A Conversation with The Collect Pond at NICE, a fest

WRBB’s BellaJoli Gedeon sat down with three of four members of local band The Collect Pond at NICE, a fest: Ben Bonaides on bass and guitar, Danny Moffat on guitar and vocals, and Roger Maranan on bass and keys.

BellaJoli Gedeon: Was there anything that inspired the name “Collect Pond” in particular?

Danny Moffat: The Collect Pond, the project, the band started in New York City, and there is a park called the Collect Pond Park which is named after the former freshwater reservoir that used to be there for a millenia. I like the idea of there being an oasis in Manhattan because it can be such a chaotic city.

Ben Bonadies: For a long time, the Collect Pond was the only source of freshwater in Manhattan. I recently did some reading about this and the way they had to pump water into the city. They built all these crazy huge pipes to bring water from upstate New York because the Collect Pond famously got so polluted. They had to develop a whole new technology of bringing water from upstate New York where the mountains are with clean, fresh, water down to Manhattan to where the people live. I didn’t know that until recently.

Moffat: I mean it was filled with trash, but that’s New York for you.

Moranan: It’s where Chinatown is now, right?

Moffat: Yeah, it’s across from the main courthouse where [Donald] Trump is getting sued, so you see all these Republican rallies in the Collect Pond Park.

I’ll have to visit the Collect Pond. I like to think that Central Park is the heart of the city. That’s great to hear the origin story of the name.

As a Boston-based, it hasn’t been your first time performing in Somerville. How does it feel to be playing at NICE, a fest this year?

Roger Moranan: It’s pretty awesome to be playing with a bunch of the local bands and being a part of the community that we’re participating in, so it’s really exciting to be a part of it all.

Bonadies: It’s really exciting. NICE, a fest is a real inspiration. We’ve seen it grow and the ability for this organization to get all this excitement and people out to see all the amazing talent we have here in Boston, and that plus the amazing vendors, the people selling food, all the love and passion and blood, sweat, and tears that goes into making a show of this size or any size. It’s amazing. NICE, a fest is like my Coachella.

Yeah, I definitely feel like a community.

Bonadies: The Boston music scene is a community, but it takes events like this to really see it.

Moffat: The venues that are putting it on like Crystal Ballroom and Rockwell–they’ve only been doing music like this for like a few years, so this is a very fresh existence. Fresh venues, fresh bands, so there’s a lot of excitement and this year they’ve got the main stage which goes to show that it’s just getting bigger.

It’s really great to see. I was here last year and the amount of people that came out is amazing.

The recent single, “Disassociating (Cigarette Dress),” is enthralling with its clever imagery and attention-grabbing style. Will it be the first time performing it for listeners this weekend?

Moffat: I don’t think it is. No, it’s not. We’ve had a few performances with it, but this is the first time we’ll–it’s the best version of it you know.

Bonadies: It’s the first time performing it live since it’s come out. We’ve been workshopping it live for awhile. Practicing it a lot. Now, it feels a little bit different playing it not just because NICE, a fest, is an amazing event, but it’s cool now that it’s out in the world and people can actually go on their phones and listen to it and to be playing it and bringing it to the NICE, a fest crowd.

Sounds amazing! I did take a listen to the record. It seems that there's a lot of variety on the next album with post-punk and noise rock elements alongside more stripped-back songs, especially towards the final tracks. Is it a mix of the entire band's personal preferences in terms of sound?

Moffat: Yeah, I think whatever comes out comes out. It’s always been the philosophy. We joke that we’re post-genre, but we definitely fall into the indie, alternative, and shoegaze category. My favorite album is The White Album.

Bonadies: Respect. [laughing]

Moffat: The Beatles didn’t give a f*ck. You know, that was back then. I think that if you want to try on a different genre. Go for it.

Bonadies: It’s funny. Dylan Riley, also writer, podcaster, DJ, described The Collect Pond as a flying nun band to someone who never heard of us. That’s actually very astute, so maybe we are post-genre. It’s cool that we have more flexibility like this song “Disassociating (Cigarette Dress)”, is our first country song like when Dan brought it to us that’s how we described it. It formed the way we added on to it. I was playing bass on that song, so I kind of wanted to add more of a swing and honky tonk feeling. It’s still us, so it’s going to have that post-punk new-wave feel.

Moffat: The flying nun of the Thames, New Zealand indie punk. I think we probably sound like The Chills. Yeah, this is our first country song. It’s our first song with a synth solo.

The title track, “Lightbreaker (Ladder)” is set to release on August 30th. It looks like there’s a direct association with the album cover. Does it encapsulate any concept or theme of the record?

Moffat: Roger is the resident artist of the band.

Moranan: I think we were looking for how to tie it all together. We did have kind of different material when it came to the songs and the visuals that we were going with. Dan had found the title track and kind of tied everything together. It felt really natural to call it Lightbreaker thematically with the visuals with the music.

Moffat: It was the last song to be added to the album. The cover art is a picture from our tour in Montreal. We played a show up there. We went to a café, but we got stuck in a day of rain for like an hour and a half or two hours. We couldn't escape really because we weren’t prepared for it, so we hung out in the garden for a while and took some photos. That became the cover art.

Is there anything else that listeners should look out for, like show dates?

Moffat: Yeah, we’re going to play Pianos in New York City on October 10th.

Bonadies: Really looking forward to that. Pianos is a really important venue in underground music. I feel like a lot of bands I respect started playing there. I’m excited to go there and play. New York’s always amazing to play