(3505) M. Ward / Okkervil River

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From the ACL taping program on August 5, 2009:

While “singing beautifully sad songs about mortality and feeling lonesome” (Rolling Stone) M. Ward has spent years crafting music to become one of the most acclaimed American musicians of the decade.

The man known as Matthew Stephen Ward to his parents grew up listening to country, gospel and classical music, and first came to attention with the California band Rodriguez before going solo. Combining his country/folk/blues roots with indie rock, Ward began a distinctive solo career that encompasses jazzy pop melodies and atmospheric textures.

His solo releases have resulted in increasing notoriety with each release. On 2003’s Transfiguration of Vincent, Ward “creates a full, alluring atmosphere that will recall for listeners all sorts of classic American music” (PopMatters). 2005’s Transistor Radio is “musically imaginative, robustly performed, and drawn from a golden well of warmth and intelligence” (Delusions of Adequacy) and 2007’s Post-War “squeezes big themes into modest but bewitching tunes” (Blender).

After taking a detour to form the critically-accliamed group She & Him with actress Zooey Deschanel, Ward released a new solo album earlier this year. Entertainment Weekly wrote his latest release, Hold Time, is “a musical wanderer’s dusty, train-hopping tour through folk, blues, and country.” This CD “cements his status as one of America’s best roots songwriters” (Q Magazine) and is “as finely wrought and thoroughly affecting an indie effort as 2009 is likely to see” (New York Magazine).

From the ACL taping program on June 18, 2009:

After years of writing novel-like songs full of memorable images and touring the globe with their “uninhibited” (New York Times) rock, Austin’s own Okkervil River is no longer a hometown secret.

Led by New Hampshire émigré Will Sheff, the band has released a series of acclaimed albums over the last 10 years. Okkervil began gaining national acclaim with 2003’s Down the River of Golden Dreams, which prompted Rolling Stone to write “Singer-songwriter Will Sheff of the haunted-country quartet Okkervil River is ready for worldwide renown. His ambitious melancholy on Down the River of Golden Dreams ... would be impressive enough with just soft strum and Sheff’s vaporous tenor. But Okkervil River aspire to bigger cinema.”

2005’s Black Sheep Boy was named CD of the year by several critics and PopMatters wrote Black Sheep Boy “is a record that stuns on first listen, then manages the elusive — it sinks deep into your soul.”

Okkervil River’s newest release, The Stand Ins, is the sequel to 2007’s critically acclaimed The Stage Names, which Pitchfork praised as “… one of the year’s best,” with The New York Times proclaiming, “This band’s musical arsenal keeps getting fuller.” When recording The Stage Names, the band had enough songs for a double album, but chose to make two groups of songs that fit together and release them separately.

“This is my favorite album we’ve done,” Sheff said. “I think of it as a message to myself, from myself, to keep going. And I also think of it as an expression of love and alliance with people who kept going even when they knew it was all over.”