Three years after More Rain and 2020’s Migration Stories, Americian musician and singer-songwriter M. Ward has released a new album. Think of Spring is out now via Anti- Records and features a collection of songs frist recorded by Billie Holiday. “It still feels good to invent new guitar tunings and use them to help deconstruct old songs,” M. Ward said. “Billie Holiday’s “For Heaven’s Sake” in a modified open B.”
The title Think of Spring comes from a poem written in 1924 by Jane Brown-Thompson that eventually became “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in 1938 – the first song on the record. “I first heard [Billie’s album] Lady In Satin in a mega-shopping mall somewhere in San Francisco,” M. Ward explained. “I was about 20 years old and didn’t know much about Billie’s records or her life or how her voice changed over the years. Anyway, the sound was coming from the other side of the mall and I remember mistaking her voice for a beautiful perfectly distorted electric guitar – some other-world thing floating there on this strange mournful ocean of strings and I was hooked for life.”
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