Matt Pond’s new EP, Free Fall presents 9 songs with steady Matt Pond PA bandmate Chris Hansen. As Pond has explained, “I misnamed this project after myself. The obvious irony is that it’s always been a collaboration. The weightier secret irony at the bottom of the box is that I’m completely driven by the seasons and cities where I survive them.”

Today we share the premiere stream of Free Fall. Pond offers these reflections on the recording, which is now available for pre-order:

My consciousness is a muddled composition. Flashes of growing up in the forest, visions of streets named after trees. The faces of friends, lost in piles of leaves. A flat tire at a convenience store in Memphis where the key to a gruesome washroom is attached to a baseball bat.

In the beginning, we toured without cell phones. All we had were landlines and ragged maps. Taco Bells and coffee shops, penciled into the margins. Green and wild, we stretched out across the country without life preservers. A small ivory dot, floating over the plains of Wyoming, stark and nearly unseeable.

The scenery inside was a flipbook of flickering sunlight. A cluttered forehead resting against a cool window. Soft conversations and the radio harmonizing with droning roads. Since then, I’ve owned five fifteen passenger vans. Each one with enough miles to have driven to the the moon.

The purpose of the expedition was to connect. Even now, it’s the reason I wake up and wrestle the knots out of the bird’s nest on my head. I require songs because I fall all over my words when I try to speak. That’s the reason for all of it. Every drive, every show, every broken string and every break-up. It’s always been this way, even when I act like Steve Martin in The Jerk. This is my thermos, from me to you. It’s all free.