Eleri Ward’s “A Perfect Little Death” Puts An Acoustic Spin on Sondheim Songs
Eleri Ward covers both "Sunday" and "Finishing The Hat" on her freshman album, yet it's a lyric from "Move On" that best sums up her work: "anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new."
In June of 2021, Ward, a Chicago-born-NYC-based actress, and musician released "A Perfect Little Death," an album that arranges 13 Stephen Sondheim songs into soft, dreamy indie-folk with only a fingerpicked acoustic guitar backing up her ethereal voice. Despite the myriad of Sondheim cover albums – from traditional to jazz to even disco – Ward's effort feels like a breath of fresh air, a reimagining that's wonderfully inventive and complementary to the source material. "First and foremost, I lead with my heart," Ward told me over Zoom about picking the songs, "So if I love it, I'm gonna do it. I focus on the things I'm most touched by. I never force anything."
That comes across to the listener. What could have easily been a gimmick never feels anything other than earnest and organic, a testament to both Ward's skill as a musician and the incredibly robust foundation of Sondheim's writing. An uninitiated ear could easily mistake these songs for material by Sufjan Stevens, Laura Marling or Joni Mitchel – serene lullabies or lush love ballads rather than songs originally written for murderous barbers and obsessive painters. Yet, for Sondheim fans, it’s a way to hear beloved songs in a whole new light without losing their intent or meaning. While some songs, like "Send In The Clowns," translate more obviously to Ward's style, her more adventurous arrangements often make the most impact. The bombastic "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" transforms into a hushed, eerie warning while the languid "Loving You" (from "Passion") gains an arpeggiated guitar and layered harmonies but keeps the song's haunting emotional clarity.
Releasing an album of folk musical theater covers was never in Ward's plans. After attending Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory, where she studied musical theater with an emphasis on acting and songwriting, Ward moved to New York City and began auditioning. "I was barely getting anything," she said, "Whenever someone would ask me how I was doing in an audition, I'd joke, 'Oh, every day a little death," a reference to a song from 1973's "A Little Night Music." With the song stuck in her head, she decided to make a cover for Instagram. Even though Ward has been a fan of musical theater and Sondheim since high school, she says she "really doesn’t enjoy listening to cast recordings," (her go-tos are Caroline Polachek, Lianne La Havas, Andrew Bird and St. Vincent), so finding a typical backing track online wasn't of much interest. Instead, she just "picked up [her] guitar and it just sort of came out." During the next two years, Ward would occasionally make up a new Sondheim arrangement for her social media, but "nothing happened with them; it was just for my own enjoyment."
That changed when she joined TikTok at a friend's insistence in January of 2021 and started posting a backlog of her Instagram content. The songs became a hit and quickly Ward "found an audience that [she] never realized that [she] had," one that kept requesting the music be available to stream. She complied and, in one month, recorded the 13-song album in her closet.
The process was a lesson in keeping things open and fluid. While Ward has been trained in songwriting, she's a self-taught guitarist who doesn't "know most of the chords [she's] playing" by name, so arrangements were learned by ear and perfected during the recording sessions. While she had to adapt tempo, chords and time-signatures, it always came back to the original melody line.
"I actually think of songs in the opposite way that Sondheim did," she mentioned, "He found the most important part to be the harmony and instrumentation; melody just had to happen to carry the lyrics. I am literally the opposite. I feel like the melody is the skeleton that holds a song together. I stayed true to 90% of any given melody and then just did my own thing with the harmony and chords."
The original plan was for Ward to self-release the music online, which she had done before with a few original singles (her pop music was described, with a laugh, as the baby of Sara Bareilles, Dua Lipa, and Maggie Rogers). But after some early publicity, Ward got an email from the president of Ghostlight Records, a label focused on cast recordings and theater artists. He loved the covers and wanted to release the album under Ghostlight's label, an offer which Ward says "truly changed my whole life."
Now, she's starting a small tour, including stops at Feinstein's at Hotel Carmichael in Indiana, before performing two shows at Joe's Pub in New York City. There, she'll be joined by her friend Brian Fitzsousa on keyboards and a few yet-undisclosed special guests. Ghostlight has also asked her for a follow-up album of Sondheim music, which she is currently working on. The songs are already selected (she recently posted an Instagram cover of "The Miller's Son," which might be a tease of what's to come) and plans to use a real recording studio rather than returning to the closet where "A Perfect Little Death" was made.
The response, she says, to everything has been "humbling, wild and heart-warming." Not surprisingly, the album's popularity first spread among the theater community, but Ward has also been surprised by the music’s broad reach. "I'm constantly overwhelmed by how much this interpretation speaks to people," she said, "I think my favorite messages of all time are the people who say they didn't like musical theater or didn't get it, and listening to my version made them understand the song for the first time, made them want to know more about Sondheim. If I can be your gateway into him, I've done my job. His music is so raw and so human. I just owe it to the material to let it be natural and come together in its own divine timing."
You can find out more at EleriWard.com and @EleriWard on Instagram and TikTok. "A Perfect Little Death" is available to stream on Spotify and Apple Music. She will be playing at Joe's Pub in New York City on March 2 and 16, and in St. Petersburg, Florida, on April 7.