Kristen Ward

Now living in Seattle, the 26-year-old musician is preparing to release her third album, My Last Night on Division, with the help of a crew of talented musicians.

As of late October, Ward said she had written most of the songs and was deep in the pre-production phase. The album’s release is scheduled for this spring.

“My Last Night on Division is a band record,” said Ward. “For my last two records, I hired studio musicians for a lot of the basic tracking. I had struggled to find my core group of guys, but now I got ‘em. And so the vibe is more relaxed and cohesive. I think the songs are a bit more rocking, more edgy, more guitar-based than previous albums.

“We are playing around with some different feels. Sometimes our tones are straight out of the ’80s. Other times, we find ourselves in a riff-driven ‘what would Zeppelin do’ moment. But, it’s always fun, and we laugh a lot. Things are evolving. The country thing still comes forward from time to time, but overall, the music is transitioning away from traditional Americana.”

Inspired by singers such as Neil Young and Lucinda Williams, Ward’s lyrics generally have a folk-rock feel, along with invented storylines and adherence to other people’s perspectives.

“Songs usually just come to me,” she said. “I often times write at the kitchen table. I write alone and become easily distracted. I do have a bank of ideas turning around in my head 24 hours a day. And when the time is right and the stars align, a good song will come. My favorite songs I write in under 30 minutes. I write mostly about my life and my truths, but I also enjoy putting myself in the shoes of another person, who I might identify with on a level.“I have done this in ‘Little Gun’ and ‘Shoot Me Down.’ Both songs are dark and touch on issues of depression, desperation, feelings of being lost and out of control and even homicidal tendencies,” she said.

In addition to her musical talents, Ward also uses her creativity to find ways to support her music financially. She has found a way to have her fans financially support her music even before selling her CDs.

“I started a deal online where fans could download my first album Roll Me On in exchange for an email address, which I would add to my mailing list,” she explained. “I used this as a way to develop a fan base, etc. When it was time to record my second album, I found myself with (1) no money, and (2) a shit-ton of email addresses. I decided to try and make the best of things, and so I went to my newly acquired fan base. I just put it out there. I told them what I was doing, and I told them they could be part of it. I flat out asked for money, and you know what? They gave it to me! I raised enough to make Drive Away.”

She did the same thing for her upcoming album My Last Night on Division, but due to the economy and other things, Ward had to find other ways to make money. She did this by selling records, art, and hand-drawn posters, and of course, playing lots of shows.

“The painting is something that came to me around the same time I decided to do music professionally,” she said. “Painting, like singing, was something I had no training in, but I had always wanted to do, and so I just started. I have had two solo art shows, which have been a lot of fun for me. Visual art is a wonderful outlet. It’s very meditative, and it challenges a different part of my brain. These days, I do a lot of hand-drawn posters, which I sell at my shows and online. I also plan on doing something with my album covers at some point.”

Ward’s artistic ambitions are no doubt inspired by her mom, Julie Neuffer. As a kid, Kristen loved to sing, but her mom refused to let her get voice lessons because it would change her style. She encouraged Kristen to let her voice develop on its own, resulting in the unique voice she has today.

“My mom is an amazing lady, and for much of my childhood, she pursued a musical path,” Kristen said. “She wrote and sang country/bluegrass and put out an album titled Brand New Pearl when I was 14 years old. She had a great band and so much talent. As kids, we grew up singing with her. She played a beautiful Guild guitar and would teach me and my brother all kinds of old folk songs which we would sing each night before bed. My mom later went on to get her PhD and is now a history professor. Outside of the obvious musical influences, what inspires me the most about her is that she really lives her life. She isn’t governed by fear, and she really does what she wants with herself.

“I believe being an artist is just as much about how you live as it is about the art you actually make….living can be an art form. My mom is the real deal and an incredible inspiration to my life and music,” Ward said.

Despite her love for music growing up, Kristen wasn’t always sure that she would pursue music as an adult. When she was 21, she was working in France as a cook when she decided to make the change. She quit her job, put a band together, and has been doing music ever since.

Gary Westlake is one of the many people who thinks that Ward made a good decision. Westlake is a long-time guitar player, and he currently plays for Ward. This partnership between Westlake and Ward had an unique beginning.

“OK, this is the God’s honest truth, it sounds like a line, but I was at a club here in Seattle playing a Bob Dylan tribute night,” Westlake said. “I was sitting backstage being all jaded with all these other jaded people when we heard somebody singing ‘Just Like a Woman.’ I remember looking at one of my most jaded friends, and we were both like, ‘Who the fuck is that?!!’ I rushed out to see who it was, and there was Kristen; I think it may have been the third or fourth show she’d ever done.

