THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATT M. Ward
Feb 03, 2009
After all this time, the acclaimed songwriter still doesn't know where his tunes come from.
BY STEPHEN DEUSNER
When Matt Ward asks, "How can I put it into words?" it's not just a conversational placeholder or a defensive retreat into an artist's cliché of refusing to discuss one's craft. It's a searching question weighted with real uncertainty, as if he's apologizing for not having a better response to the question. But Ward, knee-deep in promotion for his sixth album, Hold Time, is at least trying.
"My favorite music speaks to those elements of life that you can't really talk about in interviews. It's the same feelings or elements that I feel when I listen to some of my favorite records and my favorite books and films. It's something you can't... I think the way to talk about it is with metaphors and people will draw their own conclusions. It's probably the most difficult thing to talk about in interviews, because if you could say it, then you wouldn't have to say it with music."
His demeanor can seem reserved, but certainly it's no affectation. In fact, it's intrinsic to the intuitive way he works. Ward, who was born in southern California but settled in Portland, writes constantly, recording the skeletons of songs before archiving them in what describes as a frustratingly massive library. "They sit around on cassette for months, sometimes years," he explains. "When it comes time to make a record, I go back to the tapes to find songs that ring true to me in some way or seem to want to be together." He tinkers with them, renovates and recycles them, arranged and re-records them until the songs are fully fleshed out. He describes it as an experimental process, drawing not so much from the ideas he brings to the songs but from the themes they suggest to him. In this part of his working method, his role seems more akin to a vessel than to an active agent, and if he occasionally comes across as vague or evasive about his work, well, maybe he just doesn't want to overthink a good thing.
The results of that process often sound effortless. Thanks to his crisp songwriting, laidback vocals, and high-profile collaborations, Ward has become one of a handful of indie acts currently poised for mainstream success. He released his debut, Duets for Guitars #2 (there is no #1), in 1999 on Ow Om Records, the label owned by Giant Sand's Howe Gelb, but soon signed with Merge Records, where his releases have enjoyed steady growing sales and audiences. Over the years, he has become increasingly fluent in the language of blues, country, early rock, indie, and folk, blending them together in songs that sound convincingly out of time. His compositions are compact, with the graceful concision of a koan, and his voice possesses a slight nasal drawl that sounds like reverb and distinguishes him from his peers.
Perhaps more than any of his other albums, Hold Time seems not only to warrant speculation, but to invite discussion and debate. There's a deep spiritual component to these songs that Ward has only hinted at in the past: Old Testament imagery colors opener "For Beginners," astrology seems to inform the rambunctious "Stars of Leo," and William Blake explains the afterlife on the reassuring "Blake's View." These songs are highly personal, but Ward makes clear they are not strictly autobiographical. "Quasi-autobiographical maybe," he clarifies. "Semi-autobiographical." Take the song "Epistemology," which begins:
I was raised in a Catholic school
Learned who to fight with and pray to
I learned how to hold on from a book of old songs
And if you're singing an old song, you're getting all the words wrong
Well, you're just following along too closely in the book
Even the title implies intense self-reflection on the origin and nature of knowledge. While it may be written in first-person, it is actually drawn from a third-person perspective. "I'm not telling my story at all on any of these songs," Ward explains. "I can't tell you about that because I don't really know anything other than what the song says."
Given the general need to read confession into an artist's works, especially if the artist is a singer-songwriter working in the folk-rock medium, Ward's comments can be frustratingly unrevealing, but there is something very useful and even respectable in his evasiveness. "I believe in healthy confusion for a listener," he explains. "You shouldn't necessarily know when something was recorded. You shouldn't exactly know what is going on, and I think to put in songs from different eras, it just seems like a natural thing to try to get the listener out of a specific time or space."
Ward may say he doesn't know how to put it into words, but he has a lot to say.
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If Ward comes across as somewhat withdrawn, the kind of indie auteur who doesn't leave his bedroom, musically he is just the opposite: assured and gregarious. Outstripping even his own prolific output-roughly one album every eighteen months-are his frequent collaborations with an astounding roster of artists: There's Giant Sand of course, but also Jenny Lewis, Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, Beth Orton, Cat Power, and, yes, Norah Jones.
Most notably there is Zooey Deschanel, of Elf and The Happening fame, who has teamed with Ward as She & Him. Their debut, promisingly titled Volume One, was released in March 2008 to raves and some of the best sales of his career. It's generally considered the rare actor-turned-singer album that doesn't suck, and Ward credits Deschanel with its success. "We had no idea how it would be received," he says. "All we knew is that we believed in the record and believed in the songs. One of the greatest aspects of that project was that element of surprise and how 99 percent of the audience had no idea that Zooey was a songwriter."
Ward plans to spend part of 2009 recording tracks for Volume Two, but he'll have to juggle that with his Hold Time tour and more sessions with Conor Oberst and Jim James, which is the sort of fantasy league team many indie fans, well, fantasize about. Both projects are due in 2010, and Ward does not elaborate beyond "we're excited about the record."
For Ward, these collaborations open up nearly endless musical possibilities. "I'm not somebody who loves experimenting with the latest technology, as far as recording and producing go," he explains. "I try my best to bring the human element into the recording and let that be the experiment. I'm much more interested in using older gear, sometimes beat-up gear, and it's much more interesting to see what a talented friend will do in a situation instead of seeing what this machine that was just invented will do."
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Every album is an experiment. His previous album, Post-War, notoriously explored post-World War II sounds and styles transplanted to a contemporary setting, and was generally read as commentary on life during this wartime. Hold Time picks up at a similar place, but the core experiment is different: "I wanted to combine really expensive sounds with really cheap sounds. A cheap sound would be a cheap microphone on a $50 guitar, and an expensive sound would be a 12-piece orchestra. That was one of the guiding factors of the production." The approach is nowhere more apparent than on stand-out "To Save Me," which marries an elaborate wall of sound-including strings, piano, castanets, and tympani-with a chintzy ELO synth riff and a thick, insistent floor tom to create a timeless, placeless immediacy.
He covers Buddy Holly's "Rave On" (slowed down, glammed up) and Don Gibson's AM Gold classic "Oh Lonesome Me" (with Lucinda Williams), while "Fisher of Men" sounds like Ward corralled the Tennessee Two to provide snaky rockabilly licks. "Johnny Cash, his music is something that I grew up listening to since before I can remember," says Ward. "My dad was playing his records a lot when I was a kid. I think his influence pops up from time to time."
Growing up in San Luis Obispo County in southern California, Ward found inspiration in his parents' record collection, but says, "My first exposure to music was in church on Sundays. I love the old hymns, and that was something I could relate to before I understood what words were being said. I'm interested in those things that you hold on to even before you can remember consciously trying to hold on to them.
"Trying to tap into that subconscious aspect of memory and soul and childhood is a mystery that I keep coming back to, whether or not I want to. I think it's some sort of fuel for me. I feel like it's very important to protect certain periods of inspiration because that is what you have to go back to if you're going to play a song over and over." That is, he says, the origin of the new album's title: holding time in order to isolate a feeling and to preserve it.
Ward's tendency to protect and preserve his music creates songs that are simultaneously personal and yet kept somewhat at a distance-both from listeners and, it seems, from the creator himself. "I don't know exactly where my songs came from, I don't know where they're going, but I'm enjoying the experiment."
[Photo Credit: Autumn DeWilde]
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