Blood, Sweat And Come: Folk Music Takes No Prisoners
He’s an exceedingly dexterous fingerstyle guitarist and an alchemical interpreter able to transmute shit into gold—check out his transformation of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” from big-’80s pomp to dreamy folkadelia on 2003’s Transfiguration of Vincent.
As a songwriter, Ward spreads his wings wider with every outing, but until now his compositions have yet to transcend sensibility. They’re all vibe and swoon—arresting in the moment, but oddly forgettable beyond the bewitching atmospherics. Ward’s yet to write anything that would be half as special in the hands of another artist who didn’t share his rich old-soul vocal timbre or knack for reverb.
No matter. Sometimes beauty is its own reward. Ward’s fourth LP—in addition to curating last year’s I Am the Resurrection: A Tribute to John Fahey or producing Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins’ Rabbit Fur Coat—the wishfully titled Post-War, drops this week. It’s pretty, twittering music you usually have to see stars and little birdies to hear. This is the sound of 21st-century porch music, like a Woody Guthrie song about flying saucers or watching an old flickering silent movie on your iPod.
The darkest corner of folk is arguably the pirate song, the wheezing besotted sea chanteys barked by brutal men in cruel circumstance. Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has revived popular interest in the swashbuckling exploits of the OGs of the seven seas.
Enter Hal Willner, a Philadelphia native and musical coordinator of Saturday Night Live since 1981. Willner has made a career of corralling high-cred contemporary talent to reanimate old, weird musics in ambitiously themed tribute albums. For the pirate-themed Rogue’s Gallery, Willner assembled an impressive roster of A-list Jolly Rogers—Bono, Lou Reed, Lucinda Williams, a surprisingly non-annoying Sting—along with semi-regular cast of not-ready-for-prime-time players such as Van Dyke Parks, Nick Cave, Mary Margaret O’Hara and Kate McGarrigle (along with Loudon and Rufus Wainwright).
Lending an air of unpredictability to a 43-song double disc are wild cards such as Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, the actor John C. Reilly and Hunter S. Thompson illustrator (and no stranger to high-seas decadence) Ralph Steadman. The resulting Rogue’s Gallery is a sprawling, artsy song cycle, as unpredictable as a raging nor’easter, weirder than 15 men on a dead man’s chest, with a heaping helping of rum, sodomy and the lash.