It’s often mentioned that listening to an M. Ward record is like peeling through the pages of an old family photo album. “I think that anybody can compare to it that,” agrees Ward himself. “Whatever somebody wants to say about it is fine with me. If they say it sounds like a memory they have, then that’s great – sure, fine, why not?” he adds with a humble shrug.
The Portland, OR-based singer-songwriter buzzes like Tom Waits, tickles the fretboard like John Fahey and rounds out a smoky link to luminary artists of days past like Madeleine Peyroux. M., short for Matt, became instantly received amongst the indie rock crowd when he shared main stage billings with Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and Jim James of My Morning Jacket on The Monsters of Folk Tour. Each of the artists would play and sing on each other’s songs and would later dabble in cover versions of their own favorite standards. Ward has also played with Oberst as a member of the Bright Eyes Orchestra on a prior tour that even had the indie icon proclaiming during a late-night TV gig – “M. Ward for president!”
Ward’s solo career was launched in 2000 following his stint in the San Luis Obispo, CA-based indie band Rodriguez. Howe Gelb of Giant Sand took a liking to his unique rustic style and released Ward’s debut disc, Duet For Guitars #2, with the stark End of Amnesia to soon follow. Always a guitar player first and a singer second, Ward started off as most aspiring guitarists do, fumbling and then mastering the Beatles catalog and then moving forward to more challenging transcriptions. On his third album, 2003’s Transfiguration of Vincent, solo guitar numbers like “Duet For Guitars #3,” showcase Ward’s nimble fingerpicking alongside his picturesque country marches and jazzy folk melodies.
“I learned how to play at 15 with a Beatles book and it started from there,” Ward recalls. “When you are leaning Beatles chord progressions you are learning pretty amazing styles and rhythms and it’s a great education for me. After that I learned players like John Fahey and imitated what they were doing. On the electric guitar in high school I got into Firehose and Sonic Youth, but I discovered my own thing because you will only fall short when you imitate your heroes.” But when faced with the difficulty of establishing his “own thing,” Ward replies, “It is the easiest thing in the world because it just happens. You just have to spend a lot of time learning other people’s songs and just spend a lot of time practicing.”
Despite the influences, it’s not so easy to imply who M. Ward’s closest musical kin is. It’s simple to throw in the Tom Waits and Nick Drake comparisons, or maybe toss him into the neo-folk bowl with artists like Joanna Newsome, Bonnie Prince Billy and Iron and Wine. But all comparisons aside, Ward’s biggest kin is perhaps the radio, a device he pays homage to on his latest aptly named album – Transistor Radio.
“I wanted to try to recreate this atmosphere and this feeling that I had, and that I owned when I was younger and first discovering radio,” describes Ward. “Radio was more magical and more mysterious and I really didn’t understand what was happening, and to a larger extent I still don’t understand what is happening. But I’ve visited a lot of stations over the last few years and have been educated first hand in how it works and I guess now that I’m being educated on the state of radio, I want to go back to the way it was in my mind growing up. So I choose a lot of songs that I have either written or were inspired by radio and that was the result.”
Transistor Radio begins with an instrumental version of “You Still Believe In Me” from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and concludes with J.S. Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” In between, Ward sandwiches timeless radio classics like The Carter Family’s “Oh Take Me Back” and Louis Armstrong’s “Sweethearts On Parade,” paying homage to when commercial radio was purely independent. On originals “One Life Away” and “Fuel For Fire,” Ward’s voice channels through supernaturally like when you turn the A.M. dial on a clear night and grab the station from Pittsburgh, even though you live in Boston. On Transfiguration of Vincent, Ward even features a mellow, stripped-down version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” that brings the flashy 80’s hit to an esoteric, cozy fire place setting.
As his tribute to those days in his families’ car and nights falling asleep listening to the radio, Ward enlisted some special guests to give Transistor Radio an added depth of voice and texture. Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley, Jim James, Vic Chesnutt, John Parrish and Gelb all add their own versions of “troubadour” to the eclectic collection. For Ward, bringing in a few guests serves beyond just returning a favor or two, as he is no stranger to sharing song space with his contemporaries. Lewis has even brought in Ward to guest and help produce her much anticipated, soon to be released solo debut.
“Whenever you bring someone else into the studio, you’re opening the door to a bit of chaos and quite often it’s the x factor you are looking for in any song,” explains Ward. “Because they end up meaning something to you down the road they are the ones that surprise you in some way when you’re recording. When you have everything pre-programmed and pre-written and pre-arranged, it gets boring and you end up with a song that sounds prearranged and that’s pretty boring for everybody if you ask me.”
In our modern-day rotation of pre-programmed DJ’s and Clear Channel infestation, Transistor Radio’s sixteen songs serve a reminder that one of our most primitive communication tools hasn’t aged gracefully. Coming from the troubadour’s mouth, Ward’s thoughts on making radio interesting again is still more optimistic than forlorn.
“I think the way you’re going to get back to radio is by making the average artist available to the average listener,” Ward says about radio reacquiring its dignity. “I think people are curious what the guy down the street sounds like when he sings, I think that is my explanation with the fascination with American Idol and reality TV. It’s an interesting trend to me. I think it might be the internet or satellite radio that will be giving the room and support to discover these everyday voices but it’s hard to say.”
As for staying true to himself and not allowing the mainstream to impact his artistic style, Ward is about as likely to change as Johnny Cash switching his shirt from black to yellow. At 31, the artist seems pretty comfortable in his own shoes and speaks for the Americana message that weeds out the fake and praises the truth.
“I stay fairly true to the approach [I used] when I was just four- tracking in high school in the writing and the recording process. There is a very important incubation prop period where you protect a song and the recording from the outside world and you only take it out of the oven once its done,” explains Ward. “Because that’s the way I’ve always done it and don’t ever want to change it. In general it hasn’t become that big of a problem for me. I think the more you think about your audience the more you are tempted to cater to them and I think that is bad for both parties.”
M.Ward, like Conor Oberst, Vic Chesnutt and Jim James today, and Louis Armstrong, Brian Wilson and The Carter Family before him, is opening the doors for music to paint portraits and illustrate landscapes, of both the past and the present. Maybe one day Ward himself will moonlight as a drive time DJ while we are scouring the dial on a clear night. When asked how we would program his own radio show given the chance, Ward replies, “It would sound a lot like this record.” Fair enough indeed.
