Take a good long listen to modern-day troubadour M. Ward, and one of the first thing’s you’ll realize is that this guy doesn’t much care what year it is. Any of the hits from his recent releases could just as easily have been jammed from the stage of the Hill Valley 1885 Clock Tower Dedication Festival alongside various hoary members of ZZ Top as tracked with care in a 21st-century recording studio.
Luckily, the quantum-leaping Ward sometimes slows time enough for us mortals to catch a synchronic glimpse of what this man looks and sounds like. And 2009’s glimpse just so happens to be that of a winter tour, spanning both sides of the Atlantic, hot on the heels of his highly-anticipated release, Hold Time (due February 17, via Merge), like a trail of fire to a tricked-out, rubber-burning time machine. Amidst producing and arranging Zooey Deschanel’s indie pop gems and being the “Him” of She & Him’s critically-acclaimed Volume One (TMT Review) this past year, M. apparently rearranged space-time enough to also write and record Hold Time, which features guest performances by Lucinda Williams, Jason Lytle (ex Grandaddy), and Deschanel herself, all of whom must have been given special “temporal-displacement watches” in order to work on the project outside the normal flow of space-time.
Tickets for all shows in the U.S., UK, and Europe are on sale as of last Friday. It is not yet clear, however, whether Ward will get around the Atlantic via wormhole technology or simply by means of some sort of flying, fusion-powered, stainless-steal tour bus. Either way, I hope he’s planning some ZZ Top and Huey Lewis jams for this one.
Tourdates (arranged linearly for your limited space-time comprehension):
