JIM WARD

JIM WARD IS RECONCILED WITH HIS MUSICAL LEGACY. HE TELLS DANIELLE O’DONOHUE HOW HE FOUND THE BALANCE.

It all started with a rabbit, a lost little bunny trying to find its way home. Not a real rabbit, a rabbit in a commercial. But for Jim Ward, former member of At The Drive In and the band leader of Sparta and Sleepercar, that lost, lonely rabbit really struck a chord as he explains: “I was asked to write a song for a commercial and this commercial was about this bunny rabbit that was trying to get back home.

“I saw the commercial and I just felt this bond with this bunny rabbit. He’s sitting in the rain and he’s on a bus and then he’s hopping through a park and it just felt like my life at the time, always trying to get home from these tours. I just wanted to go home.”

Even though the song Ward penned for the ad, On My Way Back Home Again, was rejected, the track ended up inspiring a trio of EPs that Ward has put together as his first solo album, Quiet In The Valley, On The Shores The End Begins. And Ward admits he still sympathises with the bunny that started the process.

“Still to this day every time I play On My Way Back Home…, it is such a good song to play on the road because I never stop feeling that way. There was a time in my life when all I wanted to do was be gone and see the world and be in this adventure, but now my adventure is changing. My adventure is I’ve been married ten years and I’m starting businesses in El Paso and I’m trying to make my community a better place. That’s an adventure. I can’t not be on the road; it’s too much of who I am but I need to find the balance.”

Ward’s El Paso-based business ventures include a home studio and a bar. While the studio seems like an obvious venture for a musician, Ward is particularly proud of his bar.

“I really like manual labour. My favourite part of the bar is that I physically built the bar. It was a greenhouse before. I mean, I cut the wood and I put it together and I made the bar that you put your beer on top of. I love that shit. My family has been in El Paso five generations because we’re a railroad family.

“My great-great-grandfather built the bridges that the railroads travel on to this day. My history is this really blue-collar American frontier craftsmen and even though I’m nowhere near that – I mean, they would eat me up and spit me out if they were alive now – but there’s a part of me that likes to just grab a hammer and go to it.”

While the bar and the manual labour involved in building it provide an escape, the home studio gave Ward the space he needed to slowly put together Quiet…. The musician admits he sometimes needs a push from friend and studio buddy Gabe Gonzalez when it comes to recording. He’d much rather write the songs than put them to tape.

“If you have your own studio, shit takes forever because you’re not worrying about the clock and you’re not like, ‘Alright, we only have a day.’ I’m like, ‘I’ll just come back tomorrow, I’ll come back next week. What’s the big rush?’

“Once I commit to the song, after that it’s really up to Gabe to force me to finish because I’m so in love with writing songs. Recording gets to a point where I’m just like, ‘Fuck, just finish. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care if the bass is the right frequency.’ That’s why Gabe has to be there, to make sure that it sounds okay. I’m way more into the nuts and the bolts of the song. That means that I will spend fourteen hours trying to play a piano part backwards because that’s the way I want to hear it. Sometimes they have to reel me in and sometimes they have to make me finish something.”

Considering Ward’s incredible musical history, it’s hard to have a conversation without the name of his former band At The Drive In popping up. When Drum asks Ward about supporting his good friends Coldplay with his last band Sleepercar, he excitedly explains that the stadium the Coldplay tour started in, The Palace Of Auburn Hills, was the venue for the first ever At The Drive In arena set.

“At The Drive In played with Rage Against The Machine there. I was so nervous I kept my head down for the first three songs and when I looked up the entire crowd – which was probably like 15 to 20,000 people – was flipping us off ‘cause they fucking hated us,” Ward laughs.

“I was telling Coldplay that story and we were just laughing at the difference now and the difference in confidence and the fact that I can get up in front of Coldplay’s audience and they were such an open, responsive crowd. They were not prepared for this band that came with a pedal steel player, but there’s enough punk rock in us that we can go out there and just scream our arses off but still play beautiful songs and it was really fun.”

Ward admits it wasn’t always so easy chatting about At The Drive In. “There was a time when I hated talking about it. There was a time when I thought nobody in the world should care, they should only care about the record I’m making. There’s days you hate it. There’s days you love it. It is what it is. But essentially we’re all on the same page, we’re proud of it and we’ll always guard it. We don’t ever want to fuck up that legacy and we all talk about that. We have all made commitments to each other to never ruin that. The rumours are always going to be there.

“The end of that band was very confusing for all of us. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it, to be honest with you. I would never expect anyone else to understand it. But the life that I’ve led is insane. I always tell people I’m 34 but I’ve already lived like 120 years. The shit that I’ve seen and done… It’s a blessing. I’m more grateful than I could even explain to you.”

Playing at Peats Ridge

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