The so-called “I want” song is a convention in musical theater scores. From “I’ll Know” in “Guys and Dolls” to “My Shot” in “Hamilton”, these thesis statements by leading characters often come early in a show, hitching the plot’s momentum to their ambitions or dreams.
It was not for want of wanting that Stephen Sondheim didn’t write many conventional “I want” songs, one exception being the long “I wish” prologue to “Into the Woods” The characters he wrote for had huge, often doomed desires, whether it was the impossible no-strings intimacy Bobby seeks in “Company” or the apocalyptic retribution demanded by the demonic barber Sweeney Todd, they expressed them in accordingly expansive musical terms.
Among the qualities that Eleri Ward, a preternaturally gifted young singer whose guitar-based interpretations of Sondheim lit up last year’s brilliant album “A Perfect Little Death,” is being released by Ghostlight Records on Friday. There are two songs on the new album that were written by the wounded soul who wrote “Not a Day Goes By” and “Unworthy of Your Love”
Ward plumbs this deep well in a way that feels so intuitive that no one has done it before: She has fused this emo Sondheim register with a familiar coffeehouse folk sound. It is not hard to imagine these songs as the creation of an especially gifted and sometimes bloody-minded singer-songwriter.
A singer and musician who grew up on musical theater, as well as pop, in Chicago, Ward stumbled on this folk-Sondheim sound when she picked up a friend’s guitar and was inspired by Sufjan Stevens in his mellower mode. Kurt Deutsch, Ghostlight’s founder and president, said that there was a balm that came over him after he discovered her version of “Johanna (Reprise)” on TikTok. He reached out to her to see if she had more like that.
“A Perfect Little Death” was mostly made in her closet during the Pandemic. It led to a series of live shows, first at Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan, then at Joe’s Pub, where she sang a duet of “Loving You” with Donna Murphy, who first sang it in James Lapine’s 1994 musical, “Passion.” In an interview, Murphy said that she admired that Eleri was not struggling for a quality and that it all felt so fluid.
Josh Groban, who was in the audience at that first Rockwood gig and who later invited Ward to open for him on a recent concert tour, noted the “wonderful line” of her voice which he said goes against the grain not only of the spikiness of a lot of pop When he stars in a “Sweeney Todd” revival on Broadway next spring, Groban will discover more about that. What Ward does is find ways to smooth the songs out and bring even more heart into the performance of the show.
Ward said she arrives at her guitar and vocal arrangements by ear and never listens to them again, even though she reads music. Ellis Ludwig-Leone’s string parts were derived from her demos rather than from the original compositions.
The interpretations are spare and lush, honoring the complexity of the compositions without, as the album’s producer, Allen Tate, put it. Tate, who with Ludwig-Leone is a member of the Brooklyn band San Fermin, said that Eleri does well by taking what is really speaking to her about these songs, and then trying to lay that bare, as opposed to dressing them up beyond what they already are.
There is a kind of emotional logic to the 14 songs on Keep a Tender Distance, from the questioning opener, Merrily We Roll Along, to the closer, Move On.
Ward told me that the record was moving through space in many different ways. Every song explores some sort of distance from what you want or don’t have.
Among the album’s high points is a subtly reimagined “Another Hundred People” that suggests the original’s vertiginous pace, but is more heartbroken than breakneck, and a stark, haunting take on “Marry Me a Little.”
While many singers tend to lean into the song’s delusional hope that an easy-to-handle relationship might be just around the corner, Ward’s voice, alternating between what Murphy called the “whistle tones of falsetto and a Fosca-like lower”
Ward, who is currently understudying two tracks in the new musical “Only Gold” at MCC Theater, and who has recorded her own original pop music, may be feeling a bit like Bobby in “Company”: pulled in many directions by conflicting impulses. She said the new record has a sense of being far away from what she wants. That may be the reason it sounds so much like Sondheim.