the DIY Warden of Iowa City

Sam Locke Ward churns out earworms and album art faster than many songwriters can pick up a pen.

BY KEMBREW MCLEOD

Since the time Samuel Locke Ward grew up in relative isolation on a family farm in Iowa, he has taken the road less traveled at every turn. With a preternatural talent for crafting earworm hooks and catchy melodies, the prolific musician could very well have beaten a path to Nashville or Los Angeles and developed a career cranking out hit songs for the pop aristocracy.

Instead, Sam stopped in Iowa City, put down roots and took a more underground route through the world of music, one that has led to collaborations with some of America’s most significant left-ofcenter musicians. Over the past quarter century, he has built a jaw-droppingly large discography—more than 60 releases and counting—along with an impressive bullpen of musical partners.

“I love pop music, but a lot of pop is very predictable,” said collaborator Jad Fair, who co-founded the mutant rock group Half Japanese in 1974. “I prefer having the feel of a pop song, but with some twists and turns. Sam is great at that.”

Earlier this year, Jad and Sam released their debut album, Happy Hearts, on the venerable indie label Kill Rock Stars, which also released Purple Pie Plow, the brand-new record by SLW cc Watt, his ongoing project with former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt.

Sam has also worked with members of indie-punk satirists the Dead Milkmen, whose guitarist and vocalist Joe Jack Talcum told me, “I appreciate Sam’s disdain for bigotry and hypocrisy and the way he weaves those sentiments into his lyrics, but I also think he has a healthy optimism about humanity despite the darkness of some of his songs. Also, his melodies are super catchy.”

Born in 1982, Sam was raised by two high school band teachers in a rural interzone somewhere between Oskaloosa and Ottumwa where he messed around with guitars, pianos, horns and other instruments at home or at school. In a pre-internet age, one’s horizons were limited to the menu of options offered by mass media, so when Nirvana hit the bigtime in the early 1990s, Sam began to find his way to underground music.

“Even though Nirvana was a major label platinum-selling band, they were the entryway to DIY music,” he said. “One of the greatest things about 1990s music and art was that there was this fetishization of things that were doable and achievable at a grassroots level. Like, Nirvana made it sound like you could actually start a band.”

With limited pocket change, Sam educated himself with compilation CDs that he bought from mall record stores, like Introducing the Minutemen, Death To the Pixies, and Cream of the Crop: The Best of the Dead Milkmen. As he was hoovering up new musical knowledge, Sam began creating crude multitrack recordings by MacGyvering a children’s karaoke cassette tape machine while he was in high school.

“I started going to shows a ton to see the punk bands of the late 1990s, like the Horrors out of Cedar Rapids,” he recalled. “They had their own tape, so it just seemed doable, like, ‘Oh, well, I can do that!’ Then, at a certain point, I was like, ‘Oh, well, I don’t even need to be a band to do that.’ You know, I can just make music myself.”

After Sam moved to Iowa City in 2001, he lied about his age and experience, and ended up doing sound at the local rock club Gabe’s Oasis, a job he