BONUS: Urban Planning Pop with Pondless 

 

Sarah Goodyear: Hello to all. I am Sarah Goodyear, and this is a Patreon bonus episode of The War on Cars. I’m here with a musical artist known as Pondless, who as a civilian goes by the name of Aaron Oliver. Pondless writes and performs songs about urban planning, and also has some interesting theories about American cities. Aaron, welcome to The War on Cars.

Aaron Oliver: Glad to be here.

Sarah: All right. So I learned about you through my Instagram feed, because I’m not a TikTok person. You’re probably on TikTok too, right?

Aaron Oliver: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah, okay. So you have a ton of followers on Instagram, and I started getting these videos of yours in which your head is floating through the frame, and you’re intoning your theories about certain American cities. And the one that I think first caught my eye is this idea that there are two cities in the United States: there’s New York City and there’s Houston. And so you’ll do these reels where you show yourself in front of a given city, say Charlotte, North Carolina, which I believe is Houston.

Aaron Oliver: For sure.

Sarah: So can you just tell me how you came up with this taxonomy and how it became a thing?

Aaron Oliver: Yeah, definitely. Well, I was kind of thinking about how so many people are moving to New York—for all of American history, of course. And right now, there’s kind of a lack of alternatives if you want a certain type of life. I mean, there are certain cities that offer similar lifestyles, but nothing really comes close to the way that New York does. There’s a couple of cities that come really close, but still don’t get all the way there. I was kind of noticing this dichotomy of completely un-city-like to completely city-like, and how there are honestly very few examples of in-between styles. I mean, there’s Boston, there’s Philly, there’s a handful of others. But for the most part, it’s just you’re in a really dense place with lots of people everywhere, or you’re in a very low-density place with nobody anywhere.

Sarah: Yeah, right. Right. So maybe you could tell me a little bit about where you come from and how thinking about cities in this way even became a thing for you.

Aaron Oliver: So I grew up in Los Angeles. And when I was younger, like really young, we lived in Long Beach, which is in South Los Angeles. And Long Beach is great. Long Beach is pretty walkable. It’s probably the most—the largest walkable area in Los Angeles. And from Long Beach, when I got into high school, we moved up to Lancaster, California, which is probably the worst place on Earth. I can say that being somebody that is from Lancaster, really.

Sarah: Okay.

Aaron Oliver: It’s just straight suburbia. There’s nothing to do. It’s in the middle of the desert. It’s perpetually extremely hot all year. It kind of opened my eyes to really how bad it could be.

Sarah: The gates of hell.

Aaron Oliver: Yeah, the gates of hell.

Sarah: [laughs] Yeah. So that is really a tragic transition. Were you aware that this was something that people studied and tried to fix? Like, how did you—because I feel like your songs, which we’re gonna talk about in a minute, very much draw on sort of the canon of knowledge of urban planning, why places like Lancaster suck. Was that something that you were exposed to in school? How did you find out that this world of urban planning was out there trying to make places not like Lancaster?

Aaron Oliver: Well, the big catalyst for me was when I went to college and then I moved to Boston. And I was like, wow, this is really different from Lancaster! I mean, I knew Lancaster was different from Long Beach, but Boston was a whole other world. [laughs] And in Boston, I met my girlfriend there, and I was like, LA is the greatest city in the world. There’s nothing wrong with it. Lancaster’s fine. I don’t like it, but it’s a—you know, it’s a place. And then I took her to Los Angeles, and she was like, “Why do you like this place?” She was like, she got certain things in Los Angeles, you know, but generally it’s obviously the city that it’s known to be. And I love Los Angeles. I’m not dissing Los Angeles.

Sarah: Me, too. I just want to be on the record. I really love LA.

Aaron Oliver: Yeah, yeah. Me, too. I’m genuinely not dissing it, but there is a lot left to be desired there. Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. So you were in Boston, and I think there’s a third type of city that you theorize, which is places that don’t exist. Can you explain that? Because that pops up in your feed, this—you know, this, I think you said, for instance, cities, not just cities, but whole regions. Like you said, Cape Cod does not exist, I believe. But what does that mean? What are you trying to say there?

