9/6/2006 - ON WONDERLIGHT: With a little help from her friends
City Llink Magazine by Bob Weinberg

From the Beatlesque harmonies to the trippy electric keyboards to the hopeful yearning during tumultuous times, Diane Ward's new album, Wonderlight, often gives off a retro, Sgt. Pepper's kind of vibe. Sporting a tie-dyed shirt with the word Peace stenciled on it, the Hollywood-based singer-songwriter adopts a grunge-meets-flower-child attitude in the cover photo of her fourth solo recording, perfectly illustrating the album's underlying aesthetic.

"Some of the songs warranted it, just the way they were written melodically," Ward says, sitting behind the reception desk of her storefront production company, All About Eve, in downtown Hollywood. She also reveals that she and longtime guitarist Jack Shawde, who co-produced Wonderlight, were learning to use the computer program ProTools during the album's conception. "We had a lot of fun experimenting and writing parts and playing with production," she confesses.

A couple of industry heavyweights also lent their talents to Wonderlight's sparkling production: John Merchant, who mixed the album, has worked with the likes of Barry Gibb and Céline Dion; and Bob Ludwig, who mastered the album, boasts a résumé that includes Sheryl Crow and Shawn Colvin. From talking with Merchant, Ward learned that the engineer was an informed fan of the South Florida music scene and had actually worked on a recording with her bass player, Debbie Duke.

"He's a big Debbie Duke fan," Ward says, explaining that Merchant had mixed an album for Duke's band, Sixo. "It's weird how we're all connected."

Ward's fans needn't be concerned that production trumps soul on Wonderlight. The singer's voice is as passionate as ever, her vocal control allowing her to rev from lovely and intimate to full-throated roar in a blink. Her hard-strummed acoustic six-string still provides a rhythmic anchor on most tunes, and the versatile Shawde remains a vital creative force with his clean-burning lead lines. As she has throughout her career, Ward writes unshakable melodic hooks on tunes such as the opening "Fall From Summer" and "This Love Is Hard," and continues to pen thoughtful, provocative lyrics encompassing both the political and the personal.

"[Wonderlight] really was a time stamp of the … elections, all the hurricanes … so all that energy was put into this," Ward relates. "Between what's going on over there in Iraq and Afghanistan, all that stuff was just brought into the lyrics. … There's just all this turmoil, and conceptually it's kind of like exploring that and coming out the other side, a hopefulness."

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