Matt Pond PA: House Concert in Southbury, CT at Southbury – Southbury, CT

Connected Arts (Formerly Connartists) presents: Matt Pond PA on Saturday, April 25th at 7 PM.

“Matt Pond’s latest incarnation heads for the wide-open spaces of heart-swelling, Petty/Springsteen American rock.” –MOJO

Pond’s songwriting builds up to a soaring high, tapping into a magnetic vein of instant indie joy.” –Under the Radar

Set in a private space, this is a great opportunity to connect with other fans of live music and the artists who make it. By registering to attend our event, you are directly supporting artists in a powerful way.

If you have never been to one of our events, here are a few things you should know:

• Attendance is limited
• There is room to sit or stand
• You can BYO (beer, wine, sparkling water)
• Even if you come by yourself, you will meet some great people who love music just as much as you do.
• 100 % of your donation goes directly to the artists.

If you have any questions, you can reach us on Facebook, or via email.

About Matt Pond PA:

Matt Pond PA’s The Ballad of the Natural Lines is the sound of a man who loves driving fast and far, but who now balances that desire with a hard-won appreciation for slowing down and gazing in the rearview mirror to find beauty in the churned-up dust.

This broadened landscape, where Pond gets closer to the bone than ever, is one of many compelling aspects of the first Matt Pond PA album of all-new material since 2020’s A Collection of Bees, Pt. 1. After thirteen acclaimed albums, numerous singles and EPs, songs in film and television, and multiple tours to a devoted fanbase, Pond has made some significant life changes.

“I stopped drinking and lying,” he says. “Initially, I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to write songs, or parts of my personality would fall away. Now, I don’t think enough parts of my personality fell away.” Or, as he puts it over chiming electric guitar in exuberant, eponymous album opener, “I was born to be awkward / You were born to be shy /Now that the lies are untied we can see straight through our skin / Give it up to the sheltering sky / A natural line.”

The Ballad of the Natural Lines frequently offers the fascination – and occasional terror – of perspective applied to family, death-defying friendships, pivotal encounters, the overwhelming gift of another day. Although Pond’s creative life began in the refuge of the family basement – “I was comfortable there,” he says, “I knew how to survive” – he now observes the Connecticut of his often-harrowing youth as “a map of beautiful mistakes denoted by city names: Hartford, Greenwich, New London, and New Haven.” In “Connecticut,” – a co-write with longtime Matt Pond PA cohort/multi-instrumentalist Chris Hansen – he defiantly sings, over Hansen’s melodic, Joy Division-y bass line, “You can take the kid from Connecticut / But you can’t take the cut from the kid.” From his current Hudson Valley home, he adds, “My Connecticut is based on mindlessness and constant escape. I know every inch of the highway in that state.”

Prior to sober songwriting, Pond says, “I was not yet at a point where I could look back with clarity.” After his 2023 marriage to fellow singer-songwriter Anya Marina, to whom The Ballad of the Natural Lines is dedicated, Pond found stability enabled him not only to take stock of the past, it sharpened his skills as a co-producer – a role he shares with Hansen.

Throughout The Ballad of the Natural Lines, lyrics allude to – or brazenly reveal – a painful childhood, the astonishment of ardor, and acceptance of one’s shadows. Some of this is new territory for Matt Pond PA. “I’ve never wanted to reveal too much of myself,” Pond says. “But some of that reluctance has prevented me from being specific, or really getting to the heart of things.”

The Ballad of the Natural Lines enfolds those revelations in irresistible, hook-laden melodies, verses that sound like choruses, guitar work alternately delicate and muscular, high lonesome pedal steel, occasionally unusual rhythms, and plaintive, propulsive cello, courtesy longstanding Matt Pond PA member Hilary James. Of James, Pond says, “When Chris and I share our skeletal songs, she knows right where to put the organs. Almost all the parts she writes are beyond what we could ever suggest or imagine.”

The connecting thread in this varied sound palette is Pond’s burnished voice, stronger than ever, here tender and vulnerable, there blood-thick with drama. “I like albums that feel like life or death,” he says. “I like people who are passionate about what they make, not to the point of being insane, but nearly.”

Matt Pond’s road to this new phase began a few years ago with a clivia plant, flourishing now in his Kingston, NY home, and immortalized in “The Clivia in the Bedroom,” one of a trio of gorgeous, atmospheric The Ballad of the Natural Lines instrumentals. He explains, “The clivia is a lily that blooms in February, telling you, ‘Winter will be over soon.’ It was my first house plant. I said, ‘If I don’t kill it, I’ll get a dog, and move up from there.’ Did that. Then I got a yard for the first time. Then I was allowed to have an adult relationship.”

That relationship inspired The Ballad of the Natural Lines’ unabashedly besotted, swoon-y love songs. On “These Wings” Pond’s voice arcs over pulsing acoustics, and Hilary James’ ELO-esque strings. He sings, “Love the danger / In falling in / Love the danger / In falling in love.” Pond says the testimonial, unpredictably rhythmic “Lost Languages,” is “where love peaks on the album. I can nearly accept myself in this song. Change, new languages, transformation are all possible within a span of two minutes and fifty-three seconds.” Buoyed by entwined cellos, he sings, “Found a language here with you / Yes, I finally found my place /Spent my whole life sinking /I don’t need to run away.”

“Risky Business” harkens back to classic, pre-rock n’ roll songcraft, a supper club crooner inspired by equal parts Ink Spots, and, in a recitation, singer-songwriter Faye Webster. While the song evokes warm, domestic bliss between Pond and his harmonizing partner, he asserts: “We’re still wild animals playing with fire in the kitchen. We’re both gentle tyrants.”

Emboldened by that tyrannical bliss, Pond offers evocative, memory-laden tunes “Little Signs,” “Musik Express,” “Korea,” “Living Room Stage,” and “Goldie.” Observed through a lens of wonder, these excursions into the past are alternately scary and life-affirming – sometimes both. It all dovetails neatly, yet the prolific Pond says that when he and Hansen were assembling material, “There were no preconceptions for how the album was going to be. But yes, these songs tell a story.” That story, intentionally conceived or not, is one Pond has wanted to tell for a long time.

Prior to The Ballad of the Natural Lines, Pond considered retiring the Matt Pond PA moniker and starting over from scratch. But looking back cleareyed at the version of himself who created all that music, he realized the band name wasn’t the change he needed to make. It was his life. Once done, the songs on The Ballad of the Natural Lines, and the story, fell together. Tying it all together in closing track “Winged Horse,” Pond describes a new vantage point from the back of an airborne beast. He observes a life disentangled: “Hovering in the sky, and seeing all those arterial roads and rivers, realizing how they connect — the punchline revealed.”