“I was totally blown away by her! Right after she’d finished, she was standing backstage, and I stepped (maybe it was a stagger?) backwards and stood on her foot. That is how we met. I was in her band two months later and have been there ever since.”

As Westlake explained, when he and Ward play live together, they have a connection where they seem to know where the other is going without communicating. “It happened at the third gig we did together; I can remember the moment as clear as day,” he said. “I went up to her after the gig and told her she was my musical soul mate.

“I’ve been around a while, I’ve played with a lot of people, done a lot of sessions, toured all over, met many, many people through my work, recorded with Jim Carroll, Pearl Jam, hell, I’ve even won a freakin’ Grammy recording with Peter Frampton. The artist with the most potential I’ve ever worked with is Kristen. She has that quality of greatness that you can’t force or fake. She is truly the most talented person I know.”

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“I’ve actually never been to Bumbershoot,” said Kristen Ward, somewhat matter-of-factly, sitting over mid-day drinks at the Matador in Ballard earlier this week. It was a somewhat surprising admission, considering that her performance this Saturday at noon the first musical performance of the entire festival, as it happensis her second appearance at Bumbershoot. “Even after I played last time, I just left. I had to go to work, or whatever I was doing. So, yeah. This is my second time going, but just because I’m playing.”

In Ward’s case, it all makes sense: Despite calling Seattle home since 2001 (she’s lived in Ballard for the last five years), she’s still more country than city, and just plain doesn’t like being stuck in such a big crowd, though she relishes the chance to play for them. Raised in Eastern Washington, she prefers getting out of town on her days off, up to the Skagit Valley or the like, to sitting around cafes or bars, and even mentions some vague plans involving a vintage Airstream trailer she recently bought that, ostensibly, gives her the chance to spend even less time trapped in the urban jungle.

In person, Ward is an unusually confident person, even casually dressed and sipping a bottle of Modelo, a confidence that carriers to her music as a singer-songwriter backed by a crack quartet of musicians. Since her 2006 debut, Roll Me On, Ward’s been getting attention from critics as much for her music as the simple fact that she’s among a sadly small group of female musicians who come across as strong and self-assured. Backed by her band, Ward is a force to be reckoned with, with Gary Westlake’s crunchy, classic rock guitar work competing with Kevin Suggs’ pedal steel and Ward belting out her lyrics of loneliness and bad choices in her deep, sultry voice.

Chock it up to her background. Her mother, Julie Neuffer, herself a bluegrass singer who released an album called Brand New Pearl in 1997, raised Ward on a steady diet of classic country and folk. “When we were kids, she would sing John Denver and Carol King. We’d all get together, and sit on my bed and sing songs! I mean, without trying to sound totally cliche, that was really what we did. We sang a lot together and played guitar,” Ward explains, and adds to the list Merle Haggard, Johny Cash, and Dolly Parton.

As for her father, who lives in Seattle (she split time between her parents as a child), “He has a totally different take on music, he listened to a lot of jazz, a lot of soul. He also likes folk, but it was kind of interesting: Between my two parents I just listened to everything.”

Her influences and voice, which is powerful and slightly husky in a bluesy way, inevitably get Ward comparisons to the likes of Jesse Sykes and Neko Case, as well as her music lumped in under the alt-country rubric, though Ward doesn’t particularly feel that fits.

“I say folk-rock a lot, but it’s kind of funny. I write folk songs, and I write rock songs and I write country songs, and a lot of my new writing is kind of throwback–even some of my old stuff–is a throwback to Eighties rock,” she explains. As for alt-country, “You could say that because there’s pedal steel there,” she says with a shrug.

Whatever the genre, critics loved it. Drive Away (2008), a polished recording that shows off Ward’s sultry, bluesy voice as well as her ability to craft powerful lyrics out of concrete images, earned praise in The Stranger , Seattle Sound , and the P-I , as well as air-play on KEXP. And, of course, the fact that Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready laid down a solo on the song “With You Again” helped.

Ward still seems taken about by his contribution, and wants it made clear she didn’t go seeking it out. Her guitarist, Gary Westlake, has worked with Pearl Jam for years, and was on tour a couple years ago while they were starting work on Drive Away .

