I'm not too comfortable

Jim Ward feat. Tegan Quin - Broken Songs (zShare)

A quiet song; not necessarily sonically, but possessing the intimacy of wide-open country roads and long days spent travelling upon them, acoustic guitar and a lone maraca providing backdrop to the yearnng, beautifully double-tracked vocals, weary-but-hopeful, aided by a rather wonderful turn from the Tegan half of Tegan & Sara. Lyrically a page out of the Springsteen songbook, but Ward delivers the lines with a rawness of his own that doesn't appear so unrestrained anywhere else on the EP.

"I'll build a home, from these broken songs".

[Buy]

Like seemingly half the music I listen to these days, Jim Ward's In the Valley, On the Shores EP was discovered through Tegan & Sara's Twitter (@theteganandsara). I'm not as familiar with Jim Ward as I probably should be, but I do know he played in seminal post-hardcore act At the Drive-in (who I've been meaning to check out but haven't) before co-founding Sparta and the more alt-country Sleepercar. Anyway, the rather excellent five-song EP from which this song is taken can and should be purchased for $7 in your choice of download or CD format (including worldwide shipping) from the link above. Initially the download was a pay-what-you-want deal, but I see that I took too long to write about it and now it's also $7. Still more than worth it, and the physical CD is a gorgeous package, plain blue and gold ink screen-printed on a cardboard sleeve and hand-numbered (at least mine was, not sure if any of those are still in stock). The other four songs are sadly lacking in Tegan, but they're still every bit as good as this one.