Description
Label Review.
2020 album also available on CD.
Our Overview.
‘Migration Stories’ is a spare and spacious 11-song album. It’s written, says M.Ward - a Souther California based prolific singer-songwriter writer, producer and performer - from the point of view of people living their day-to-day amidst political chaos, relying on faith and hope to keep going to try and find better lives. Ever since early human history, people have migrated, immigrated and emigrated. So, Ward thought, he should tell some of their stories. And he does so in his signature restrained, hypnotic style. “I love concise, short songs,” Ward says, citing The Beatles and The Minute Men as examples. “I’m inspired by songwriters that are able to say a lot with as little as possible.”
M. Ward’s music has always felt intricate, intimate and other worldly. With ‘Migration Stories’ he breathes beautiful life into vignettes of human flight, 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.
For Ward, who wrote much of his new album amidst the contemporary torrent of terrible news headlines swirling the country of late, his processing involves music, often used as a filter. “The first thing that inspired the record were the articles that I’ve been reading in the newspaper and hearing about from friends when I travel,” he says. “It’s the story that’s impossible to ignore right now. The music comes out in a way that, to me, sounds like my brain is still processing the injustices I’m reading about.”
M. Ward has established himself as one of modern American music’s most unique and versatile voices. For his tenth album he journeyed to Quebec, Canada to work with Arcade Fire’s Tim Kingsbury, Richard Reed Parry, producer/mixer Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Florence and the Machine) and Teddy Impakt who opened up a new world of synthesisers and keyboards for the music.
Tracklisting: Migration Of Souls / Heaven’s Nail And Hammer / Coyote Mary’s Traveling Show / Independent Man / Stevens’ Snow Man / Unreal City / Real Silence / Along The Santa Fe Trail / Chamber Music / Torch / Rio Drone