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From The Desk Of matt pond PA: Sundays And Nuns

The 11th matt pond PA full-length, Winter Lives, features artwork that evokes Windham Hill’s catalog. Winter Lives arrives 11 years after Pond’s nearly all covers EP, Winter Songs. Pond, a New Hampshire native, understands the season that inspired Winter Lives, but he needed to write winter songs in the spring, so the album would arrive in context. Given his background, Pond didn’t scratch down too far to find inspiration. “It’s just visceral,” he says of winter. “There’s this coldness and shut-down emotional temperament to people in northern places, but when you get through that, there’s so much depth and reality to northern people.” Pond will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com over the next two winter weeks. Read our new feature on him.

Pond: I don’t like Sundays. I don’t like the feeling of failing and falling the day seems to imbue. Silent and gray. (Morrissey sometimes really said it best.) Sundays are the chasm in which I was dropped off between parents, the nights I first developed a healthy case of insomnia—dreading the dawn, waiting to get on the hillbilly bus and go to school. If I were in solitary confinement, I believe I could spot a Sunday just from the alchemical reaction between the hours and my soul. But I do like nuns. Theoretically, that is. I believe in their belief, their undying dedication to a premise, both indeterminate and totally determined. Their fervor is insane. And the habits, the black-and-white elegance of medieval constancy, of dragon-slaying fortitude. They’re both classic and core.