We miss you...

We’ve been a long time away, and we want to be back in the game, playing shows and open mic nights and writing songs for you again. Unfortunately, we’ve been separated by an ocean this school year (Matty’s been studying in Paris), so there’s not too much we can do about it.

Except maybe we can give you the next best thing. Starting this week, we’re digging through our archives to give you everything we’ve got—music, videos, pictures, stories from the past 6 years.

This week, we’re starting with the song One Small Step for Man (So Far), the title track off our debut album, when we were still known as High Tide.

We’ve been itching for years to iron out some of the kinks that we didn’t get to the first time around, so today we’re releasing the remastered album, One Small Step for Man. Stay tuned throughout the rest of the week for more rare and unreleased material.

We hope you enjoy it!

http://pons.bandcamp.com/album/one-small-step-for-man

Exciting News!

So it’s been a bit of a crazy week for us. One week ago today we released Soft Shoulders and already we have over 700 online plays (and hopefully many more in your iTunes). And now, we’ve just gotten word that we’ll be performing next week at Tufts’ annual Battle of the Bands!

We’ve already got a killer setlist ready for you: some favorites from the new album plus maybe some old (think 2008) hits thrown in the mix. And if we win, we’ll get a once in a lifetime chance to open for Guster, The White Panda, and Lupe Fiasco!

We’d love for all of you to join us for the FREE show, with more details about what time we’ll be playing coming soon. For now, just head on over to the Facebook event to show your PONS support. 

See you Saturday!

  • 30 Plays
  • Off of the Ground (live at Tufts)PONS

Here’s an abbreviated, acoustic version of “Off of the Ground,” performed in Distler Hall, Tufts University on October 21, 2011. Go to our bandcamp to download the full version of the song, along with the rest of our new album, Soft Shoulders!

What’s in a name?

Thanks so much to everyone who downloaded the album or streamed the tracks on bandcamp! The explosion of likes and shares has been amazing, and we hope that you continue to pass on the music.

We’ve been getting a number of questions about our name PONS, so I thought I’d shine some light on the selection process. 

We first came across the name on October 21st, when Ryan joined Matty and me at Tufts for an acoustic performance of “Physics” and “Off of the Ground.“We had been in a bit of a name crisis for a while and were discussing possible changes in my room, when we all noticed the pair of German dictionaries sitting on my bookshelf.

I can remember staring at the books as a child, and almost everyone who came into my room that semester commented on them, simply because they are huge books with just the word PONS, the name of the publishing company, printed in large letters on the spine. We were transfixed by the word, and after googling it, discovered that it’s Latin for “bridge,” and it’s the name of the part of the brain that generates dreams, among other things. 

We ended up contemplating the name for a couple more weeks, but by Thanksgiving we were certain that the coupling of the unique word and the powerful symbols associated with it were too good to pass up as a name, and thus we have been PONS since Fall of 2011.

—Josh

Introduction

Hello fans, friends, and family!

We are so excited to announce the launch of the media platforms accompanying the release of our new album, Soft Shoulders. 

This album is the culmination of hundreds of hours from October 2010 to January 2012 of songwriting, recording, editing, mixing, and mastering, and it has been a real transformative experience for us as a band. For those of you who knew us before, we bid a bittersweet goodbye to the name High Tide, which we carried to two consecutive wins at Sharon High’s battle of the bands, and that we took to the SchoolJam USA Finals in Anaheim, CA in 2010. Despite how far we came with our old moniker, it just couldn’t stand up to the higher bar we set for ourselves on this album, and for that the name PONS clicked perfectly. 

Before we send you off to our Bandcamp page, where you can listen to the entire album and download it for free, there are a number of thank yous in order. First, an enormous thanks to Emma Kurman-Faber for the beautiful piano work that resurrected some songs on the brink of being cut, and reinvigorated others in need of the extra spark she added. Another huge thanks to Scott Craggs, who was so easy to work with and who provided the expert set of ears that helped unify the tracks in ways we could never have done ourselves. And finally, thanks to Andie James for a great set of shoulders. We never could have made the cover art without you.

Now, we invite you all to participate in the musical experience that we have worked so long to bring you. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or Tumblr, and most importantly, check out our Bandcamp page, where all the real magic lies.

Happy listenings,

Matty, Ryan, and Josh



Extra Thank Yous-

PONS: Will Doolittle, Lee Cohen, Leo Schwartz, and Dan Blanchet

Matty: mom, dad, maggie, bern, jon, lucas, kanes, TIDE, tufts, dorothy, patrice, MOMA, santiago et all 

Ryan: The Kaplan Fam, טל, my good friends in Field, and Andrew Jackson.

Josh: Rapps, Jameses, Dowds, Kaplans, my WMFO and METS teachers, my Tufts family, and every single person who listens all the way through the album…and AKJ again, because really…