Recently I was able to schedule a Zoom call with Canadian power pop band, PONY, to discuss everything that went into their new album called Clearly Cursed. I asked the band about the meaning behind key songs on the new LP, their upcoming touring plans, and much more. At the time of the interview, PONY had to cancel almost all of their U.S. tour dates due to Visa issues, but the band has since announced some additional dates supporting Phoneboy and Heart Attack Man (dates below). If you’re enjoying the interview, please consider pre-ordering Clearly Cursed here.
Thank you both for your time today! Your third studio album is called Clearly Cursed and will be released on February 13th. Can you discuss the circumstances that led to your band wanting to call your new album this?
Sam Bielanski: There are a lot of circumstances that I was actually thinking about before this interview where I don’t want to sound like a complainer, but every inch of our trajectory, and every inch of our time doing this project has been pretty challenging. And I think,really, the only thing that hasn’t been cursed has been you, Matty, joining forces with me. But other than that, and Joe, of course Joe, we’re so grateful for Joe…but it’s just been like band members leaving, management leaving labels scamming us, other managers leaving us, switching recording engineers midway through, mixing engineers scamming us…it has been, I hate to be one of those people who’s like,” it’s so hard being a musician…” but it is so hard. And we were watching a lot of movies like Possession. We watched John Cassavetes opening night, and I was seeing a lot of these videos of women before and after lobotomies on TikTok. And I was like, “Oh, my God, that’s me! I see myself in this.” And so that kind of sparked the song that we wrote called “Clearly Cursed,” which was a song where Matty wrote the instrumental and I wrote the vocal melody and lyrics, and I think that was our first time doing that. Or, was that one of the first times of us writing in this way, and that kind of sparked this journey that I went on thinking about how my life is clearly cursed. And then that kind of reminded me of this time when I went to a psychic when I was 21 and she told me I had a dark spirit attachment. And right around that time, I also think I broke a mirror, so it has been a lot of bad luck going along the way.
Wow, it sounds like it!
Matty Morand: Are you a basketball fan?
I am.
Matty: Yeah, okay, so I feel like our time as a band, I really relate it to like the ‘23-’24 Pistons season, where, just like all of the parts are good, but they just never win…no joke. <Laughter>
<Laughter> I live in the DC area, and my Wizards are very cursed. They haven’t been good since I’ve been alive…Anyways, I love the upbeat nature of your lead single called “Middle of Summer,” even if the lyrical material seems to be coming from a sadder place, I’ll say. Can you walk me through your guys’ writing process on this track?
Sam: Yeah, so for this track, I wanted to just write a little piece of music to honor our cat who we had lost a couple summers before, and I showed Matty, and I wasn’t really feeling like this is going to be on the record. I was just like, here’s a little thing I wrote for Fret. And then Matty was like, “No, this has to be on the record.” And then Matty wrote beautiful guitar parts. So basically, for that song, I would write a skeleton of more of a synth-pop version of the song, because I write everything on my iPhone. I write on my iPhone because it’s just so easy for me. That way I can get down all my ideas in a very concise way. Yeah, it’s like the sketch of the song, and then I send that to Matty, and then Matty builds on that alone. And then I’ll come back in and we’ll build on it even more together with harmonies and different guitar parts. And then our bass player and drummer added their stuff to it in the studio, and then we worked with this amazing engineer, Alex Gamble, who also really adds stuff to the mix.
Pretty cool! So I understand you’ll be touring this soon. How do you plan on crafting your set list now with three albums worth of material?
Matty: That’s a great question.
Sam: Every day, Matty and I also work together, and every day I’m like, maybe I’ll come upstairs and we’ll work on the set list and see what we should do for the set list. And I keep putting it off, because I do feel like it’s pretty daunting. Also never got to tour on TV Baby. So a lot of those songs we’ve never played live, but at the same time, it’s like, “Should we just be playing newer stuff?” Give that an opportunity to have some life. So I don’t know what we’re going to do….he last tour we did, we didn’t play a single song from TV Baby, right?
Matty: No, I don’t think so.
Sam: We didn’t so that we’ve kind of like moving away from those songs in the live set. So I don’t even know if we’re gonna play any of those on this. We’re gonna try and focus more on the new stuff.
Okay, yeah, it’s a very old school style of set list creation, where a lot of times bands would put out an album in the 70s, and then they’d just play it front to back, and then maybe play some extra tracks at the end, kind of thing. So I’ve heard the advance of the new record. This record would suit that type of setting. I think playing it from front to back, it flows really well.
