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Michael Ward, Former Guitarist For The Wallflowers, Dead At 57

Michael Ward, the guitarist for The Wallflowers from 1995 to 2001, has died. According to online sources, he was 57.

His sister Tracy Ward Hartfiel announced his death on her Facebook page Tuesday, April 2, writing, "Michael Ward has left this plane. It's with tremendous sorrow that I let you know complications from diabetes took his life last night. Obviously, we are all in shock and overcome with grief. This is all I can handle writing right now. Please tell the people you love just how much they mean to you."

On Wednesday, April 4, the band posted a tribute to the rocker on its official Facebook page.

"With love and gratitude the Wallflowers say farewell to the great and singular Michael Ward," the post read. "Michael's role and talents will forever remain a crucial part of the band's history. His contributions to music began before his time with the Wallflowers and continued long after his time with the band. Listening to Thin Lizzy on a sorrowful day. Rest now Mike. Much love to his family and his two children."

Photos of guitar picks, Ward in his younger days, the cover for their hit "6th Avenue Heartache" and a shot of Ward with lead singer Jakob Dylan accompanied the tribute.

Ward played on the band's two most successful albums: 1996's Bringing Down the Horse and 2000's Breach.

The Wallflowers (Stuart Mathis, Michael Ward, Mario Calire, Jakob Dylan, Greg Richling, and Rami Jaffee) performing in 2000.

Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty

Per MTV, Ward departed the group in 2001, though he wanted to quit earlier due to a falling out with Dylan.

"About a year ago I quit the band and then was persuaded into staying by our manager, Andy Slater," Ward said in the 2001 interview. "So I stayed through the whole Breach tour."

"For me, what music is all about is sitting down and creating songs from scratch," he told MTV at the time. "That's my life, and it's not really about adding guitar parts to someone else's music. That's not really satisfying for me. For a long time we were writing together, and then that stopped, and that made me pretty unhappy."

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Over time, Ward and Dylan seemingly made up, with Ward even wishing Dylan a happy birthday on Instagram in December.

Ward was slated to perform in Las Vegas on Friday, April 5, per his Instagram.

Ward also was a founding member of the band School of Fish.

Mavenjones (David Isen Of HORSE The Band)

HORSE the Band guitarist David Isen has launched his solo project Mavenjones, which he has been working on during HORSE down time.

Here's what Isen had to say about the project: "A lot of musical ideas that were marinating, latent, and brewing in my head needed to get out one way or another. Its a lot different from HORSE the band, but shares the same spirit of adventure. Making something yourself is especially hard because you are forced to fully expose your weaknesses - but what you lose in skill of execution, you gain in authenticity and unity of vision."

You can check it out here.

Band Of Horses – Why Are You OK

Band Of Horses' Ben Bridwell has muttered elsewhere his dissatisfaction that Why Are You OK will be heard for the first time largely in spring and summer. It is, he insists, a record for autumn, and he's right. Measured against Band Of Horses' previous records, it finds the group's essential melancholy getting the upper hand in the long-ongoing struggle with their baser rock instincts: it is a record for darkness drawing in, for falling mercury, for "all the trees are turning gold", as Bridwell has it on "Throw My Mess".

Why Are You OK begins with the seven-minute suite-in-two-parts "Dull Times/The Moon". The first portion is a stately procession that feels like it's about to erupt into a carnival, but never quite does: spectral harmonies sigh over a gradually escalating backdrop, while Bridwell exudes fretful ennui ("Feel like I'm going insane/Why bother?"). When the shift in tempo comes, about five minutes in, it's with guitars like a motorcycle being kick-started, and it revs quickly into something raucous, almost Jane's Addiction-y, although Bridwell still sounds plagued by whatever it was ("Blank state and maudlin/In need of something to say" – an audacious tone to take in an opening statement, but one which suits the ensuing album.)

Not everything here is existential disquiet set to counter-intuitively expansive alterna-rock, but quite a lot of it is (no bad thing, obviously: it is possible to situate Band Of Horses in a parallelogram cornered by Radiohead, The National, The Decemberists and Okkervil River). "Solemn Oath", which builds from a back porch strumalong, decorated by electric guitars sounding as much like banjos as electric guitars are ever likely to, into a(nother) tumult of widescreen rock, includes the telling line "But I'm lucky as fuck/It still ain't enough". Still other songs plumb depths sufficiently dark that one can only hope they're not autobiographical. "Throw My Mess", superficially a breezy country stomper, secretes the bruising appreciation "Getting me arrested was the strangest way/Of showing me that you're mine/But it saved my life".

This isn't quite a record of two halves – there is a brief instrumental interlude, "Hold On Gimme A Sec", about halfway through, but this doesn't obviously cleave Why Are You OK into discrete Acts. There are, however, some (well, relatively) playful moments. "Casual Party", sounds something like Radiohead playing FM radio rock, and (not incongruently) chronicles the narrator's overwhelming horror of the suburban minutiae under discussion at the titular soiree ("Awful conversation at the casual party/The job, babble on/the recreational hobbies/No it never stops"). "In A Drawer" is a sumptuous, shape-shifting symphony that fades in and out of a dazed singalong chorus, furnished by a choir comprising guests J Mascis, Sera Cahoone and Jenn Champion (nee Ghetto).

In the interests of creative freedom, Band Of Horses financed the recording of Why Are You OK themselves, but recouped their investment thanks to Rick Rubin – who, not for the first time in Band Of Horses' history, served as a mentor, editor and facilitator of a new record deal (it was Rubin who got them signed to Columbia for 2010's Infinite Arms and 2012's Mirage Rock). Grandaddy's Jason Lytle, producing, approaches the task as a sympathetic conductor, rather than overbearing auteur. The Grandaddy-est track is "Hag", a downbeat epic haunted by keyboards which manage that signature Lytle trick of sounding somehow gloomy yet whimsical, and Bridwell's tendency towards doubt and self-abasement ("Why spend half the time indifferent/And the other half alone?"). Lytle's touch is also discernible on "Lying Under Oak", synthesisers whispering behind one of those Band Of Horses ballads on which they demonstrate that one can abandon the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-etc convention without descending into obtuseness.

For all that, the two best moments of Why Are You OK are its least complicated and adorned. "Country Teen" is a wilfully lo-fi country ballad, recorded in a modern facsimile of old-school mono, acoustic rhythm guitar in the left speaker, Bridwell's voice in the right. And the closing track, "Even Still", is just exquisite, a lament of loneliness that resembles the unfettered internal monologue of someone hopelessly awake at four in the morning, accompanied by knelling piano chords before being lifted from of its murk by flourishes of psychedelia.

If there's much complaint to be made about Why Are You OK, it's only the same objection that might be lodged against Band Of Horses generally. More than once, it is difficult not to drift into wistful contemplation of the splendid, unreconstructed rock'n'roll racket of which they might be capable if they tried underthinking things for a change.

The September 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – featuring our cover story on Tom Waits, plus Tom Petty, Teenage Fanclub, Pink Floyd, Aaron Neville, Bat For Lashes, De La Soul, Chet Baker, Cass McCombs, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Ryley Walker, Kendrick Lamar, Lord Buckley, Sex Pistols, Brexit and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.

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