About the band:
Tommy met Ruby behind a tree in his backyard. She was wearing OshKosh overalls, had her hair in tiny pigtails, and rode a BMX bike. Despite their age difference (Tommy is old enough to be Ruby’s older brother or maybe a cousin from her aunt’s previous marriage), they played music together for the first time that night and have since recorded over 60 songs together in three different bands.

After leaving the first of those bands, Tommy and Ruby began playing as a duo using drum samples and the funky-fresh beats of Ruby’s Casio keyboard, which was later stolen from Ruby’s house. (Two kids in her old neighborhood are now using our beats to make their life of crime more danceable.) While recording their first album as a duo, they met Steve in a local recording studio.

Tommy and Ruby only thought they knew what they needed for a back-beat when Steve walked into their lives. Steve is not only the most musical drummer they have ever met, he is also quick with a pun and makes long stories short. Steve plays the drums that play in Tommy’s head when he’s writing. The neighboring heads are always complaining.

Tommy, Ruby, and Steve met Joel while Joel was fronting the band Tammany Hall Machine. They asked him to stop doing that and join their band. After four years of pressuring him and convoluting his life with recording sessions and shows, Joel finally agreed to join, but only after drinking two bottles of red wine. To this day, he doesn’t remember joining the band.

The Pons formed in late 2007 in Austin, Texas.

About our name:
The Pons is a very important section of the human brain. It’s responsible for bridging the brain to the body and helps control almost every vital function. Having that name allows us to do anything we want.

What we do:
The music we make together is about the future. At some point, rock stopped growing. We recognize that. We hope to find reasons in what we do to make that notion untrue. We’re urban soldiers on a lonely musical front.

What we don’t do:
We don’t mimic or play tribute to some movement from the past as a way of being accepted or understood. We aren’t looking for the fast track to market adoption, clearly.

References:
Our influences are too vast to have any noticeable impact on how we write. References people have made about us that we can agree on: Low, Pixies, Talking Heads, and Galaxie 500.

References other people have made that could only have come from a person who doesn’t get out much: The Wallflowers, Matthew Sweet, and The Smithereens.
Instrumentation