Sam: Thank you! I think we have the luxury of not many people knowing about us, so they won’t be disappointed if we don’t play the old stuff. We’re kind of traditionalists when it comes to the album and the way we approach all of that stuff. I don’t think we have a very modern approach to streaming and that sort of thing.
To each his own! I wrote the review of your last record called Velveteen, which I really enjoyed. What did you want to do differently as a band on Clearly Cursed to keep evolving over time?
Sam: I think that on Velveteen, that was like the first time that we were feeling kind of empowered to do our own production. A little more like TV Baby, those songs as they are on the record. That’s how they sounded in the practice space. You know what I mean? It was very classic, like a punk band in a room, stuff. Velveteen, we were coming out of the pandemic. We had spent a lot of time, just like learning how to do it in our rooms, on the computer, on the phone, whatever. And then when it came time to do the new album, Clearly Cursed, it was like, I feel like we really dove into that and spent a lot of time crafting the structure of the songs, the layers…like the way a chorus works, all of that sort of stuff. It was just expanding on and diving further into the way that the song is constructed. And on Velveteen, a lot of the songs, because the pandemic was so emotional, a lot of those songs on Velveteen, I wrote about other things, like television shows and books, because I didn’t really want to do any of the “trauma mining” that I would have normally done writing a record and so on. With Clearly Cursed, I wanted to move away from not being connected lyrically to my songs anymore. So I tried to really, really be like…a lot of the songs on this record are like diary entries, or are my deep subconscious thoughts. So we tried, I think we tried to get a little deeper in the production of it, and as well as, like, the content of the record.
And this past year was pretty trying in general…at least based on the constant news cycle in the states and bad news politically, every hour, it seems like. Every day it seems a little bit trickier than the next. So how do you guys stay grounded and protect your mental health, both at home and on the road?
Sam: I think we really do practice, whether or not we do it consciously, gratitude. We’re so grateful. We really count our blessings. Grateful to have each other, grateful for our cats and our friends and family. Medication helps.
Matty: I think trying to balance staying healthy, going to the gym, eating properly is really good on tour, especially. We really try to stay healthy. We don’t go out after the shows. We go right to bed. We all try to get sleep. We like each other, which I think is important.
Sam: We’re both quite community-centric people. We have a lot of people in our lives. We love those people, we love the music community that we’re from, and that we’ve been able to cultivate through playing music and knowing all of these different people in different parts of the United States and Canada and whatnot. It’s easier, I think, to stay grounded when your mindset is a smaller community, and how you can better that, and how you can have a positive influence on the people around you in the world that you are able to control, or have some say in your life.
Oh, absolutely, yeah. That’s a great way of looking at it, and it’s good advice for people to follow, too. So where do you guys find most of your inspiration for the lyrics and on the new record for Clearly Cursed?
Sam: So, yeah, that’s what we were saying earlier. I was trying to, in a way, exercise these demons that I have in me that I feel are associated with being cursed and identifying as cursed. And a lot of times I’ll try it, I’ll have an idea come to me, and then I’ll really like zero in on that. Like one of the songs sunny something is a song that is kind of like the personification of your hometown being like an evil demon, and it like ruining the lives of the people who stayed. But then also you have this guilt that you left them behind, stuff like that, and just like “Super glue.” It is a song that I wrote about being jealous, which I think a lot of people may be ashamed to feel jealousy, but I was like, “No, you know what? I’m feeling this jealousy. I’m gonna really dissect it, and try to pick apart and use those feelings.” Like the ugly feelings that you can feel, and turn it into something out of thin air, basically. And in that case, it’s being jealous of somebody else’s success, or perceived success, or whatever. I feel like that’s something everybody relates to, and is instantly relatable on the internet.
Absolutely. So the last question I have for you guys is, what do you hope fans of Pony will keep in mind when they hear Clearly Cursed for the first time in full this February?
Sam: That’s a good question. I hope that they can feel some sort of connection to the record. I hope that they will feel like I love when someone will come up to me and be like, I love this song because it’s about this. And I’m like, that’s not what it’s about, but I love that it was about that for you like I hope that they can feel a connection to the songs in a cool way. And I also hope that they can see that we’ve grown as songwriters and that they aren’t disappointed, maybe that we aren’t trying to always do the same thing. They’re always trying to better ourselves, or get better at it.
I mean, that’s a great way of looking at it, because you guys really are growing as a band and as artists.
Matty: For the two of us, I think that’s very important to the two of us, growing from one record to the next. I never want to do the same thing twice. It should feel hard and out of your comfort zone, and doing something all different.
I mean, I’m very protective that I get to hear it first before everyone else. Everyone else should be jealous of us that we get to hear it now! <Laughter> Enjoy the rest of your day!
Pony: Thanks, Adam!