Sparta

Here's an interview I did with Jim Ward of Sparta for the December 2006 issue of Mean Street Magazine.

Three’s company

They say good things come in threes and Sparta frontman Jim Ward is a believer in this adage. Considering it a good luck charm of sorts, he named his band’s newestalbum Threes.

“All good things come in threes, and being this is our third album, it worked out,” Ward says. “We went through a lot during those years and a lot of this record is talking about what we went through and overcoming these things.”

Threes became an album that represents the full load of ups and downs band members went through during the past few years. They locked themselves inside of a warehouse and wrote songs that expressed every emotion they had.

“It was really a stream of emotions,” Ward says. “I was coming up with some of the ideas to build off that. The other guys were feeding off of those ideas. Now having Keeley [Davis, guitarist and formerly of Engine Down] in the band, he also contributes. The way I like to do things is as a band. It always changes. I’m very blessed to have him as part of this band.”

Sparta focused a lot of the songwriting on Threes, and one of the highlights became the anthemic “Taking Back Control.”

“Maybe anthem’s not the right word, but I definitely wanted a call to arms-type of song,” Ward says. “Not anything in specific. It’s not just about politics, but about the state of the world. I think we are not doing enough in the world.”

Ward, drummer Tony Hajjar and bassist/guitarist Paul Hinojos were all in At the Drive-In until that band effectively broke up in 2001. Immediately, the trio formed Sparta (the remaining ATDI members went on to form the Mars Volta) and worked hard to be heard.

Wiretap Scars (DreamWorks) and Porcelain (Geffen), their first two full-length releases, were acclaimed albums that built up a fan base. But business and internal problems ended a tour prematurely, nearly prompting the end to Ward’s music career.

He particularly describes this dark, Porcelain-era period as “working twice as hard to get half as far.”

“I never look back on records,” Ward says. “I didn’t have the passion to play when I left that tour. I didn’t want to be famous. I didn’t want to go through it to be an entertainer, because I’m not just an entertainer. I’m a musician and part of that is playing in front of people that love it. But I don’t put on a smile and go on stage and dance around. That’s not my deal.”This also led to Hinojos’ defection to join his former bandmates in Mars Volta.

“You know what? With the way things were, I don’t blame him for leaving,” Ward says. “I wouldn’t stay either. With that opening [in Mars Volta], he wanted to leave. I have absolutely zero problems with it. That was the last thing on my mind. The first thing on my mind was I didn’t want to play music any more. Honestly, I didn’t care.”

Fortunately, Ward regained his drive to make music and with new axe-man Keeley and a new label (Hollywood) as a morale booster, Threes was written and recorded. As a bonus, the band included a DVD with Threes, but one intended to be meaningful and not just consist of garden-variety backstage band antics.

The DVD is called Eme Nakia (“Mother Nakia” in Arabic) and is based on Hajjar’s life escaping war-torn Lebanon and growing up in El Paso with a mother dying of cancer and an older brother raising the family.

“We wanted something as a bonus disc that was different,” Ward says. “I talked to Tony [Hajjar] about making a film part of this album [Threes]. I mentioned about doing it on his life and we went from there. I knew some of his story. His mother died when he was 15, and his older brother raised him and his sister. He lived a tough life and now he has his own family.”

On the web: spartamusic.com