterfly Effect to go back in time and change the results. The change that they spoke about was a bit more extreme than what I had imagined as they’re alternate ending would have led to their death so that they wouldn’t have even been able to perform. It turns out that such ideas aren’t incredibly out of line for the Pittsburgh duo.

Jackson: That’s always been a source of humor—our destruction or the destruction of the people that have given an ounce of a fuck about our music. It just makes sense to us on a comic level and in two years we’ll do shows and no one will laugh at all because it will be so goddamned funny. We’re just moving on that kind of level. Or everyone will laugh just because they want to be part of the fun. We did a show in New York where it was like that. A lot of the shit we were saying were inside jokes or jokes that had no punchline—there was nothing funny about it—but they were laughing just because they wanted. They knew instinctively that we were hipper, that we just had more fun inside of us and they just wanted to be liked.

One of the concert highlights was the performance of a song from Grand Buffet’s future children’s album. A couple of the children’s songs have been regulars at Grand Buffet shows over the past couple of years and it was the direction Grand Buffet planned on taking with these songs that intrigued us the most.

Yaeka: So tell us about this children’s album.
Jared: It’s really coming.
Yaeka: And you’re taking it totally seriously?
Jared: Yeah, it’s not backhanded and it’s not ironic. It’s an honest pop album. It doesn’t cater to kids, but it is for anyone.
Jackson: When we were growing up, Jim Henson was still alive and parents liked kid’s programs too because the music was good and it kept their attention—it was quality. It wasn’t just making baby faces for the kids. It wasn’t just stupid. It was practical and game was being kicked. And so we’re writing pop songs, we like melodies, and so we’re writing children’s songs. Why not?
Jared: Why not, dude?
Jackson: We’re the type of dudes that people should feel safer babysitting their kids. You see us; you see all; we’re multi-dimensional people. Where as people that have a more respectable role in society, notably people in religion or teachers, turn out to be really sick creepy assholes.
Yaeka: Were you guys babysitters?
Jared: Actually, I was starting to say this before, post-Borders during the summer of ’99 I babysat. An ex-girlfriend of mine had the gig and one night there was this whole group of kids so I went to help. Then she moved so I got to pick up a little extra work. It was just for one family, but still I like having that under my belt.
Yaeka: Do children love you?
Jared: Well I love kids and I think that’s what makes the difference. People can know how to act around kids and that’s one aspect of it, and then there are people that honestly just try to appreciate kids. I love people who aren’t pretentious period and most kids haven’t learned how to be pretentious; that’s why I feel a vibe with kids. Some people say that kids are like grown ups, but, no, bullshit, they’re not, they’re kids. They’re clean, they’re honest, they’re real and that’s what I can relate to.
Jackson: Definately.
Jared: And that’s why I like babysitting.
PhiLL: So the kids album, is it just going to be an album or are you going to tour with it?
Jackson: It’s going to be an album, we want to get Grand Buffet a little bit bigger and put out a legit children’s album under a different name, Gorilla and Fox. We want to hit a legit children’s entertainment market, but at the same time we want to have the option of opening up for ourselves at clubs.
Jared: That’s why we are really laying back about putting the album out. The more established we get Grand Buffet first, the better because the kid’s shit is a side project. We’ve been doing this stuff for years at Grand Buffet shows.

By the time their set was done, the majority of the audience had been won over and newly made fans were seen purchasing the entire Trilogy of Terror collection. We experienced our first Grand Buffet show about four years ago. At that show Jared ended the set by breaking a bottle over his head. Now that Grand Buffet had several tours under their belt and were definitely attracting a larger audience. We wondered if maybe over the years the fans had started becoming crazier than Grand Buffet.

Jared: Really cool fans, like a couple, well I guess I’m just thinking of one diehard fan. She’s actually one of my best friends now. She was insane, before we ever met she sent us this thing and she wrote it with her left hand or something so it looked like it was written by an eight year old and she put a picture of some eight year old girl and I totally thought it was from some kid.
Jackson: What was the question?
Jared: Do we have any crazy fans?
Jackson: Oh yeah, we have a lot of crazy fans.
Jared: But she’s like the craziest one ever.
Jackson: She’s just like one of the crazy fans that it’s fun to hang out with
Jared: She’s not just like a fan anymore. She started out as a fan, but now she’s like a close friend. That was a weird transition. It’s like Steven Seagal fucking his babysitter and getting her pregnant. Steven Seagal and Kelly LeBrock named their kid after the babysitter. Then a couple years later Seagal was fucking the woman he named his kid after with his wife. That’s what I mean, it’s just weird. The only shit she knew us from was our music, but that was cool because that was like a gateway to a pretty bona fide friendship.
Jackson: I don’t know. What are some other ones?
Jared: Oh dude, like at Reno. We just played at Reno and this dude and his girl they came to Healdsburg ““ they’re from San Francisco ““ which is like an hour drive, no big deal and then they came to Reno. This dude, we think he’s a scientologist, he’s a super cool dude, but they like bought us a fucking hotel room. I went and played blackjack with dude until 7 am and he was just a maniac. I love casinos, but I fear and respect them. This dude was just totally fucking with everyone that worked there and almost got us thrown out. They came to like three shows in a row. They came to Healdsburg, Reno and then San Fran and bought us the hotel room. That was a first.
Jackson:But we’ve had kids roll out to shows with homemade t-shirts that reference our songs. I guess it’s your definition of crazy.

I wondered, though, how many of the less diehard fans were aware of an album that came out before Sparkle Classic, the album Grand Buffet has been touting as their “first album” on the website.

PhiLL: So Sparkle Classic, that’s the first album?
Jared: Officially.
PhiLL: Okay, because I found a copy of…
Jared: Scrooge McRock. Truth be told, Scrooge McRock is a demo. We’re not hiding from it, but it was a demo. We wanted to get signed so we tried to make something that was a means to an end.
Jackson: There was a three year gap between those albums. That was basically our high school album. It represents our creative level at high school.
Jared: Yeah, well there’s still, well did you dig any of it?
PhiLL: I am a big fan of the one about little league.
Jared: “Headballs”.
Jackson: Yeah, that’s the one people still mention.
Jared: There’s a few tracks on there that I think are cool, but it’s just a demo. It’s not really us. It’s a demo, bro.
PhiLL: It doesn’t say demo on it.
Jared: I know! You know what, dude, it’s a demo and it looks like
Jackson: It was well put together for a local first album. We had the visual game tight before we had the rest.
Jared: The reason I call it a demo is because at that point all we wanted was to get a deal. We tried to craft something that would rope it in. It’s the most contrived thing we have ever done. To me that’s the thing about it that’s not cool.

As our interview at Denny’s came to a close around 3 am, most of what we learned about this pair was not captured on tape. The pair that makes up Grand Buffet are very different individuals and take what they say and do very seriously, but most importantly when Jared says, “RESPECT”, he truly means it and it’s that mutual respect that keeps Grand Buffet together.