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From The Desk Of matt pond PA: The Future (A New Morrissey)

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 want to live. I like it most days. There are guitars, there are songs, there’s food, some drinks, a little nightlife, a little dancing. As a basic concept, it’s pretty brilliant. Still, though I’m not prone to rational fears—moths, marriage and slatted stairs are my mental nemeses—I fear the future, the feckless nature in which we approach truth and meaning in our modern world. What I fear is the fear. I fear that human beings are willfully disconnecting from reality and other human beings. All in some strange desire to avoid the heart of existence: we live and then we die. It is simple and beautiful.

I guess what I’m saying is we need another Morrissey. Not that he’s even close to perfection, neither musically nor as a person. But he was one hell of an authentic human being—existing as a flawed, larger-than-life, pompadoured and dour voice of the misbegotten. Morrissey makes our ceaseless bleating timeless and fun—he puts the teen back into the aged.

Fear, death, complaints. They will disappear in the fake smoke and fugue of this perfectly lit dance party for one. “The more you ignore me, the closer I get. You’re wasting your time.”