There is a century-old house in the southeast section of this city, with an attic full of vintage instruments and audio equipment and a drum kit in the dining room, and this is where the indie musician M. Ward likes to record. Reel-to-reel tapes are stacked on the linoleum floor upstairs; a broken film projector with an old coil speaker serves as an amplifier; bells and shakers crowd a shelf in a studio lit mostly by Christmas lights; the Wurlitzer gets a lot of use.
Ward — the initial stands for Matt — is a connoisseur of the old-fashioned, like the Japanese-made circa-1970 Epiphone guitar that Mike Coykendall, the owner of the house and one of Ward’s longtime producers, handed him to strum.
“Want to see Matt’s favorite microphone?” Coykendall, a genial man with long silver hair and excitable eyebrows, said, producing something out of date. “Be very careful with it, it probably cost US$2.”
Ward, 35, a singer-songwriter and guitarist, doesn’t hide his nostalgia, or his taste for the homemade. “I don’t like expensive sounds,” he said. “I’m still using the same four-track I bought when I was 15 to write songs.” That retro-crafting is evident in his sixth studio album, Hold Time, which will be released by Merge Records tomorrow. About half the songs were produced in this house. Like his previous work, it is indie folk with some pop glimmer and more country pluck, and a roster of starry collaborators, like Lucinda Williams and his partner in the duo She & Him, the actress Zooey Deschanel, who sings backup on the peppy, toe-tapping single Never Had Nobody Like You.
“The blogosphere will eat this track up,” the editor Amrit Singh wrote on Stereogum.com, the influential music blog, which also named Hold Time one of the most anticipated albums of the year. It has been streamed more than 100,000 times in the last month on National Public Radio.
It was also in this house that Ward recorded most of She & Him’s debut, Volume One. Released last year by Merge, it was his biggest hit, selling more than 120,000 copies and winning his solo act new fans. He will play the Apollo Theater in Harlem on Thursday and, for the first time under his own name, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, in April.
“She & Him definitely broadened the number of people who would hear Matt’s new record,” said Mac McCaughan, a founder of Merge. But even before that project, “this would have been our biggest release in the first half of this year,” he added. “His last record sold more than 60,000 copies. For us that’s a huge record.”
For Ward that success has been a slow and steady build. In the decade since he moved to Portland to record his first album, he has supported himself through music — a reflection of the city’s livability as well as his career as a sideman. Something of a musician’s musician, Ward has performed as a slide guitarist with members of Calexico in Europe, as an orchestral player for Bright Eyes in concert and on TV, and at Madison Square Garden with Norah Jones. His other collaborations on the road and in the studio read like a Who’s Who of the indie-love firmament: Jenny Lewis, Cat Power, Neko Case, the White Stripes. In addition to She & Him’s Volume Two, among his next projects is Monsters of Folk, an album with Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and Jim James of My Morning Jacket.
“I think our voices and spirits blend well together. When we played together, it just felt natural,” James wrote in an e-mail message. “His music is eternal and people will be listening to it as long as they have ears.”
Through it all Ward has maintained his own distinctive style, built equally on his croaky, plaintive voice, his fingerpicking musicality and his throwback aesthetic sense. He doesn’t listen to much contemporary music or read newer books. He watches movies, but as for TV, he said, “I’ve never taken the plunge, except for Twin Peaks.”
It’s not that he’s a Luddite — he buys songs on iTunes and does late-night YouTubing like everyone else — or a misanthrope who believes that art was better in someone else’s day. “I know there’s great stuff out there,” he said. “But I don’t want to be influenced by stuff that’s going on around me. I’m more interested in consuming stuff that’s stood the test of time and the hard work of filtering has already happened.”
Is he just a little bit lazy? “I think lazy isn’t too far off,” he said. Even so, Ward is not out of step; contemporary indie music has caught up to his brand of revivalism. And he’s more diverse than he lets on: He likes the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and grew up, near Los Angeles, on KROQ, then home to British new wave and acts like Sonic Youth and Firehose from the punk label SST.
“Listening to something that’s brand-new, I get a little bit excited about it,” he said, mentioning Fleet Foxes, a young harmonizing Seattle band, as a recent discovery, though he doesn’t yet own their album. “But I get more excited about stuff that’s obviously weathered storms.”
In concert he’s not into working the crowd. “I’ve never said, ‘Hello, Milwaukee!’ or ‘Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care,’” he said. “It’s not my world. I’m much more interested in finding some common ground with myself and the musicians onstage.”
Ward’s ability to cede the spotlight may be one reason he has managed to collaborate with so many star players and tour so consistently, both choices he called “no-brainers.”
“I sincerely believe that he does not care how much attention he gets,” James wrote. “He makes his records in his own quiet and beautiful way and he always will.”
McCaughan, who is also the singer for the indie group Superchunk, said: “He’s a patient artist. I think you have to be on board with growing gradually to make it happen. I think the way he makes records is indicative of that. He’s not someone who just bangs out a record in a week. He works on stuff and goes back and thinks about it.”
Though he is rarely hurried, Ward now has the luxury of having extra time. His recent success means he can build in more significant breaks between tours, be choosier about where and when he plays, and even turn down projects. What would he do if he weren’t pursuing music?
“It’s something I think about all the time,” he said. “It’s more of a question of what wouldn’t I do than what would I do.” A sabbatical, he said, is in his future, but not the near future.
“Is there a word that means weighted down, but not in a bad way?” he asked. “I’m weighted down with musical ideas that keep me writing and recording and doing my job.”
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