Saturday, April 5 was a packed final day of Mission Creek. As the dust settles on the 2025 fest, let’s take a look back at some of the local music acts who made Day 3 memorable. Sam Locke Ward Early afternoon isn’t the usual time for watching Sam Locke Ward. I’ve seen him in the […]
Sam Locke Ward
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Ten music releases from 2023 that changed my mind about Iowa music
As an outsider looking in, Iowa might be mistaken for a cultural desert. As someone who’s lived most of their life outside of the state, that’s largely how I viewed it. My mother was born in Elk Horn, but I began my time on Earth some 1,400 miles northwest of Shelby County. And it’s been […]
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Meet Sam Locke Ward, Iowa City’s pop music MacGyver
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 […]
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Album Review: Sam Locke Ward — ‘Thrift Store Gtr Gold’
Thrift Store Gtr Gold by Samuel Locke Ward “Everything that they ever warned us about, all the sad things, all the bad things, all of those things, they are coming. They are all coming to pass.” So singeth Samuel Locke Ward, master of minimalism, grim jester and bard of Iowa in the unhinged 2020s. In […]
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Album Review: Jad Fair and Samuel Locke Ward — ‘Happy Hearts’
Happy Hearts by Jad Fair and Samuel Locke Ward Cross-country collaborations with punk-rock legends are nothing new for Sam Locke Ward. His glorious work with Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE, etc.) under the SLW cc Watt moniker has been covered in this publication before. At the same time those albums were unleashed on an unsuspecting public, […]
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Album Review: SLW + BBJR — ‘Bubblegum Necropolis EP’
Bubblegum Necropolis EP by SLW + BBJR Iowa is beautiful: a land of verdant cornfields, ball diamonds, quaint small towns and Shire-like rolling hills. But the realities of life are grim: the mask of “Iowa nice” all too often hides a deep core of red-state intolerance. Those acres of corn are nurtured by chemicals that […]
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Album Reviews: Bob Bucko Jr. and Samuel Locke Ward — ‘Discount Sacrifice At The Altar Of Bargains’
Discount Sacrifice At The Altar Of Bargains by BBJR + SLW I can’t stop thinking about this album. When it dropped in December of last year, I’d kind of resigned myself to not writing about it, just given the way our coverage schedule usually falls out. Typically, I avoid running reviews of albums that dropped […]
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Album Review: SLW cc Watt — ‘Real Manic Time’
Real Manic Time by SLW cc Watt Being Iowa City’s — scratch that, Iowa’s — most prolific songwriter for years, you would think it would be hard to keep surprising people. While most of us gorged on trashy Netflix documentaries or started and stopped fad hobbies to fill in for the lack of human contact, […]
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Album Review: The Great American Cattle Barons – Lavish Lies of the Holy Corpse
The Great American Cattle Barons is actually yet another ‘band’ instigated by Iowa City’s profligate purveyor of bummer rock, Samuel Locke Ward, this time…
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The Lame Years project proves that more Samuel Locke Ward is always better
On Dec. 1, as the clock hit midnight, Samuel Locke Ward posted Back from Heaven onto his Bandcamp page. A stadium-rock-in-miniature album with…