Aaron Oliver: Yeah, well, when I say that a place doesn’t exist, it’s mostly meaning that it is not fitting in this prototypical, like, New York or prototypical Houston kind of idea of, like, being purely suburban, purely New York. And it ends up being predominantly middle density. For example, Boston is mostly, you know, shorter apartment buildings. There’s—when you get further out, of course, it gets into this whole suburban sprawl thing like every US city. But generally, central Boston is kind of a comfortable density where it’s not so many people in your face. Like, you know, when you’re in Manhattan, in Times Square, there’s a million people, whereas when you’re in Houston, you see nobody around anywhere. But Boston is kind of you see a few people around, you feel comfortable, you feel safe. But yeah.

Sarah: So tell me about your musical persona. First of all, where does the name “Pondless” come from? What does that signify? And what’s your musical background? How’d you become a musical artist who does urbanism music?

Aaron Oliver: I’ve been playing music my whole life. And when I was in high school, I started writing a lot of music and getting really into playing music. And then in college, I went to music school. I went to Berklee College of Music. And then I was writing all of these songs that were, you know, kind of traditional songs, love songs, that sort of thing. And I enjoy that, but at a certain point I was so obsessed with urban planning and how we can fix cities like Los Angeles and everything like that, that I just started writing a lot of songs about urban planning. [laughs] It just kind of happened naturally. It wasn’t like, one day I need to start writing about urban planning. It just was all I was thinking about.

Sarah: Okay. All right. So I want to play a couple of little bits of your music for our listeners. So I just want to play, like, the very beginning of this one song of yours, “Having Fallen Asleep in the Wilderness: A Prologue.”

Aaron Oliver: Sounds good.

[Pondless: Everywhere I walk is just parking. I go for hours and hours and hours, and it’s just parking. And parking for parking? Multi-level parking structures that people park at to get to underground parking structures for surface parking lots.]

Sarah: Talk about where did this song come from?

Aaron Oliver: Yeah, sure. So after college, I moved back to Los Angeles for a little over a year. And when I was there, I was in Santa Clarita staying with my mom. And I don’t know if you are familiar with Santa Clarita. It’s kind of northern LA County, not all the way to Lancaster, but most of the way. And it is this beautiful place, naturally, with just crazy suburbs, so many, just unending, and parking lots everywhere. And I was walking everywhere because I really don’t like driving. I know how to drive, but I don’t really enjoy it. And the distances in Santa Clarita are gigantic, as many places, and there’s not many sidewalks places, but there’s parking lots everywhere. So I kind of started thinking about this world that I was in, and feeling like it was its own kind of universe that is just parking everywhere, and there’s expressways everywhere, and freeways everywhere, whatever. And it’s just nothing but that.

Sarah: Yeah. It’s, as you say, parking for parking. It’s an incredible awareness of what I think so many Americans are born into, raised in, and then they just don’t see it. And that’s a big part of what we at The War on Cars are trying to do is to help people see what their reality is and to understand that it’s not inevitable and that there are possibilities. But just that waking up to it, I mean, a lot of people don’t wake up to it. I mean, you say you love to walk, you don’t like driving, and yet you were born and raised into this culture. You obviously, from having seen your performance style and your—it’s just your aesthetic, you are a countercultural person. You’re not somebody who fits in. Do you think that that is what helped you to see urban settings in a different way?

Aaron Oliver: Certainly that plays a component in it. I mean, I never really felt comfortable at home in Los Angeles, not because of it as a city, but just because of being a bit out there as a person, making music, doing whatever things I was doing, not exactly fitting in in school, you know? And then when I moved to Boston, when I got into college, an experience many people have had, I had tons of friends and it was great. And I loved life, and I think there might have been that sort of thing of, like, when I was younger, I was kind of not particularly comfortable. And then when I moved there, I was very comfortable. So there was just a clear shift where it was like, what is this? Yeah.