“They were in London on tour, in a hotel room,” she explains. “And I guess Mike said, ‘Hey, can I use your iPod?’ or something like that, to listen to. And he would up getting a hold of some of these really raw demos, which I could have strangled Gary for letting him show anybody those demos!”

“I guess he was interested in being involved…it was just his genuine interest, which is amazing because I grew up watching him on MTV,” she said.

Ward has won a strong fan-base with her music, which has supported her rather novel approach to recording albums. Drive Away , her breakthrough, was self-released and recorded with financial support from fans, through pre-orders or donations ($100 or more even got you into the liner notes). She’s following the same process with the new record. It’s an intense relationship, and it goes both ways. Ward readily admits she is where she is because of her fans, and is moved to find out how much her work can mean to them.

“I had a guy at Neumos, I just played up there with Flight to Mars , and this guy came up to meet and he pulled me aside and he said, ‘You know, I’m living out here, my wife is still back in the Midwest, and I came out because I got a job, and I lost my job, and I miss her and I love her and it’s been such a challenge for me to be out in this new city by myself. And I listen to Drive Away all the time, and through the emotion in your voice and through your lyrics, you’re describing my situation.’” She pauses, fiddling with the mostly empty bottle of beer.

“And it’s funny, because I write this song, I record it, I sing it, but I sort of take it for granted. I mean, after it’s done, it’s done. I’m not feeling it like the day I wrote it. But it’s kind of a gift to others, because they can still feel it in their own way.”

The Sunbreak, Sept 3, 2009

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As old school as I like to be, there is something to be said about this current world of insta-smack-in-your-face-communication and how you can have that unexpected sensation of being completely captivated and excited about a new artist in the flash of a few keystrokes. It happened to me most recently when an email alerted me to Seattle’s Kristen Ward and within seconds I was on her website and streaming her latest independent release Drive Away. Immediately taken by her commandingly deep yet lush and sultry voice on the opening track Baby, her music struck me as incredibly fresh, intriguing, and written with the quality of someone who really has a good handle on her craft. Which says a lot for a young woman of twenty-six. Raised in Spokane, Washington, in a home where mom was a bluegrass singer and led family bedtime sing-a-longs to 70s folkies like Gordon Lightfoot, Carole King and John Denver, Kristen was always singing, be it the school choir or just around the house. My mom refused to let me have voice lessons, she says over the phone from her Seattle home, “because they’re gonna change your style. Just let your voice develop on its own, and when youre older, then if you need some fine tuning, explore that”. Good motherly advice has paid off for Ms. Ward, who since grabbing her moms Guild guitar around the age of 14 and diving right in till her fingers bled, her course was pretty much set. And then one day her voice suddenly changed to the enticingly rich and original quality that fills the songs on Drive Away.

With her heart firmly planted in the wide musical plains where country, rock and folk happily cohabitate, youll find a fine balance yet determined style at the root of Drive Away. The title track is completely gorgeous, a big, dreamy sound given to this heart-wrencher of a ballad. When asked if she envisioned this sound when writing the song, Ward replies, I couldn’t hear the parts as they are, but I knew what kind of vibe I wanted and how it should flow. A good song has a life of its own. When you get a good one, it’s like its not even from you anymore, you’re just channeling something cool. It’s coming through you and it speaks to everybody that’s part of it too. The band instantly did their own thing with it and it was perfectly right.

Citing her two biggest influences as Lucinda Wiliams and Neil Young, Kristen’s highly ambitious and successful DIY style reflects how influence and inspiration can coalesce into a greater creation. Drive Away was recorded in Seattle with her band of local musicians including Gary Westlake on guitars and mandolin and Kevin Suggs on pedal steel (Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready also contributes guitar to one song), and was funded by Kristens unique approach to maintaining creative control from start to finish. Along with seeking donations from fans culled from gigs and her web site, a free download was offered in exchange for an email address. In this day and age, not only is this a far cry from the Gold Circle of the ticket gouging times that currently engulf every music fan, but this approach can only be seen as smart and enterprising for an artist out there fighting the good fight. The resulting outpouring of support secured the recording and release of Drive Away, and Kristen is currently taking the same approach for her new recording she is about to take on to be titled My Last Night On Division. If you’d like to be a part of the team that will help make this album, check out blogs.myspace.com/kristenwardmusic

Kristen Ward will be performing at the No Depression Festival Saturday, July 11, at Marymoor Park in Redmond, Washington, just outside Seattle.

Rob Bleetsein, No Depression.com, May 18, 2009

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