Matt Pond PA‘s The State Of Gold is of a piece with the singer/songwriter’s previous work in its tension between plaintive longing and earnest a ffirmations. Paradoxically, it’s a confident album about having doubts; it looks outward as well as inward. Pond will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new feature on him.
Pond: In a quick scan of my mind, I believe Haruki Murakami is my favorite living writer. My dreams still get tangled up in the visceral scenes of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84, scenes that have wrapped themselves so tightly around my mind that I feel as if I lived them myself. Murakami’s writing makes it possible to fully invest in the unbelievable, to be drawn into worlds and events that could never exist but still seem entirely real at the same time. Cynical-minded people may recoil and gag. But as a semi-cynical-minded person myself, I’m drawn in. There’s a pace and calmness to Murakami’s novels, even when he’s making it seem as if the axe murderer’s ascending the stairs. In his native Japan, Murakami isn’t as critically well-received as he is elsewhere. He’s an outsider in his own home. He skirts the issue in interviews. His reaction is to let it go. In a certain sense, he’s forced to occupy another world outside of himself, just like the characters in his novels. I want his powers. Not the genius of his woven words—although that wouldn’t hurt—but I want to be able to steel myself against the velocity of the outside world through the powers of other supposable worlds. There’s nothing like a lull.
Video after the jump.
