Band: M. Ward
Album: Think of Spring
VÖ: 11.12.2020
Label/Vertrieb: ANTI-/Indigo
Website: https://www.mwardmusic.com/
Prolific songwriter M. Ward has announced his new album Think of Spring today, a collection of songs originally recorded by Billie Holiday – a muse to Ward and many others. To be released via ANTI- on December 11.
“It still feels good to invent new guitar tunings and use them to help deconstruct old songs,” M. Ward said. “Billie Holiday's “For Heaven’s Sake" in a modified open B."
Ward achieved the intimate sound of this record by filtering the original songs and strings through a single acoustic guitar, using various alternate tunings and a minimal amount of textures and studio manipulation. Most of the songs were recorded on an analog Tascam four track. The title Think of Spring comes from a poem written in 1924 by Jane Brown-Thompson that eventually became "I Get Along Without You Very Well" in 1938 - the first song on the record. Proceeds from Think of Spring will benefit Inner-City Arts & DonorsChoose via PLUS1 for Black Lives Fund. “I first heard [Billie’s album] Lady In Satin in a mega-shopping mall somewhere in San Francisco,” M. Ward explained. “I was about 20 years old and didn’t know much about Billie’s records or her life or how her voice changed over the years. Anyway, the sound was coming from the other side of the mall and I remember mistaking her voice for a beautiful perfectly distorted electric guitar - some other-world thing floating there on this strange mournful ocean of strings and I was hooked for life.”
In April of this year M. Ward also released his critically acclaimed tenth studio release and first for ANTI-, Migration Stories. Recorded at Arcade Fire’s Montreal studio, the collection is languid and hazy, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy as it reckons with a world that feels more divided than ever before, even as its inhabitants grow more inextricably linked by the day. "The relaxed pacing, Ward’s intimate vocals and tips of the cap to Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and the sounds of the West give the album a decidedly nighttime atmosphere, a drizzle of starlight that settles gently on the ears and the mind," said Associated Press. "The intimate atmospherics, along with Ward’s storytelling acumen, make it an album practically designed for deep listening rather than skipping around to the singles," added The San Francisco Chronicle.
M. WARD - ‘Think of Spring’
1. I Get Along Without You Very Well
2. For Heaven’s Sake
3. It’s Easy To Remember
4. You’ve Changed
5. Violets For Your Furs
6. For All We Know
7. But Beautiful
8. All The Way
9. I’m A Fool To Want You
10. I’ll Be Around
11. You Don’t Know What Love Is
Infos zur vorherigen VÖ:
Band: M. Ward
Album: Migration Stories
VÖ: 03.04.2020
Label/Vertrieb: ANTI- / Indigo
Website: https://www.facebook.com/mwardmusic/
A prolific writer, producer, and performer, M. Ward has established himself as one of modern American music’s most unique and versatile voices. While he’s perhaps best known for his own remarkable output—nine acclaimed studio albums that have prompted Rolling Stone to hail him a “folk hero” and The Guardian to praise him as “a maverick auteur who draws upon blues, folk, country and art-rock, and is equally adept within each genre”—Ward may be equally celebrated for his wide-ranging and adventurous collaborations.
In just the last decade alone he’s teamed up with Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, and Jim James to form the beloved super group Monsters of Folk, paired with Zooey Deschanel for six records as She & Him and worked in the studio and on the road with the likes of Mavis Staples, Jenny Lewis, Norah Jones, Cat Power, Neko Case, Lucinda Williams, Peter Buck, and countless more.
Ward’s newest album, ‘Migration Stories’ (out April 3), marks his tenth studio release and his debut for ANTI- Records. Recorded at Arcade Fire’s Montreal studio, the collection is languid and hazy, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy as it reckons with a world that feels more divided than ever before, even as its inhabitants grow more inextricably linked by the day. Ward’s delivery is tender and gentle throughout the album’s eleven intimately rendered meditations, but there’s an undercurrent of darkness floating just beneath the surface, a persistent sense that the end may be closer than any of us dare to realize.
Eerily beautiful opener “Migration of Souls” imagines a reunion beyond the boundaries of space and time, while the slow-shuffling “Heaven’s Nail and Hammer” gets lost in the stars, and the driving “Unreal City” searches for peace in a post-apocalyptic swirl of synthesizers. It’s a record that draws on the full gamut of Ward’s profound powers as an artist, mixing folk tradition and timeless song craft with bold production and transportive sonic landscapes.
