photo by Sasha Israel; photo courtesy of September Gurl

Album Review of Ward Hayden & the Outliers: Little By Little

Ward Hayden & the Outliers are one of New England’s best country bands. When the band was called Girls, Guns, and Glory, I was a near-miss at several of their performances, which were hosted and/or attended by friends and connections whose opinion I generally consider to be consistently spot-on. So was I surprised when I finally dug into the new Ward Hayden & the Outliers album, Little By Little, and it blew me away? Not at all, though it exceeded any reasonable pre-listen expectations. This is an exceptional, tight, rich album from a band that’s also known for its great live performances. In New England, Ward Hayden & the Outliers are no secret. As further proof of that, the band was named Country Act of the Year and received one of the two Performer of the Year awards at the 2025 New England Music Awards.

I know this seems like an abrupt transition, but I should note that I’ve never been a deep-catalog Bruce Springsteen fan, or even a big fan of some of his hits. I did always enjoy “Dancing in the Dark,” a fun song that Ward Hayden & the Outliers put a nifty, modestly country spin on as Little By Little‘s third track. The anguished emotion in the vocal and the warm ambience of the soundbed make this rendition just as enjoyable as the original and with a unique Ward Hayden spin on it.

The preceding song on Little By Little, “Youngstown,” also sounded familiar to me, and I wasn’t surprised to find it was also a Springsteen song. Hayden and company serve it up as a lively, powerful, guitar-picking-driven sound with a full rockin’ country arrangement and well-placed fiddle flourishes.

image courtesy of September Gurl

Sensing a pattern, I finally took a look at the album’s press material. I usually like to let albums marinate for a while before reading about them so I’m not influenced by either the press material’s or other reviewers’ thoughts until my own are mostly formed, so I hadn’t given them a glance. Lo and behold, all eight songs on Little By Little are Bruce Springsteen’s covers. Yeah, I know, I probably should have realized it sooner, but like I said, while I respect and enjoy Springsteen’s music – and even my esteem for the Boss has grown with each passing year to be quite substantial by now – I know little beyond his biggest hits, mostly the ones from the ’80s. Some of the songs on Little By Little are deeper Springsteen cuts, too. Well-chosen ones, I might add, selected almost certainly because they can be arranged to fit Ward Hayden & the Outliers’ strengths. Indeed, these eight track are fully Outliers-styled, so much so that if  you didn’t know they’re Springsteen tracks (I raise my hand here), you’d be easily convinced they’re the band’s originals.

One of my favorite songs on Little By Little is the album’s opener, a lively performance of “Promised Land” whose feisty pace is enhanced by the way the band dives quickly from between blocks of lyric, from verse to verse, verse to chorus, and chorus to bridge or next verse. It’s an introduction to Ward’s powerful vocal delivery with its cracking and quavering that create a convincing sincerity, and it includes opportunities for a variety of well-integrated instrumental featurettes (or solos, if you prefer).

“Cadillac Ranch” is another strong entry, a rockabilly-tinged number (I hear shades of Jerry Lee Lewis in the pianowork) that moves a mile a minute and leaves the listener energized but breathless by its conclusion.

Probably my very favorite song on this record is track five, though. “If I Should Fall Behind” is a steadily-plodding, loosely (yet richly) instrumented number whose heartfelt message lives in the cracks and wails of Ward Hayden’s vocals. The haunted western rhythms in the song’s instrumental sections – I know, I always reference Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” but that’s because you all know what that sounds like – add another cool element that’s relevant to the song’s sonics and lyrics both.

“Two Faces” is delivered in a stripped-down fashion, with the vocals primarily accompanied by rhythmic drums, supported by the rest of the band in an as-necessary fashion without the sort of big, rich sound found on most of the other tracks, providing some stylistic variance while focusing the attention more heavily on the lyrics.

The stripped-down flavor continues with “County Fair,” though it’s more of a sweet, old-school, twangin’ country crooner, as opposed to the more avant garde vibe of “Two Faces.”

Ward & the Outliers close with “Used Cars,” delivered in a steady style that leans country while recalling the delivery of John Cougar Mellencamp, particularly on working-class songs like this one.

In all, Little By Little is an album that’ll appeal to country music fans, Springsteen fans (at least, if you can appreciate different arrangements of his music), and simply fans of well-conceived arrangements of damn fine songs. But wait, there’s more because more recently…

More Recently

Little By Little was released early in 2025. It was followed by the summer release of Piece By Piece, a collection of eight more Bruce Springsteen songs given the Ward Hayden & the Outliers treatment. I haven’t checked out that collection yet, but I’m sure it’ll rock. Well, country rock. Also worth noting is the summer release of Restless, an EP from Ward Hayden & Greg Hall.

Of course, this fall, as I mentioned at the top, the band won a pair of New England Music Awards. Ward Hayden & the Outliers were also nominated in the Boston Music Awards’ Americana Act of the Year category. (The oft-nominated band’s most recent Boston Music Award win was for Country Act of the Year in 2023.)