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Oct 15, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Holly Andres M. Ward

M. Ward has announced a new Billie Holiday covers album, Think of Spring, and shared its first single, a cover of “For Heaven’s Sake.” Think of Spring is due out December 11 via ANTI-. Check out “For Heaven’s Sake” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

Think of Spring is Ward’s second album of 2020 and follows Migration Stories, which was released in April, also via ANTI-. Migration Stories followed What a Wonderful Industry, a self-released album Ward surprise-released in 2018.

“I first heard [Billie’s album] Lady In Satin in a mega-shopping mall somewhere in San Francisco,” Ward explains in a press release. “I was about 20 years old and didn’t know much about Billie’s records or her life or how her voice changed over the years. Anyway, the sound was coming from the other side of the mall and I remember mistaking her voice for a beautiful perfectly distorted electric guitar—some other-world thing floating there on this strange mournful ocean of strings and I was hooked for life.”

The album’s title, Think of Spring, was taken from a 1924 poem written by Jane Brown-Thompson. In 1938 that poem turned into Holiday’s song “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” which is the opening track on the album.

“It still feels good to invent new guitar tunings and use them to help deconstruct old songs,” M. Ward says of the album’s first single. “Billie Holiday’s ‘For Heaven’s Sake’ in a modified open B.”

Think of Spring Tracklist:

1. I Get Along Without You Very Well
2. For Heaven’s Sake
3. It’s Easy To Remember
4. You’ve Changed
5. Violets For Your Furs
6. For All We Know
7. But Beautiful
8. All The Way
9. I’m A Fool To Want You
10. I’ll Be Around
11. You Don’t Know What Love Is

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