By Ben Bonadies

Photo by Benjamin Daley

Disclaimer: Dan Moffat is a staff writer for Allston Pudding. 

Brian Eno once said that all 30,000 people who bought the first Velvet Underground album started bands themselves. The quote has dogged the Velvets ever since and become emblematic of the way their influence has dwarfed their commercial popularity. But I think what that quote really gets at is the flash of inspiration their music elicits, an “I can do that, too” feeling that made audiences in 1967 rush to their guitars and start playing. 

Danny Moffat, a singer-songwriter known as The Collect Pond, charts a similar path from inspiration to activation on latest single “Man of Mystique.” The song details a moment of self actualization at a concert. “He picked me, a nervous teen,” the refrain begins over staccato guitar strums, “A nod to know I’m seen / And I began to dream.” 

It’s this moment that begins Moffat’s narrator down a path toward songwriting, and, inevitably one imagines, to “Man of Mystique” itself. The noted “guitar screams” that sparked artistic ideation in the first place are here, too, in the form of a descending synth melody and ambient distortion underneath the taut groove. It’s a song that carries within it the secrets of its origins. 

But it’s not just the dreams of an artist that manifest in Moffat at this moment, it’s this whole other thing. That feeling when you’re young of wanting so badly to be somebody else. “Man of Mystique” engages with this most teenage of rituals: remaking yourself in the image of your idols. You get the sense that this isn’t the first time Moffat’s narrator has done this. “Yeah that’s the life for me / Every day of the week / I’ll be the man of mystique” doesn’t sound like the rigorous thought process of someone who thinks things through, or even that this is his first attempt at a complete personality overhaul. Nowhere is there mention of what makes this man so mysterious, or how to become him. The will to change is decided in simple terms, then and there. 

“Growing up is hard to explain” Moffat sings in the bridge. Growing up is hard to explain. That’s why people write songs about it. The 30,000 kids in who started bands after wearing out their copies of Velvet Underground & Nico had something of their own to say about coming of age. The explanation “Man of Mystique” offers is one of transformation, however improbable it might seem. 

Stream “Man of Mystique” below and the find rest of the singles from the forthcoming album Long Range on Bandcamp. Long Range is due out 9/24.