M. WARD: Making It Up As He Goes

The soft-spoken guitarist, who’s recorded with young progressive artists Conor Oberst a.k.a. Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, Jenny Lewis and the Zooey Deschanel-duet project She & Him, may make ethereal soundscapes, but his origin of species was some of America’s most mainstream radio stations. From the point of origin of contemporary culture, an almost archivist’s love affair with music was born.

The soft-spoken guitarist, who’s recorded with young progressive artists Conor Oberst a.k.a. Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, Jenny Lewis and the Zooey Deschanel-duet project She & Him, may make ethereal soundscapes, but his origin of species was some of America’s most mainstream radio stations. From the point of origin of contemporary culture, an almost archivist’s love affair with music was born.

“Those stations were important to me… I ate it all up, and it has an influence on how I see music, even making records to this day. To have all those influences at your disposal, to hear all those disc jockeys and their voices bouncing off the walls… it just brought you in.”

Hardly the most likely champion for commercial pop music, Ward’s exposure to far-flung genres and aesthetics planted a lot of seeds that would manifest later. The radio also gave the San Luis Obispo-raised youngster a place that was his own within the large family he came from.

“Growing up in a pretty big family, I found some sort of escape in the radio,” he concedes softly, considering the roots of his collage approach the arrangements. “I’d started playing guitar one year when I got a book that was a Beatles anthology for Christmas-and that’s when I made the connection [with radio]: anyone can do it.

“Playing piano didn’t really make sense to me… It was more a foreign language on a piece of paper. But with the guitar, I started writing right away, turning those Beatles chords into songs.

“I bought a 4-track and making up songs. I started learning how to put different things together. I never thought I’d share any of it with anybody else…. Just curious if I could do it, to see what would happen. It was like the Beach Boys song: being in my room with my own imagination, getting away from my homework.”

There’s barely a hint of melancholy when the man once signed to Giant Sand’s Howie Gelb’s label says this. In a hotel somewhere in New York, it’s the beginning of the press rounds to promote Hold Time, his first full, solo album in three years. But more than loneliness that marks coming of age, there is a vibrance in his voice that comes from the spark of connecting with something so wholly it makes you more alive.

And that notion of loving music, finding one’s grace and emotional clarity inside the songs permeates his latest, from the winsome “For Beginnings” to the reaching “Fishers of Men.” It is a world of its own, and that place to recede to suits the writer/producer/artist.

“I think there’s some escape in every great film or book,” he explains, addressing the secessionist universality of space of one’s own. “It’s my hope people can still see records as being able to ignite your imagination rather than…”

He pauses, considering whether he’s going to say it. Exhaling audibly, there’s a notion of what the heck, and he explains, “So much music on the radio, the only aim I seems-and you can tell 00 is for financial reasons. Films, too… the new James Bond film, it looks like all the other others.

“And it’s funny because there are lots of screenwriters and artists and musicians who are interested in sparking people’s imaginations-even though an awful lot of people are just plain after the next mainstream blockbuster.”

Chasing fashion has never been of much use to Ward. Even his big plan for the music business lacked a certain sort of big star quality. As he concedes, “My dream was to go to Europe and someone else pay for it.

“After that started happening, I had to think again.”

Like his original dream, the goals have shifted; the songs have grown more filigreed and timeless sounding. Having jettisoned the notion of big pop success, the hushed intimacy he creates evokes far deeper things-even as it reflects a unique worldview.

The title track, with its classical strings, almost ethereal vocals and a melody that meanders, captures that most ephemeral of notions: the spark of moments and not clutching them, but keeping them alive in the most potent hard drive of all: one’s heart.

“Hold Time can mean a lot of different things in the instance of the song and this record,” offers the man whose about to release his fourth recording on Durham, N.C.’s Merge Records, home of label founders Superchunk, as well indie originals Lambchop, Oberst, Broken West and Arcade Fire. “Something I learned a long time ago was that in order to record a song successfully or to perform a song with any sort of ingenuity, you need to go back to the time that inspired it.

“It might be a meaningless moment, but those sparks that ignite the song…. It’s mystical maybe, those magic moments. And to make music for a living, to perform these songs over and over, you have to safeguard these sparks. If you can do that, they’ll last a lot longer…”

Ward considers the potency of room to breathe within a work. It is something he seeks in other mediums as well. “I love the way David Lynch makes films, produces. He leaves enough room for the audience to dream-and I think music should have the same role. He leaves room to put [in] your own story…. And that’s important.

“To me, I know what the songs are about in a general sense, but I don’t see the benefit of putting it in a straight jacket about one specific thing in my life that probably doesn’t mean anything to someone else.”

He pauses to consider lyrical heft, the notion of what you conjure and the power of realities grounded in detail. It is a tricky line, especially for someone committed to leaving lots of room for his listeners own lives.

