Tonight after work I'm trekking to North Jersey to see Matt Pond PA, who have been one of my favorite bands for a few years. I try to explain my infatuation with this band to people and sometimes they get it but mostly they don't. I'll try again.

Basically, I have a preternatural concern for place and time which manifests itself in my tastes in books, movies, art, music, etc. I think in a way this concept appeals to everyone. To hear a song and find yourself transported to a specific place or time in your life is an amazing thing. Its why people dance to certain songs at weddings, for example. But taking a melody and then tying it to a moment is the easiest of several routes to that end. What's far more challenging, and I think noteworthy, is to somehow craft something (be it a song, film, or painting) which is wholly imbued with a sense of time and space from the start.

This is what Matt Pond PA is to me, generally, and why I will travel a few hours back and forth to see them on a Thursday night. There are of course exceptions. I hear Halloween and I'm in an apartment where I listened to it on repeat a dozen times or more. I hear Summer (Butcher Two) and I'm barefoot in someone's wet grass, having a cool drink on a July night. But even better than this are the songs that take me places I have never been, and which make me know feelings that I have no real reason to feel. Musical escapism is my concern here, and it's something for which I have the utmost respect and admiration.



In other news, after a decade with old red, I purchased a new guitar. Expect a new post when it shows up on my doorstep.