Premiere: Christina Ward lights a box of matches with debut LP, ‘Calendar’
The singer-songwriter probes deep within a pit of ruin and redemption.
Christina Ward torches her former self. The flames lick her heels, propelling her further into self-actualization and the kind of prickly songwriting that forges careers. Her debut record, Calendar, sifts out the old, leaving behind bright and shiny crystals, and forges ahead with exhilarating newness. Self-written, recorded, and produced, the seven songs are broiled and cooled in her wispy, ethereal vocals. Guitars, both acoustic and electric, guide the arrangements — coated in crunchy rhythms, haunting echos, and peculiar tilts.
Musical ferocity is met with personal ruin. “Passed out at the end of the hallway / You were pushing for it / You couldn’t leave it alone,” Ward sings, heaving the boulder from her shoulders. “Alone” spins through starlit orbs, like a cosmic awakening that lurches far beyond the here and now. With “Time,” flicking with centripetal force, she laments time’s structural foundation, singing, “Boredom overcomes us / And we always want more.” Where “Cathedral” braids faith and brokenness, strewn with twinkling colors, closing track “Costumes” observes the hollow nature of existing. “Earthquakes swim in the ocean rising / Throw our heads back, we can laugh about it / Life’s a dumpster fire / And I’m too drunk to care,” she shrugs.
Calendar provokes, and it questions how we’re expected to go on living when the world is burning down around us. Ash fills the air, found in crumbled spots throughout the record, and lungs collapse underneath the album’s sheer power. Ward leverages her own pain and transformation as a way to connect to the universe. Sooner or later, we’re all Ward, navigating firestorms and high tides and sometimes failing to overcome.
“This album has much to do with starting over. I wrote and recorded most of it while I was going through a divorce, which made me recall all the times in my life that I’ve had to restart from scratch,” she says. “Having fallen in love with someone and knowing it won’t ever really work out. But as with everything I write, it’s a mix of things past and present. Realizing a lesson I should have already learned is coming around again, full circle. Hoping that maybe I’ll get it right one of these days…”
Christina Ward’s Calendar drops today (October 21) on Mint 400 Records.
