Reel-to-reel tapes are stacked on the linoleum floor upstairs; a broken film projector with an old coil speaker serves as an amplifier; bells and shakers crowd a shelf in a studio lit mostly by Christmas lights; the Wurlitzer gets a lot of use.
Mr. Ward — the initial stands for Matt — is a connoisseur of the old-fashioned, like the Japanese-made circa-1970 Epiphone guitar that Mike Coykendall, the owner of the house and one of Mr. Ward’s longtime producers, handed him to strum.
“Want to see Matt’s favorite microphone?” Mr. Coykendall, a genial man with long silver hair and excitable eyebrows, said, producing something out of date. “Be very careful with it, it probably cost $2.”
Mr. Ward, 35, a singer-songwriter and guitarist, doesn’t hide his nostalgia, or his taste for the homemade. “I don’t like expensive sounds,” he said. “I’m still using the same four- track I bought when I was 15 to write songs.” That retro- crafting is evident in his sixth studio album, “Hold Time,” which will be released by Merge Records on Tuesday. About half the songs were produced in this house. Like his previous work, it is indie folk with some pop glimmer and more country pluck, and a roster of starry collaborators, like Lucinda Williams and his partner in the duo She & Him, the actress Zooey Deschanel, who sings backup on the peppy, toe-tapping single “Never Had Nobody Like You.”
“The blogosphere will eat this track up,” the editor Amrit Singh wrote on Stereogum.com, the influential music blog, which also named “Hold Time” one of the most anticipated albums of the year. It has been streamed more than 100,000 times in the last month on NPR.
It was also in this house that Mr. Ward recorded most of She & Him’s debut, “Volume One.” Released last year by Merge, it was his biggest hit, selling more than 120,000 copies and winning his solo act new fans. He will play the Apollo Theater in Harlem on Thursday and, for the first time under his own name, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., in April.
“She & Him definitely broadened the number of people who would hear Matt’s new record,” said Mac McCaughan, a founder of Merge. But even before that project, “this would have been our biggest release in the first half of this year,” he added. “His last record sold more than 60,000 copies. For us that’s a huge record.”
