On his 10th solo LP, M. Ward offers a personal spin on a hot-topic political issue with the help of a few friends from Arcade Fire and some unexpected synthesizers.

Some 100 years ago, Matt Ward’s grandparents left their home of Durango, Mexico, and made their way to the United States. They entered through El Paso—it cost about 50 cents—which, in hindsight, set the stage for Ward’s life decades later. Their story is similar to that of many immigrants today, who risk their lives to enter this country, in hopes of giving their families a better life.

And, ruminating about his own lineage while reading about the border-crossing stories that have populated the papers in recent years, set Ward down the path of wonder, hope, desire and triumph that he explores throughout his tenth album, Migration Stories. 

“I’ve been noticing how the country is shifting and it ends up infiltrating my thoughts,” he says on a recent January day, while walking in Los Angeles. “The more I travel to Europe, the more I see some of the same problems and discussions happening. How do we deal with xenophobia? How do we deal with people that weren’t born in the same country we were? The more you look at it, the more you notice it’s everywhere.” 

It would be easy to say that Ward’s new direction is a dive into the political sphere, taking the anger—and viral videos—of the last several years and condensing them into his own brand of modern folk. But that’s not his style and, for Migration Stories, Ward sought to find a different voice than what you’d read in The New York Times. 

“What I’m interested in is taking the perspective of someone crossing a border or taking a leap of faith,” he says. “The news is doing a good job of showing all the tragic outcomes of what happens when people are taking these leaps. For me, music is a good place to process information into something more hopeful. I see music as a big processing plant— all of the news, as well as our conversations and dreams come in. And what comes out is, hopefully, some synthesis or harmony—something to wake up to the next day and build off of.” 

Throughout Ward’s career, he too has been a bit nomadic. In the liner notes of his 1999 debut album Duet for Guitar #2, he even writes, “Most of these songs were written in Chicago. The others were figured out en route to, or in, Seattle, but they were all recorded in Portland.” In 2008, he released his first duet album with Zooey Deschanel under the moniker She & Him—the two dipped into more classic pop songwriting and have released three more proper LPs, an EP and two celebrated Christmas albums since then.

Around the same time he started She & Him, Ward also contributed vocals to Norah Jones’s 2007 album Not Too Late and took part in the supergroup Monsters of Folk alongside My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, and Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis. Their self-titled—and only—album came out in 2009. 

This past decade, along with lending his musical talents to Beth Orton’s 2012 album Sugaring Season, Neko Case’s 2013 album The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You and Conor Oberst’s 2017 album Salutations, Ward released three of his own records. They all retain what have become M. Ward signatures: hushed vocals, dripping in sentimentality and passion surrounded by his killer guitar lines. For this set, though, he decided to travel down a new path altogether. Yet, remarkably, the creation of Migration Stories somewhat mirrored those same tales he was writing about. 

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Ward was born outside of Los Angeles in 1973, In Thousand Oaks, Calif. As a child, drawing was his primary creative outlet, but, when he was 14, he started shifting his energy to studying the guitar and recording songs to a 4-track machine. To teach himself, he took on the task of learning every Beatles song. “If you can stay in touch with your younger self, it can prepare you for old age,” Ward says when thinking back about those very early years. “I think many of the artists I know are all very connected to their childhoods in a way that can feed your creativity.” 

Those early days still inform his process decades later and, thus, Migrations Stories started in a familiar place.

“Normally, I create the foundations of my songs on my own using GarageBand,” he says. “I sit on those for six months or a year, letting them grow older. Then I bring them into the studio to bounce off other musicians. The ones that seem to take a life of their own are the ones that stay on the record.” 

That gestation period is key. “It’s a matter of seeing if I still like the idea,” he says. “I learned at an early age that for every 10 songs that are unplayable, just unworthy of production, there’s one song that has all the pieces that fit together. Time has to tell you that this is a keeper. Because, at the moment, every song you create seems pretty good. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing it. But sometimes you wake up the next day and realize something was a stinker. Then you wait six months or a year, and if it still feels pretty good when you relisten to that idea, you have something.” 

