Though Jordan Ward’s debut album Forward won critics over with its earnest and optimistic hodgepodge of the background-dancer-turned-foreground-artists dreams, roots, and quirks, in the two years since, Ward tells Rolling Stone the darker sides of striving have helped him deliver his equally ambitious sophomore album, Backward. Speaking exclusively with Rolling Stone to announce the LP set to drop January 30 and available for pre-order now, Ward says, “I just turned 30 this year. Later on in life, consequences start hitting harder. Those little mistakes that you let slide along the way, all of a sudden, in these little moments, they cost so much. You start to question, you know, am I doing the right thing?”
Taking the call over Zoom from Los Angeles, Jordan explains his forthcoming album title became literal for him as he tends to a right ACL tear and lateral meniscus tear from a new athletic hobby (one he’s keeping under wraps until he’s better at it). “I’m literally walking backwards and reverse engineering my run so that I can actually heal and move forward the correct way,” he says.
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Back in 2023, Rolling Stone named Forward one of the best albums of that year, an innovative and refreshingly diaristic take on R&B with that molded the typically romantic genre into a more personal one, performing songs about normalized violence, financial hardship, and complicated family dynamics — each with a unique bounce and couched in Ward’s vision for his future and that of his family name. With approaches ranging from the groovy throwback “Famjam4000” to the high-tech, lo-fi vibe of “White Crocs,” Ward proved himself eclectic and charming – so much so that when we spent time with SZA for her 2023 Rolling Stone Grammy Preview cover story, she had “White Crocs” in particular on repeat.
While Backward sees Ward reuniting with Forward’s executive producer Lido (Halsey’s Badlands, Chance the Rapper’s “Same Drugs”) in the same role, also finds him in new company. The “Smoking Potna,” out now, features buzzy Florida R&B upstart Sailorr, who Ward recently became a fan of and connected with through mutual friends. “As somebody like myself, who’s trying to tell stories within songs, and sometimes trying to tell a greater story with groups of songs, I feel her project did a very good job of introducing herself, how she feels, and where she stands in the world.”For his own songwriting on Backward, Ward says he channeled greats like Donny Hathaway, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, James Taylor, and Roberta Flack. “They wrote really good, simple songs,” says Ward. “Coming up the last project, I felt I just had a lot of room to grow with the songwriting, as far as structuring [it and] having more clear takeaways for the songs and just also expressing things that I haven’t yet and wanted to, or even expounding on things I’ve talked about before, just to keep the story evolving.”
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