“I like using concrete imagery, but I don’t feel that’s what it’s about,” he continues. “It’s a combination of concrete and abstract to take the listener somewhere they know better than you. That’s true for music, seeing a painting, watching a movie… it’s all some kind of an escape.”

Though he’s co-written with Beth Orton (the title track on her Comfort of Strangers), toured as the opening act for and part of Norah Jones’ band and been compared to British folk etherealist John Fahey, Ward’s sentimental papercuts and coat-pocket moments are equal matched by ironic, iconic covers that bring out whole new emotional notions in much loved songs.

With an upside down take on David Bowie’s steamy “Let’s Dance” from KCRW/Hear Music’s Sounds Eclectic: The Cover Music Project to Hold Time‘s organic reinvention of Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” Ward takes what he loves and makes it something even more. And it in what’s revealed his joy unfurls.

“I love giving the listener healthy confusion – not knowing where you are or even what year it was recorded,” he explains. “I covered David Bowie and slowed it down, flipped it around, wondered about why do I do that? It’s like with ‘Rave On,’ I’ve loved that song since I was a kid-and it was another experiment.

“What I wanted it to sound like if it were a John Fahey song. But it’s a song you know, like when you hear a three chord song on the radio that grabs your attention. My instincts were to take it home and see what happens…

“That’s where it starts; I knew I wanted it to be a simple production I wanted to know what would happen if The Ronettes did it, or Brian Wilson. If you listen to where the song wants to go, they’ll lead you. Sometimes it’s two songs or three, sometimes they come together.”

It’s a simple process. For all the layers, the drifting vocals, the sound of guitars in rooms, it’s just that to a large extent: a 4-track and a fistful of notions to color in as the mood strikes him.

“Music started out as a laboratory to me. In my bedroom, with my 4-track and my guitar. I’m not necessarily going to make a huge splash on the Billboard charts, but there’s something there: there’s so much joy to sacrifice that for financial goals.

“I’ve tried my best to stay close to the patterns I discovered when I was discovering. Nothing much has changed. It starts at the beginning, ends at the end-and it’s so hard to pull things out. Every song is an experiment; never try to do the same production twice… I’m always trying other things.

“It’s either revolutionary or old-fashioned, because the further back you look, the further forward you can see. I’m in the dark for most of the process. I work on instinct, because I see the danger in over-thinking anything.”

There’s a pause. He’s not quite got it all-the secrets of M. Ward’s hushed songs that suggest so much. “I think I’m much more interested in experimenting with sounds and chords and production rather than screaming and whining. The music I grew up listening to-and trying to do some justice to in this incredible wonderful career that I landed on… they’re more like that.

“My father introduced me to Johnny cash before I can even remember. Before then, I went to church every Sunday where I discovered hymnal music – and reading those turned me onto literature and poetry before high school.

“So to me, I thought music and poetry and literature were all one. As a high school student, I had a very naïve view of what it meant to be a musician. It’s funny, I don’t think my idea has changed that much.”

Like his continual use of the 4-track to sort of where he’s going Ward has another tried and true notion when it comes to assessing his songs: time. Though his uses a few words to say much, sketch emotions and scenes, it’s not something that is just throw together.

“If I’m writing… even a piece of a song… I write it down. If it still resonates six months down the line, a year, even five, those are the ones you put in your bag and you take to the studio. You come to realize, the ones that don’t make it, they were only meant to live for that moment in your notebook or on the 4-track-and plenty songs never get any further than the 4-track.”

It’s funny what one can do with scraps, pretty melodies, rhythms that pause and hang. There is-as he’s quick to point out-nothing obvious about his music, yet there is a hypnotic quality that soothes and draws listeners in. Along with Deschanel, Ward is joined on Hold Time by alt-country-rock goddess Lucinda Williams.

“I wanted a singer who wasn’t too sweet or sugary,” he says of the unlikely pairing of kerosene against vintage chiffon. “She brings the right amount of vinegar to the proceedings. She’s been a huge influence, and it’s the way she sounds…

“It’s like working with Zooey, I definitely learned a lot from her about vocal harmonies and layering. She has a real instinctive sense about her… and it came out of left field. The best things do.”

It is twenty minutes past the allotted time. Ward isn’t rushing, but it’s clear he needs to have his lunch, to find some space inside that big bustling city. As long as he has his room to retreat to, to let his mind wander into fields of songs, he’ll be alright. But for now, there is Hold Time-and he must support his experiments as part of the drifting that realizes the songs he sings.

“It makes interviews tricky,” he apologies. “I tend to see the whole picture. I don’t compartmentalize, so it’s tricky. When I’m writing, I just write… and the rest sorts itself out as it happens.”