M. Ward

★★★★ Think Of Spring ANTI-. CD/DL/LP

On his 11th solo release – a benefit LP – Ward sings Billie.

Just months after M. Ward’s rich, dreamy Migration

Stories comes this solo, voiceand-guitar album of Billie Holiday covers, recorded on a 4-track at his Portland home. Spellbinding, self-contained and strangely beautiful, with the hazy, late-night feel of an empty nightclub, it features all 10 songs from Lady In Satin

(1958), the last record Holiday released before her death. Ward, in his early twenties when he first heard it, mistook her voice for a distortion box on an electric guitar. Trying to recreate its atmosphere became a lifelong obsession. On his 2009 album Hold Time he covered I’m A Fool To Want You, but as an instrumental. Here he sings, using multiple guitar tunings for the complex arrangements, and his voice is variously a warm croon (For Heaven’s Sake), sometimes darker (Violets For Your Furs) but mostly pure and tender – heartbreaking on his revisit to I’m A Fool To Want You. Proceeds go to the Black Lives Fund and Inner-City Arts. Sylvie Simmons