Sarah: Right. So wait, Pondless. We haven’t—we haven’t answered that question. Why Pondless?

Aaron Oliver: Right. Well, the true story is I was trying to come up with a band name. And I had this horrible band name. It was called, like—I think it was Don’t Think About It, which is an awful band name. I mean, it’s fine, but it’s awful. And then I was looking up how other bands came up with band names, and I was looking at the story of a few different bands, and I was like, “Oh, Coldplay. That’s a really, like, memorable name. It means nothing at all, but it’s super memorable.” They created a new word with two words, and I was like, what if I just exchanged the words in that? And so I made, like, a thousand different versions. I don’t have the notes file anymore, but I made, like, a thousand different versions of it. And I was just reading through them all the time. And I was like, “Pondless, that’s kind of cool.” That kind of fits what I was wanting to do and everything like that. And yeah, it has this—it kind of invokes this image of the place that I went to high school in Lancaster, which is as pondless as it gets, really.

Sarah: [laughs] That’s right. It’s true. No—no ponds unless there were a golf course there, in which case we would have an artificial pond. So you do these songs and, like, for instance, your latest release—and we’ll play a little bit of this in a second—your latest release is called “Add Another Lane.”

Aaron Oliver: Yeah.

Sarah: Let’s just take a quick listen to some of that.

[Pondless: Add another lane, this one will fix everything. Add another lane, this one will fix everything. Do you dream of the future? Flying cars and giant buildings. Never go outside, you’ll never know if it’s still alive.]

Sarah: First of all, tell me about writing this song. How did that come to you?

Aaron Oliver: Well, the main way I write songs is I kind of improvise some stuff on the piano, and then I record it, and then I kind of listen to the melody and figure out does this have some words that kind of fit into it? And as I was going through that process, I knew I wanted to write a song about road widening and freeway construction and displacement and everything like that. So I just kind of—I had this line that felt like it fit the melody, which is right at the beginning: “Where a grove once stood, stands a neighborhood.” And I was like, okay, this is gonna be the song about it. And I was thinking about specifically Orange County, California, where there are all these genuinely lovely small towns kind of spread out but filled in with all suburbs and everything like that. And so many of them, the original format is basically gone, whether it’s by suburbanization or by freeway construction. And it kind of led me to write this song. It also goes into, on the second verse, talking about modernization. So instead of talking about just suburbia, talking about how a lot of the time the proposed solution to a lot of our urban form problems in the US is just high-rises everywhere. You know, I don’t think this is something that most people are particularly wanting, but if you look on Reddit and stuff like that, a lot of people are like, “Why is this development not a high-rise?” When a lot of the time it doesn’t really fit a place. I know that—I’m not trying to be all NIMBY here.

Sarah: No, no, no, that’s okay. This is a safe space.

Aaron Oliver: Yeah. But I think we can agree with Jane Jacobs on there is, like, a nice comfortable density of things.

Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I often think of Tokyo when people bring this up, because I don’t know if you’ve been there, but what’s really remarkable about Tokyo is they achieve this extraordinary density and neighborhood fabric with relative low-rise development. Like, it’s not—it is not towering skyscrapers. They’re weak on parks. That’s their problem there. But it certainly proves that you can have an extremely functional, high-density city with superb transit and excellent biking and walking, and it doesn’t need to be a forest of skyscrapers.

Aaron Oliver: For sure.

Sarah: Yeah. So I really get that. So you come from this pretty hardcore musical background. I didn’t know you’d gone to Berklee College of Music. So you’re obviously a very accomplished musician coming out of that world. Now you’ve developed this, I think, sort of cult-like following perhaps among the urban planning and sort of CityNerd population. How does that feel different from what you might have expected as a musician? Like, what has been unexpected about attracting a fan base that is so passionate about urbanism?

