Event Information

Several times, as I listened to M. Wards Supernatural Thing, I asked myself what year it was. Was it 1952, and was I listening to a track from the Harry Smith Anthology? Was it 1972, and was I eavesdropping on the recording session for After the Gold Rush? No, its 2023, and M. Ward is one of the special contemporary artists who invite such questions. Ward has clearly mastered the whole vocabulary of American popular music and made serious decisions about how to employ it for his own ends. What Ward shares with Harry Smiths artists and Neil Young is a context of musical and human values: authenticity and intimacy. Supernatural Things original songs sound freshly pulled from the ground, with a little earth sticking to them. Wards lyric delivery has that slight rawness the ear loves, and his voice has quiet dignity and great tenderness. Supernatural Thing is an open-hearted, inviting album. The albums guest stars First Aid Kit, Shovels enliven the album with surprises. On Too Young to Die, the womens voices in First Aid Kit spread a light frosting over the melody, and their Beach Boys-like chorus on Engine 5 makes the song sound like an instant hit. The whole program has a lovely open house feeling, reminiscent of pre-pandemic house parties. It was at such parties in San Luis Obispo in the mid-1990s where I first heard M. Wards music. He was still a college student, writing his first songs and learning the vocabulary he uses today with such calm assurance.I asked him about the title track, in which Elvis Presley appears with a message: You can go anywhere you please. Well, all my songs depend on dream-imagery to some extent, he replied, and this was an actual dream I had about Elvis, when he came to me and said that. I dont know if its pandemic-related or not. This is the song where Ward sings you feel the line is growing thin / between beautiful and strange, which I told him I thought sums up the emotional tone of the album. (He agreed.) The title Supernatural Thing comes from an early thought as a kid that radio traveled the same airwaves as messages from supernatural things and music, especially remembered music, is somehow tied up in this exchange, he continued.