{"id":5834,"date":"2012-04-25T10:14:22","date_gmt":"2012-04-25T17:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=5834"},"modified":"2012-04-25T10:15:22","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T17:15:22","slug":"m-ward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2012\/04\/m-ward\/","title":{"rendered":"M. WARD"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

M. Ward<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The \u201cHim\u201d of She & Him takes a confident step back to center stage \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

After releasing 2009\u2019s Hold Time<\/em>, Portland-based singer and songwriter\u00a0M. Ward largely put his solo career on hold. He toured and made albums with Monsters of Folk\u2014an indie-rock supergroup also featuring My Morning Jacket\u2019s Jim James and Bright Eyes\u2019 Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis\u2014and She & Him, the duo Ward founded with actress and singer Zooey Deschanel. \u201cI\u2019m one of those strange people who\u2019s just as happy in the driver\u2019s seat as I am in the passenger\u2019s seat,\u201d Ward says.<\/p>\n

Still, Ward slowly and surely made his way back to the steering wheel. Over the last three years, whenever he found himself with moments of free time, he whiled away at A Wasteland Companion<\/em>, his seventh solo album. \u201cI wanted to make a new kind of record,\u201d he says. \u201cOne that combined live records with studio records.\u201d So Ward\u00a0(first name: Matthew) hit the road to record in Los Angeles, Austin, Omaha and New York, among other U.S. cities, teaming with regular collaborators like Deschanel and Mogis as well as new partners like Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley. When his travels took him to England, Ward recorded the \u201960s-style piano-pop tune \u201cPrimitive Girl\u201d with John Parish, best known for his\u00a0work with PJ Harvey.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the nice things about listening to a live record is that you\u2019re going to\u00a0these different places in the world, and you\u2019re getting a chance to listen to a musician think on his feet in a new situation, in a new room,\u201d explains Ward, 38. \u201cI wanted that element, but also wanted to have the advantages you get when you record in a studio\u2014like\u00a0making guitars and vocals sound how you want them to sound.\u201d Wasteland <\/em>benefits from the spontaneous instincts of Ward and his cohorts. \u201cI\u2019m lucky to have talented friends who enjoy thinking on their \u00a0feet and meeting me in strange rooms around the world and recording songs that they\u2019ve never heard before\u2014but\u00a0that I\u2019d been thinking about for months\u00a0or years,\u201d says Ward.<\/p>\n

Despite the circuitous manner of its creation, Wasteland<\/em> was never intended as a travel diary. With its wide range of styles\u2014everything from sunny malt-shop pop and fuzzy rockabilly to somber acoustic ballads\u2014the album remains representative of Ward in full. \u201cI\u2019m not someone who feels like a record has to be a picture of two weeks of songwriting,\u201d he says. \u201cI feel like a record should be a picture of a whole\u00a0lifetime, if possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Kenneth Partridge<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. Ward The \u201cHim\u201d of She & Him takes a confident step back to center stage \u00a0 After releasing 2009\u2019s Hold Time, Portland-based singer and songwriter\u00a0M. Ward largely put his solo career on hold. He toured and made albums with Monsters of Folk\u2014an indie-rock supergroup also featuring My Morning Jacket\u2019s Jim James and Bright Eyes\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[3513,3303,10156],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5834"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5834"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5839,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5834\/revisions\/5839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}