M Ward: A different kind of blue

The enigmatic M Ward revels in being a man out of time. In Boston, he reveals to Kevin Harley the antique roots of his unique brand of melancholia

With the names and faces of Delta Blues legends decorating its ceiling, Boston's House of Blues feels like the right kind of venue in which to meet M Ward. (That M stands for Matt.) The 29-year-old Californian is something of a rarity on America's underground music scene: a new name who mines older seams of musical history than those of 1970s New York. To date, his three sublime albums of roots melancholia veer between sepia-toned blues elegies, finger-picking folk guitar and piano-led, Tom Waits-ish romps held together by a dusty, textured depth of sound that avoids pastiche or artifice. And his voice is a befuddling thing – part sighing whisper, part thick, breathy rasp, it seems to come from somewhere other than the slight, softly spoken man himself.

His new album, Transfiguration of Vincent, is one of the year's finest so far. It is sure to grab the ears of anyone with a yen for US roots music. Indeed, Ward is already in with some of the Americana scene's rustic royalty. Friends and admirers include Grandaddy's Jason Lytle, from when Ward's first band, Rodriguez, supported the beatific beardies in California. What's more, the alt.country luminary Howe Gelb released Ward's debut solo album, Duet for Guitars #2, through his Ow Om label, on the strength of some four-track demos sent to Gelb and Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan to scout for a reaction. Ward played lap-steel on tour with Gelb's band Giant Sand, too, before his second album, End of Amnesia, took him to the US indie-kid frontline via a support slot on the Bright Eyes 2002 tour.

He's in the middle of a US tour with Vic Chesnutt when we meet, although it was an older iconoclast than anyone on today's alt.country scene who inspired Transfiguration. The late John Fahey's finger-picking style is echoed in Ward's, and his album's title doffs a hat to Fahey's 1965 album, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death.

"The ideals for the record came about at Fahey's memorial service," says Ward, who now lives in Fahey's home town of Portland, Oregon. ("The best place to live in America.") "A musician played a Fahey composition on a harmonica, which to me said more in three minutes about life, death, love, religion and transfiguration than anyone speaking. It seemed to be about a beautiful new chapter beginning, as sad as it was to see an old one end. Which was important, because I feel like one of Fahey's talents was to approach the guitar as one part historian, almost, and one part innovator, taking what was old and making it new."

A couple of subliminal samples aside ("Headphone sounds," he says), there's no modern embellishments on Ward's transfiguration of Fahey. He's regressing, even: where his other albums were recorded on 16-track analog, he turned to eight-track for Transfiguration. "I gravitate toward used furniture, used clothing, old sounds, because it gives you the benefit of time, which weeds out anything that falls under the influence of trends. Some of my favourite recordings are the old blues ones, when there were only two mics and it's pretty scratchy. I like the question marks in analog recording. Digital recording filters out the way you breathe, which doesn't sound right to me. I'm attracted to what the filter doesn't catch – the grain of a voice, rather than the sheen."

Proving Ward's point, one of the album's stripped-bare miracles is a gorgeously gentle cover of David Bowie's "Let's Dance". Where Bowie's version seems dated by the Eighties gloss of its production, Ward's acoustic reworking sounds utterly organic and new. You could almost be hearing its – surprisingly strong – lyrics for the first time. "I think they're good enough for you to feel something without production," Ward nods. "Or a beat you can dance to, necessarily."

On stage later that night, it's obvious that Ward doesn't need studio tweakery. Battling against the buzz of talk from the bar, his voice is richer still in the flesh, and he's a blinding guitarist. At one point, he even turns his back on the audience and plays a note-perfect, Fahey-esque instrumental with his guitar behind his head, in the hope of getting the attention of the nattering contingent. Not a note dropped, either. It's a stunt, but a glorious one, and the applause briefly drowns out those who've turned up to have a chat.

Still, attention-grabbing is the exception rather than the rule with Ward. The pursuit of a kind of evocative, timeless simplicity is his ideal. "I'm always romanticising what music was like when I picked up the guitar," he says. "I hope I never understand the guitar, because the thing the records I loved had in common was a certain mystery. And I wish I knew why I was this deranged, because then maybe I'd fit in more in 2003. But that's what keeps anything interesting for me – the question marks and the mystery."

'Transfiguration of Vincent' is out on Monday on Matador