M. Ward

South by Southwest, for every attendee, is full of moments of revelry and revelation, disappointment and transcendent joy. This show didn’t rock me the hardest, and it certainly didn’t last the longest, but it was surely one of the rarest moments of serendipity I’ve experienced on the musical plane. Early Saturday afternoon, a companion and I were shoeing it from South Austin all the way up to Waterloo Park on the northeastern edge of downtown for the all-day Mess with Texas party. As it was a long journey, halfway I suggested we stop at my favorite little Austin coffeeshop/bar/lounge downtown—Halcyon—for a drink. I’d always loved the outdoor seating at Halcyon; the patio is part of the pedestrian throughway on 4th St., and it offers some of the best peoplewatching in town. We knew that South by crowds would render the seating pretty much nil, but we weren’t prepared for the crowd that was spilling out of the main entrance. We worked our way around to the side entrance, and I asked the familiar bartendress, “What’s the deal—who’s playing?” “M. Ward,” she says. Come again? “Uh, wow. When’s the show start?” (figuring it would be a wait). “Oh, five minutes or so.” Hot damn. There were maybe 100, 120 folks stuffed into the place, but my companion and I were able to squirm our way up to just about 15 feet from the stage, still a bit baffled that this was happening. (I’d last seen M. Ward at a quickly sold-out show at the Apollo Theater.) And then the man took the stage, masked behind windscreen-wide Ray Bans, and said, a little shyly, “How y’all doin’?” Well. Pretty goddamn well is how we’re doing, Mr. Ward, thanks for asking. And then he started right in on a set of familiar tunes in his sweet smoky lovelorn voice and warm river of guitar, expanding out into minutes-long acoustic expansions of songs that blended into others, mixing their rhythms and melodies, and then back again. Time didn’t so much stand still as expand outward until you were unaware of anything but the hypnotic strumming of M. Ward’s guitar. He played for only a short while, but afterward I still felt like I needed a post-coital cigarette.