Aaron Oliver: Yeah. I mean, I didn’t expect most of my conversations after shows to be about urban planning and talking about different cities and everything like that. But I mean, I think it’s great. It’s definitely different from what I had initially envisioned when I was like, I’m gonna be a musician. But I love it. I mean, this is the world that I want to be in. This is the world that I am obsessed with. So yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. So for those who haven’t seen you live—I just was lucky enough to see you live at the Mercury Lounge the other night. And I said this to you before we started, you have, if people are familiar with the comedian Chris Fleming, you have a little bit of Chris Fleming energy in terms of your physical presentation on stage. And I’m interested to know how you’ve developed your stage persona. I just think that’s a fascinating thing to do. And also it kind of dovetails with your social media persona. And what has that been like to build that persona? Because you don’t seem—like, when I meet you in person, I was nervous to meet you. I’m gonna be real. I was kind of nervous to meet you in person. I’m like, wow, he’s—he’s like a creature from another planet, but you’re like a regular person. So tell me about that.

Aaron Oliver: Yeah. I mean, I feel like I’ve got a little bit of this thing, this sort of artist thing where you’re actually like a really shy and quiet person, but then on stage, because you’re holding in all this energy, it’s just, “Rahr!” I’m like a pretty shy and quiet person normally. When I’m on stage, I feel more comfortable. And just doing shows over the years, I’ve gotten more comfortable on stage. And I’ve always just wanted to move as much as possible. That’s, like, a big part of it for me is just being able to—I don’t know. I’m—have you seen Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert film?

Sarah: Yeah. Not only that, I was—I’m old enough and lucky enough that I saw that show in person.

Aaron Oliver: Wow! That’s so cool! Wow!

Sarah: Yeah.

Aaron Oliver: Yeah. Well, I love that concert film. I’ve seen it probably a million times. I’ve practiced many of the dances as David Byrne does in that. And I’m sure it comes out very differently in how I present myself on stage, but that’s just because I’m a totally different person.

Sarah: Yeah. No, I thought of that, too. That was definitely another thing that came to mind. And your instrument that you use in your shows, can you tell us about the instrument?

Aaron Oliver: Yeah, so I play keytar. I used to do keyboard at shows, but the problem with keyboard is you can only do a little bit of dancing.

Sarah: Yeah.

Aaron Oliver: Yeah, with keytar, I’m able to jump around and do backflips, and—although I’m not really doing the backflips, but …

Sarah: Yeah. No, well, maybe that’ll come. And also, let’s give a shout out to your bandmates. Who else is in the band?

Aaron Oliver: Yeah, so the bass player is Connor Shann, the drummer is James Paul Nadien, and the guitar player is Shai Rodriguez. They’re all amazing players. Shai I met at Berklee. Connor and James, I actually met as a music teacher here in New York.

Sarah: Well, they’re all really amazing. And it’s a great live show. I totally recommend people to follow. It’s Pondless on whatever social media platform works for you and find out more. And yeah, I guess I just want to say that I think that—I mean, one of the reasons that I was so drawn to your stuff is we here are always trying to break things open and find new ways of talking about these things to people because we think they’re so important. And so it’s cool to try to bring people in. Have you ever had an experience where somebody was drawn in by the music and then was just like, wow, you really made me think about the message? Does that happen to you a lot?

Aaron Oliver: Yeah. I mean, at least my band, for sure. And people at the place I work at, definitely. I mean, I hope that there are more people that are hearing my music for the music and then going, oh wow, urban planning is awesome. I have no idea. I want it to work. Well obviously, this is—you know, I’m totally in agreeance. My main goal is communication, bringing these things that often can be very dry when you first approach them to being, like, really interesting and colorful and big.

Sarah: Well, I think that’s a great place to end, and we’re gonna go out on a little tune about a man who changed New York.

[Pondless: Thank you, Robert Moses. Thank you, you beautiful king. Thank you. Robert Moses. America owes you everything, everything.]