matt pond PA

I really love this group a lot and in fact I find that almost their entire catalog fits that autumnal season very well, especially Several Arrows Later.  But instead of choosing a track from that album I thought I would kill two birds with one stone and include this excellent cover of another band that fits the fall season very well, Neutral Milk Hotel.

matt pond PA – In An Aeroplane Over the Sea (Neutral Milk Hotel)

Iron & Wine

Here is a guy I am sure you are all familiar with by now.  Someone who like Nick Drake also got his first big exposure through the “Garden State” soundtrack. Well I find his contemplative lo-fi folk music to be great company on a sunny fall afternoon.  One of my favorite things to do is to go for a drive in the fall while the leaves are in transition and this song I chose for you here is one of my favorite companions along the way.

Iron & Wine – The Trapeze Swinger

M83′s Saturdays = Youth

Saturdays was an album that I heard last year and it went in one ear and out the other without making much of an impact.  But this fall it has penetrated down to my very core and has become one of my favorite records.  And I attribute a lot of that to the season in which it was heard, both physically and in my personal life.

M83 – Graveyard Girl

Explosions in the Sky’s The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place

One of the best experimental quartets around.  They were the first instrumental band that I was able to really get into and I find myself consistently going back to this album each fall. You might recognize them from their work for the soundtrack to “Friday Night Lights,” the television show.

Explosions In the Sky – Your Hand In Mine

The Radio Dept.

Here is another group that I would say has an autumn feel to their entire catalog.  Something about their music just takes me back.  It just puts me in this very retrospective mood. It’s not uncommon for music from my past to take me back to the time when it first captured me. But I just discovered this band about a year ago. I don’t know how they do it.

The Radio Dept. – Pulling Our Weight

Here are a few more tracks to help round out the playlist.

TV on the Radio – Family Tree

Grand Archives – Torn Blue Foam Couch

Broken Social Scene – Guilty Cubicles

Conor Oberst + Gillian Welch – Lua