Once Ward had a batch of songs he felt was ready for Migration Stories, he chose to leave the comforting confines of Los Angeles and Portland, where he says he usually records, and flew to Montreal. He teamed up with producer Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Florence and the Machine) and hunkered down in Arcade Fire’s studio, a light-filled space on the second floor of a house. Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry and Tim Kingsbury contributed to the sessions, adding a variety of instruments, such as bass, guitar, triangle, keys and vocals. 

“The time spent in Montreal was putting myself out of my comfort zone,” Ward says. “I had known the musicians that I worked with on an acquaintance level, but I had never worked with them before.”

Perhaps the most unexpected result of Ward’s work alongside so many outside collaborators was the heavy use of synthesizers, an instrument that’s been largely foreign to his aesthetic.

“I definitely did not expect to be relying on synthesizers,” he says with a bit of revelation in his voice. “[Craig] is a master of these synthesizers. They’re rare and hard to find sounds because they were made 50 years ago. He helped me by finding a lot of beautiful textures. I’ve always been more reliant on guitars, vocals and percussions—so this was a great experiment, a chance to play with these new sounds and textures.” 

“He works quickly,” Kingsbury says about recording with Ward. “He’ll share a song with you and show you the chords—he’s just super open. And he keeps the mood light; if something doesn’t feel like it’s getting there quickly, he’s ready to move on.” 

“He gets tired of doing the same thing over and over again,” adds Zooey Deschanel. “I know, with She & Him, he likes being the producer and shifting the way he thinks about production for each record; and when we tour he can focus on playing guitar, which I think is really fun for him. He’s always challenging himself.”

That’s not to say that Migration Stories is a massive sonic departure—classic Ward sounds still brim throughout. The gorgeous “Heaven’s Nail and Hammer” features his signature vocal intonations over a soft guitar. And his cover of “Along the Santa Fe Trail,” a cowboy ballad popularized by Glenn Miller, feels like it could have been plucked right out of the 1950s, oozing with Southwestsounding guitars and doo-woppy backing vocals. 

Ward, who currently divides his time between LA and Portland, Ore., believes a song like that is indicative of how his relationship with music has evolved over time. “There’s so many things that keep my passion going for music,” he says. “The biggest thing is having some strange connection to these old records that I love. A lot of them are obscure songs that, for one reason or another, I got obsessed with. A year ago, I didn’t know ‘Santa Fe Trail’ existed. But working on it in the studio, you give an old thing new life. All of a sudden, you’re connected to these great ideas that were put in the universe way before you were born. It’s a strange feeling, but it’s one of those kinds of pleasures that never gets old.”

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In 2018, Ward self-released a 12-aong album Called What A Wonderful Industry, a record that was partly inspired by a legal battle he became entangled with, involving getting back the rights to his second album, 2001’s End of Amnesia. 

“Some songs came out of that situation having to do with the characterizations of people I met in the industry, who seemed to be in the business for the wrong reasons,” he says. “But I didn’t want the record to just be a list of villains; I also wanted it to be a list of heroes. I think everyone has the fantasy of releasing a record as soon as you’re done recording it. And this was my chance to do that. I was glad that I did it—but I’ll probably never do it again. “I wanted to avoid the entire industry,” he adds. “And that’s what I did.”

Whether it’s traveling to a new studio or releasing a record right after the tape stops, the migration theme has fully seeped into Ward’s psyche, allowing for a musical approach that’s full of hope and a desire for something different— something better. Simply put, he’s taken a musical leap of faith himself. 

“A lot of producers become obsessed with mathematical perfection and miss the soul; Matt is all soul. I believe that’s why his music is so moving,” Deschanel says. “He likes to capture a whole performance with an emotional throughline. It’s so rare because most music these days is so fixed, processed and chopped up. It can be hard to recognize an artist when you compare [their studio work] to their live performance. It’s rare to find a producer who wants to take the time to find the beauty in those live moments and get a good performance start to finish, rather than getting something piecemeal or mediocre and fixing everything later.”

“I’ve just been following my instincts on this since I started making music,” Ward says, summing up his current creative state. “I just continue to do that. Whether it’s timely or not, I don’t know. I’m interested in hearing how other people will interpret the songs. That’s usually much more interesting than my own interpretation.”