M. Ward
Adding another entry to my Music category, here is something I wrote from my impressions on M. Ward. It waxes a little poetic, so I hope you’re reading this on an empty stomach.
Here is music for sitting under a weeping willow while watching a thick summer sunset. It seems as if there are spaces between the notes reserved for crickets and cicada and the low song of a whippoorwill. Underneath his voice is the rustle of long grass by the riverbank.
Here is music for walking through pools of cold moonlight with your hands in your pockets down a dirt road at night. When the occasional car passes you step to the side of the road, and it washes you in brief yellow light and noise before rumbling off into the dark.
This is the music you would whistle while pushing your log raft down the Mississippi River on the way to St. Louis. Everyone who heard it as you passed would retreat briefly into nostalgia for that summer, years ago, with that first kiss or first car, milestones of warm days where everything seemed fantastic and meaningful.
Dew rests lightly on these songs, cool and damp and reflecting a broad country sunrise. These are slow morning songs, for a man who wakes up under a weeping willow bathed in quiet dawn. The spaces between the acoustic notes suddenly fill with birdsong, and the man gets up, brushes off his coat, and retrieves his hat that fell to the ground as he slept.
These songs rumble into the afternoon like children to the lunch table. Thirsty after a day imagining bandits in the woods, they speak eagerly about their adventures. They clatter from the kitchen and settle in that comfortable armchair - soon the crickets have sung them awake and they rub their eyes at dusk. Outside they can see their favorite tree ablaze in the sunset, the fireflies dancing like sparks.