SOUNDTRACK: M. WARD-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #39 (June 25, 2020).
I don’t really know all that much about M. Ward. I was supposed to see him live on many occasions that never panned out (I think at least three shows were either cancelled or I couldn’t go). But then I did get to see him live at the She & Him Christmas show. I was really impressed with his guitar playing in that set. And I’m even more impressed in this set.
He opens here with two beautiful finger-picked songs. The first is “just” an “Instrumental Intro.” I don’t know if it’s an actual song or just an improv, but it’s terrific (with nice harmonics). It segues seamlessly into “Duet for Guitars #3.” I’m not sure how you play a duet with just one guitar but it, too, sounds wonderful.
His tuning is nonstandard for all of these songs, which somehow makes them more chill and pretty. His playing is effortless and really fun to watch.
For me, M. Ward would be the perfect artist to sit next to while he played his songs, perhaps on a couch in a small room. And that’s pretty much what you get with this Tiny Desk (home) concert. We see M. Ward in the lounge of BOCCE, a recording studio in Vancouver, Wash.
I didn’t really know his singing voice, but the blurb sums it up nicely:
That tender wispy-rasp in his voice and flowing acoustic guitar make M. Ward a musician I’d want to hear up close.
He explains that he took requests from various social media for this set. He plays four requests and one new song.
Ward’s delivery reminds me of Sandro Perri, although a little more conventional. “Chinese Translation” and “Requiem” are softly strummed songs and his vocals are mostly deeper with an occasional high note added in.
In between the requests he plays a new song.
Those songs fit so well with music on his new record, Migration Stories, from which he plays “Coyote Mary’s Traveling Show.”
This song sounds a little different in style–a more traditional bluesy style, I guess. Then it’s on to
comforting and memorable older tunes like “Poison Cup” (2006)
for which he switches to a different guitar–this one smaller (and presumably tuned differently).
Then it’s back to the first guitar for “Voice at the End of the Line” (2003). There’s some really lovely guitar work in this song. I’m not sure I’d go out of my way to see him live but maybe one of these opening gigs will actually happen someday.
[READ: June 22, 2020] “Grief”
This story is about genocide and how to cope with it–especially if you are far away from when it happened to your family.
The narrator found it worse that no one would say the word genocide, just wry observations like “weird stuff goes on in your country.” She had not given up hope that he mother, father, brother, sisters, her whole family back in Rwanda might still be alive.
In her homeland, the word was
gutsembatsemba, a verb, used when talking about parasites or mad dogs, things that had to be eradicated, and about Tutsis, also known as inyenzi—cockroaches—something else to be wiped out.
A Hutu classmate once told her he had asked his mother who those Tutsi people were that he’d heard about and his mother said, they were nothing–just stories.
The narrator tried to get in touch with her family but heard nothing.
Finally, she called her older brother in Canada. He told her that he was now the head of the family. She received a formal letter in June confirming the deaths. Why didn’t she have a photo of any of them? (more…)
I Just Read About That... 