Past echoes through M. Ward’s Wasteland
Singer- songwriter recruits all- star cast on retro- tinged latest album
Matt Ward’s music has the kind of ethereal quality that instantly brings you back to the golden era of AM radio. It’s the kind of melodies and production style the singer- songwriter has applied to both his solo recordings as M. Ward and through his collaboration with singer/ actress Zooey Deschanel in the duo She & Him, a kind of timeless essence that lingers in the mind as if a dream emanating from an old tube radio.
On Ward’s latest album, A Wasteland Companion, that feeling is most clearly conjured in a cover of troubled singer- songwriter Daniel Johnston’s Sweetheart, a hand- clapping, surf guitar- inflected throwback that recalls high school in the ’ 50s, Lovers Lane, and vintage poodle skirts and letterman jackets.
“Certain singers, voices, songwriters you hear when you are in junior high or high school just stay with you for some reason, and you always return to their records or CDs or, in this case, early cassette tapes,” Ward said in a phone interview from his new home in L. A. ( Ward originally hails from Portland, Ore.) “I feel like he has a million other songs that need to be covered.”
The album opens with Clean Slate, a touching tribute to Big Star’s Alex Chilton, who died in 2010. As with Johnston, Ward has been a fan of Chilton’s band since his high school days.
“Big Star’s records have been a big inspiration for a long time,” Ward, now 38, said. “Clean Slate I started about a month before Alex Chilton passed away. It hit me that this song seemed somehow tied into older Big Star songs I was inspired by, so it seemed right to dedicate this song to one of my favourite Big Star songs called Ballad of El Goudo.”
Before She & Him and folk “supergroup” Monster of Folk, which features My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, Ward rose to prominence with 2006’ s critically acclaimed Post- War, an album that seems to connect thematically with A Wasteland Companion. ( Pivotal track The First Time I Ran Away and its video strangely mirror PostWar’s Chinese Translation, multipart stories featuring similar lyrical and visual themes.)
Ward conceded the two records were loosely connected, but mostly
Certain singers, voices, songwriters you hear when you are in junior high or high school just stay with you for some reason, and you always return to their records or CDs, or ... cassette tapes.
M. WARD
my favourite aspects of studio records,” Ward said. “Instead of recording the songs on stage, I travelled to these different places and found studios I had been close to via friends or friends of friends and made the record that way. There’s a lot of movement in it for me. A lot of different characters coming in and out. It was a good challenge.”
Inspired by Bob Dylan and John Coltrane, Ward said most of the material was recorded on the first take, live in the studio.
“The first take normally dictates all the takes that come after. The reason why is because I love to hear people’s first instincts. When the red light is on, people view their performance a little bit differently. They’re still a little bit scared, and I like that.” He laughed. Ward admitted he may have given Shelley a bit more room than others.
“He’s royalty, so he got as many takes as he needed,” Ward said with a laugh.
( Note: M. Ward will also be performing with his new Portland outfit Alialujah Choir opening for Pokey Lafarge at the Rio Theatre in Vancouver, Sept. 1.) because of the way his dreams have continually formed the basis of inspiration for the songs over the course of his career.
It really makes you wonder if Ward dreams in colour or black and white.
“It’s always in colour, but the dreams do inspire a lot of songs,” he said. “On this new record, it was this character called Billy Burrows who was this newscaster and he would say all these frightening things and that turned into Watch The Show.”
Watch The Show is a song with a bit of an apocalyptic flavour, the newscaster “hijacking” the channel and telling “tales untold” that serve to scare the populace.
The song sounds like it speaks more about a McCarthy- era type of newscaster speaking from a big wooden box television set than one you would find on a 24- hour network blasting from a flatscreen TV.
The track features Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, who is part of a stellar cast of guests on A Wasteland Companion that also includes Deschanel, Mike Mogis ( Bright Eyes, Monsters of Folk) and singer- songwriter Howe Gelb, among others.
The album was recorded at eight different studios across the U. S. and the U. K., including producer/ musician John Parish’s studio beneath an old church in Bristol, England. Parish recently produced PJ Harvey’s Mercury Prize- winning Let England Shake.
“I had the idea to try to make a different kind of record that combined my favourite aspects of live records with