Matt Ward pines for the glory days of free-form radio like a veteran of the 1960s -- his new album, "Transistor Radio," is a highly personal homage to that endangered sensibility -- and the singer-songwriter-guitarist's musical touchstones include Louis Armstrong and the Carter Family.
So connected is Ward with the currents of last century's music and its transmission on radio that it's easy to forget that he's barely into his 30s.
"My vision of [radio] is very idealistic and romantic and not exactly in reality," Ward conceded this week, sitting in the upstairs bar at the Troubadour before his headlining performance at the West Hollywood club.
"But even if you compare [radio in] the late '70s and early '80s to how it is now, I still think it's a pretty huge difference. I've just always romanticized radio as being a human connection with some other person in some faraway booth playing the records that they love and not the ones that they're getting paid to love. So it is a sort of idealized history, but to me it's true."
As for those musical currents he encountered in his childhood radio reveries, well, they aren't really so distant.
"I feel like the digital age has done something really powerful to people's minds, because it's made everything that's predigital sound ancient," said Ward, who grew up in Thousand Oaks and now lives in Portland, Ore.
"That's not how things are in my mind. Analog from the '60s and '70s is not ancient. I feel like the music of the middle of the century isn't really that old either. I feel like it was not very long ago that rock 'n' roll was born....
"There's just a sort of amnesia on radio, in popular music and popular culture that I feel lost in. So I guess one of the ways I get myself out of this is by making these records that make some sort of abstract sense."
From the looks of it, they're also making some kind of sense to a growing audience. As Ward sipped a bottle of beer and talked in the bar, the showroom below was filling up with fans. "Transistor Radio" is his fourth album, but this is his first headlining tour, and he says all the dates have sold out.
His record sales have been modest by mainstream standards, but his profile in the independent rock world is picking up steam, and he's affiliated with a label, Merge Records, that has picked up momentum with the breakthrough success of the Canadian band Arcade Fire.
