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Best Of 2013, Guest Editors: Matt Pond On “Paris, Texas”

As 2013 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.

It wasn’t a near-death experience, but it was enough to compel Matt Pond to hit the reset button. The newly emancipated, New Hampshire-bred frontguy for the ever-morphing outfit Matt Pond PA broke his leg on tour in 2011. Shaken by the freak occurrence and the ensuing surgery, Pond finished out the tour sitting down, then headed to St. Augustine, Fla., to convalesce with friends. Once there, he quickly took to the funky, historic northeast Florida town’s laid-back lifestyle and Southern lilt. A rejuvenated sheen permeates The Lives Inside The Lines Of Your Hands (BMG)—especially the new album’s ebullient first half. It isn’t so much that Pond has abandoned the autumnal, inward-delving perspective that pervaded 2010’s The Dark Leaves, or his long-established penchant for overt melancholy. But he has given both a thorough airing out with a blast of smog-free, temperate air. Pond will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on him.

Pond: If you were to change one second of this film, it would fall apart under its own weight. Harry Dean Stanton’s endless gaze, the drawn-out slides on Ry Cooder’s steel guitar, Robby Müller’s shots. There’s no separation between the acting, the music and the cinematography. They work as one stream of subconsciousness, tied together under Wim Wenders‘ direction. Beyond that, there’s so much force and mass in the negative space of this movie. The way we say more by saying nothing (this is not the cue to start humming “Extreme”). I don’t mind living up a little silence, a spot loneliness. When the larger world becomes too loud, I head to a cabin in the Catskills and grind my swiveling thoughts into gritty pieces of music. And beyond, there’s The Spirit Of The Beehive, The 400 Blows, Days of Heaven, L’eclisse and so on.

Video after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b44paD20O3M